Small Business | 05 Mar 2010 :
While attending a conference held by a virtualisation and hosting technology company, I was interested to hear the CEO talk about cloud services for smaller businesses.
Now, the event was in the US and most US companies use vastly different definitions of what a small businesses is, especially on the smaller end. However, Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, spoke in a presentation about businesses of 50 people or less being a major focus for his company.
Parallels produce software and infrastructure systems to allow service providers to build and bundle cloud services for businesses. I was lucky enough to get to speak to Beloussov directly and I asked him about his definitions, inquiring if his European origins had perhaps influenced this focus. To his credit, Beloussov claimed no great insight from either his Russian background or any special European affinity, he said he was relying on IDC stats - no bad thing really.
He said that according to the sources, of all the companies worldwide below 1,000 employees, the biggest single group, 45% comprised of businesses of 50 or less. Beloussov has such businesses firmly in his sights as his company develops the tools and platforms that allow companies such as our own Blacknight here, to offer what had previously been available only to large companies that ad in house expertise to deliver them.
Matt Domo, the CTO of the company explained a little further. Domo said that most people understand the example of e-mail best, delivered from the cloud. However, A service provider using the likes of Parallels systems could not only offer e-mail from the cloud, but also an antispam service, along with perhaps secure e-mail and customised footers or disclaimers that would be merely tick box options for the client. But in the past, these would likely have been costly point solutions that would have had to have been installed and configured on expensive hardware by skilled personnel - both of which are in short supply for many businesses below 50 users.
The ability of a service provider to put together these bundles, along with a pay as you go payment model that Domo says "encourages trial" makes a lot of sense for small businesses.