"SMBs need the same functionality as large enterprises, they just don’t have the staffing," says Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. "They don’t have time to do integration. It’s not fun connecting all these things together ... so what they’re looking for is something that’s out of the box and turnkey that allows them to go out and take the solution and turn it on."
Wang says that some SMBs are still running "pre-Y2K" IT systems that are close to breaking, and that "they are looking for cloud as the upgrade strategy."
Also on hand at the news conference was Paul Leary, president of Blackbird Vineyards, a Napa Valley winery north of San Francisco that is using SaaS applications and trying to implement business analytics capabilities to study customer and other business data. Leary started Blackbird in 2006 after leaving another winery that was still running DOS-based applications.
While another employee can manage hardware and networking issues, Leary also wears the "Salesforce administrator" hat at his 30-person business. He says he wants to use business analytics to develop new programs his competitors lack, such as a "thank you" program in which notes would be sent to high-value, repeat-purchase customers to maintain their loyalty.
"It’s as simple as creating a report that gets pushed out on a daily basis to a [Blackbird employee] that says, 'Here’s a new client who spent $25,000. Where did they come from? What are we doing to thank them?'" he said.
On Monday, Dell announced it would offer its first public and hybrid cloud service to enterprise customers based on VMware’s vCloud Datacenter Services, which VMware unveiled at its VMworld 2011 conference in Las Vegas. At the San Francisco event, Dell’s Felice said Dell’s strategy would be to nurture SMBs with DCBA while hoping, as they grow, to eventually migrate them to its version of vCloud.
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