With cloud computing becoming a common buzzword along with Software as a Service and related discussions, it has becoming a challenge for many IT managers or business owners to understand which is which, how it is relevant and why any business should go for it. As with many things IT, technology professionals don’t always make it easy to understand concepts or explain them. They’re great at using names for new developments, but bad at justifying such names or explaining these concepts.

Essentially, cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) are older concepts with new names. In a nutshell, from an end user’s standpoint, both would mean deploying a piece of software over the internet. For illustrative purposes, when you log in to your PC at work, rather than clicking on an icon for ‘Project Management Software’ you would simply open Internet Explorer (or Firefox or any other browser) and log in to a website. Here, you would enter a username and password and then log-in to your software. It’s a longer process than just double clicking an icon on your desktop, but then it has its pros.

Basically, this means software deployed and delivered over the internet. It used to be and is still called web 2.0 by some, and different names are applied to the same concept by different users from different perspectives. Yes, it is all about perspective.

Here are some of the simple reasons why you may want to use such hosted web 2.0 software offered to you as a service in the cloud:
•    Access from anywhere, anytime
•    No maintenance of hardware
•    No maintenance of server software
•    No room required for equipment
•    Less investment require up-front
There are numerous other reasons, but these are the reasons almost all businesses will connect with. So, that’s why you should look into cloud computing and SaaS, but what the hell is the difference? Glad you want to know.

Software as a Service basically means paying to use existing software over the internet as opposed to in a desktop environment. In most instances, SaaS also comes with a user driven license (the equivalent being PC based in the case of desktop software), but it saves you the hassle of applying updates or doing any kind of maintenance. For SaaS, in most cases, you have a software company that has developed a product that they sell to you as a service. Examples are Zoho CRM, Salesforce.com CRM or Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.

You pay a simple fee per user per month, and you have access to using the software. Your files, data, etc. are all stored on the software provider’s servers and depending on the provider and the software, you may or may not be able to extract your data. My favourite part about SaaS is that it is platform independent. So you in your organization you can have Mac lovers and PC users, and they can all use the software because it is delivered in a browser. It simplifies things, because people can stick to their individual cults and technology preferences without losing too much productivity within the business. Saas will usually come pre-configured and you will need no technical knowledge to start using it. Some user administration, etc. may be required, but you won’t have to do any programming to get things moving.

Now, let’s move on to the cloud.

This is best explained from a CIO or IT manager’s standpoint. So you manage an IT department which has a development team. You have to maintain servers for live and testing environments, make sure they stay up-to-date and free of viruses. You have to setup firewalls and VPNs for security and remote access, and run regular routines for security checks. In essence, you need maintenance and security function to support development and other functions of the business. It’s quite a stressful job to have and in today’s world, in many cases, an unnecessary hassle.

The concept of the cloud here is similar when applied to simpler websites. If you’re building a website, do you really want to hire people and learn how the server software and hardware works, or do you simply want a pre-configured online environment where you can place your files and programming scripts and get the site to work? That’s how web hosts came into being and now virtually the whole world fields away the hassle of hosting to professionals who do just that, hosting. Take this same context and put it into our IT manager’s scenario, and let’s say our service provider here is Force.com. Now, Force.com is the could computing environment on which salesforce.com is built and delivers as SaaS.

So, you can move your entire development team onto the force.com platform. They have their own programming language and predefined functions, you can built applications using this without ever having to worry about maintaining servers for live and testing environments, firewalls, VPN access or anything of the sort. Your development team can log in and develop applications within their environment on the internet. It’s called cloud, well, because it’s all just floating out there, you log-in and do your work and it’s always there, without you ever having to worry about a physical box or server. So, put simply, it saves you a whole lot of maintenance and security expenditure (along with other things), and you simply get to do what your development team needs to do: develop.

Now Salesforce.com may be popular in its own regard, but just to set the record straight, the clould’s early days are marked by innovation from Amazon. Amazon was probably the first company to deploy a commercially available could computing platform.

SaaS companies that also offer cloud platforms make life much simpler for developers, because if you use their SaaS, you can develop other applications on their cloud that can easily integrate with this SaaS, evolving your business and software around it. There are other technical advantages, but cloud computing and SaaS is not free of woes, especially financial ones.

It’s great to pay £50 per user per month when there’s two of you, but when there’s 500 users, it’s almost worth investing in your own equipment and development team; entirely a matter of finance and preference.

As a software development company that specializes in deploying web-based solutions, we at VAFTA essentially develop SaaS for our customers to sell to others. The development may or may not be in a could environment, and that very much depends on the needs and requirements of the business model in question. The idea here is to clarify the difference between SaaS and Cloud and help you start thinking in terms of a cloud or web environment as opposed to the traditional desktop one.

New technology is not always the right technology. Consider your options: the cloud can be cheap today but if not managed well, it can bankrupt businesses in the long run.

As most businesses start to make the transition from a one man show to becoming a growing enterprise, owners are faced with the difficult but crucial task of identifying information systems and processes, a major part of which today is procuring the right software and hardware. Even all large corporations are consistently faced with this task of improving the systems, redefining processes and procuring the correct hardware and software to either support the growth of the business or deliver efficiency in times of downsizing.

1. Planning – Must use external help for this to get a better view of the situation and your business.
2. Analysis – External help over here is a must. It will help a third party clearly interpret what you need, thereby making the requirements of the entire project or solution clear.
3. Design – Contrary to the popular belief that you won’t need this if you buy an off the shelf solution, you will always need this. Software does not design a system or vice versa.
4. Development – For most complex pieces of software that you procure, the will need some customized development. So don’t forget to budget for this whether you’re costing.
5. Implementation – You always need a contingency plan. What if implementation does not go right? What can go wrong and how will you tackle the situation. Not planning for this can be very expensive.
6. Maintenance – You’ve heard that prevention is better than the cure. Well, it’s true of systems and software. Reactive maintenance is very expensive. If you’re proactive and stay on top of this, you’ll save millions in the years to come.

Here is something that your SEO consultant or marketing firm will never want you to know: there are 2 parts to SEO. And here’s the second part of what your marketing or SEO consultant will really not want you to know at all: most SEO consultants and marketing firms do, respectively, one half each. This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, but since I don’t spend a whole lot of time doing SEO for any of my own websites or businesses, well, I haven’t really had the motivation to pen (or in this case, screen) the issue. Now that I’m done sorting out some of the basics that I consider more important than issues like SEO and PPC marketing for a business, I’m coming back into this rather messy affair.

I can name many of my clients who consistently spend hundreds, if not thousands of pounds and dollars every month in trying to get their SEO to work. Let’s get one thing out of the way before we have the marketing folks butt-in: SEO is not the same as PPC, so let us not confuse the two. PPC optimization, although similar in some regards to SEO, is a different line of work. There are no, per se, two parts to it on a macro level, although I think you can break up PPC into two different parts if you want to get a view from the inside out.

So, what really are the two parts of any SEO campaign? Well, let’s see…

The Technological Part

If you have a marketing firm that claims they’ve got SEO down, this is the part they are most likely not doing. I personally know firms who are spending 5 figures of Great British Pounds Sterling every month in an attempt to get their SEO up and running in addition to a GBP 20k+ Pay per Click bill, but SEO is just not working. The content may very well be right because that’s probably what their SEO provider is OKAY at (not brilliant, just OKAY), but the reason that Google or Yahoo don’t give them any importance is simply because their pristine, apparently clear and clean-cut looking design isn’t so clean when you look at the source code. It’s rampant with violations of W3C XHTML and CSS standards, javascript errors, lack or misuse of meta tags, and many more to name a few. What’s worst is that these chaps still haven’t figured out what they’re getting wrong, and it’s not all their fault.

To develop their mammoth online project, they hired a technology consulting giant like Sapient, but got a possibly unqualified employee to manage the relationship. So, in essence, the code produced is not particularly garbage, but it is something most decent developers wouldn’t feel heartache about trashing. Second, the XHTML and CSS interface was developed by an idependent party which, it seems, specializes in developing interfaces that work toward the stern purpose of being non-standard compliant. The SEO company has no clue why their magic doesn’t work and the reason why that’s happening is because they don’t fully understand the business or recognize or realize the techological or technical faults that are holding the company back.

It’s the same old issue: marketing firms become web development and web 2.0 software consulting firms, create garbage product, but sell it hard by throwing money on PPC and Out of Home Advertising (OOH) and all their client seem to think they’re doing  a great job, without actually realizing that they could save a huge amount of money spent on PPC every month by simply streamlining some of the technology issues involved in SEO.

I’m not going to go into what it is that you need to do to get the technology right; at least not in this article. What I do want to do is illustrate the benefit of having the technology issue resolved. Let’s be clear on one thing: with the right age and domain length and correct coding, etc. (i.e., fullfilling the techincal requirements of SEO), you’ll certainly land yourself a higher Google PageRank than a website that foscuses solely on cosmetic appearance and writing fancy content but misses the boat on writing Google friendly code. If your competitor has done this part right and you’re relying on your good old marketing man to provide you with SEO services, when somebody does search for your keywords you will end up getting the small corner to the right that google has reserved for AdWords, where as your competitor, even if he doesn’t have the right kind of content on his website (which is valid to  a search term), is getting a good 80% of the screen. Who do you reckon your potential customer will click on, someone Google thinks is providing valid content or someone Google says is paying money to ‘appear’ to provide valid content. Maybe not all clients work like that: I sure do.

The Marketing Part

Okay, this is the part where you need to not listen to your SEO consultant, who knows the technical aspects of what Google, Yahoo and MSN like to see, but has no clue about how to sell. Remember, most technical people suck at selling. They like to brief and give information, not make the effort to pretend like they care about your business and sell you their skills. Hence, that’s what you need to use them for.

I can’t stess the importance of getting this part right. As much I bash marketing firms for getting the technology part of SEO wrong, ultimately, selling lies at the heart of every business. No sale means no business, so get this right!

Here is an example of how companies get this wrong: Fix all your tags and content on each page, so that when google does list you organically, people at least land on the correct page. Not landing on the correct page means you’ll never make a conversion from visitor to customer. The first part giving yourself the ability to appear in the 80% portion of the screen of a Search Engine by getting the technical portion right. The second, is to strengthen the credbility of the visitor who trusts the judgment of the search engine to list you in their organic listings by giving the visitor what he or she is really searching for.

Once there, the content needs to be right. Don’t hire a car salesman for this unless you are selling cars. You need a short, sofisticated form of copywriting, not those long sales letters that eBook copiers and MLM scammers have used and misused and abused over the last decade.

Here is the most important thing you need to take away from this article. Don’t believe everyone you see on Google or Yahoo’s first page. Most often than not people will show up and stay there until the next crawl when the search engine realizes that a certain website has cheated. So, look for decent history when picking a provider. Also keep in mind that not all businesses that do SEO spend resources on SEO: they don’t need to. They get their business from other resources like management consulting. In fact, that’s how some of the largest contracts are signed, by consultants know nothing except for how to close a deal.

Lastly, there are very few companies out there who can do SEO and PPC right at the same time and score both on the marketing and technological front. It’s the same reason why marketing guys are horrible at using technology AND the same reason why your IT guys can’t sell for shit. Get your technical SEO person to liaise with your marketing team. That’s how you can results out of your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Lastly, always remember this simple piece of advice: you get what you pay for and here is why: opinions are free, consultations are NOT. Which one are you looking for?

Despite all the hoo-ha about how business has become difficult in the recession and how money from banks and lending institutions is short, I am here to tell you that it is really not that bad, certainly not if you are a small business.

The reason is that most small businesses don’t necessarily depend on funding from banks. Growing small businesses certainly do, but most small businesses do not. It may be true that economy is slowing down and bad economic news is making headlines on a daily basis, but think about it, this is the opportunity for many, innovative small businessmen to move in and get the business they’ve been waiting for.

Big business is struggling. On a daily basis, you’re reading about multi national companies shedding employees. Basically, it is in times like these that big businesses actually make an effort to run efficiently, and they’re open to help and suggestions, because laying off people is not always the most legally feasible way to cut costs.  Companies are looking to rewrite and renegotiate vendor contracts and if presented with a better, more cost-effective solution, almost all businesses will change. This is where SMEs come in.

Most small businesses don’t sell to consumers; they sell to large corporations. Large corporations, on the other hand, sell to consumers. This recession, like all recessions, has ultimately arised because of the consumers inability to meet the greed of large corporations, which created domino effect of cash shortage in a global economy that operated, for all practical purposes, on one cycle of credit.

For a small business, this is the time to put its savings into marketing itself as a more professional, stable, and cost effective vendor to a big business. Markets that were in the past only open to big vendors, i.e., areas of work where big business only dealt with big business, are now open to small business. The big players in the industry are short on cash. They cannot move fast enough to respond to the recessive nature of the economy, the result of which is their shedding of employees. I think the market is certainly better for many small business owners today than it was 15 months ago. To succeed in this climate, however, here are a few things you need to do:

1. Invest in marketing! It is extremely important for small businesses to appear professional. You must never compromise on quality and professionalism, especially not in a big city like New York or London. With my own business being in London, I can tell you that this is a city of first impressions. Quality of work is secondary, but if you can impress someone in London with a fancy business card and decent looking website, chances are you will be able to get their business.

2.  Do what you promise! Make sure you don’t oversell yourself. This is an economic climate where, as a small business, you naturally have an advantage over big companies. It is imperative that you let your clientele know up front what it is that you provide. Remember, your primary selling factor here would be helping them cut cost, so they’re naturally adept to understanding that they may lose out on some features that another, more expensive vendor may have been providing. The trick to keeping the big client: Deliver what you promised!

3.  Call your own office to check to see what your reponse is like. If you are a single person business, setup a vitural PA service. Remember, that depending in which country you are in, having an answering machine is not always a wise thing. In the UK, people do not leave messages, and they’re not too happy if the person answering their phone is not extremely friendly. Don’t compromise on this. If you lose an incoming call, you may very well lose thousands in business.

4.  Update your website and check all the forms on it. Don’t make this mistake! So many businesses lose out on potential clients because the contact forms on their websites don’t work!  If you sell products online, keep it simple! Don’t flood your users with information or questions. Keep the experience clean and provide enough information for them to got through with the sale.

5.  Know your market! Yes, when I first moved to the UK from the US, I thought that having state of the art technology for my clients was the way to go. Turns out, that’s not the case. You must stick to what your customers are comfortable with. If you conduct too much work online or via web 2.0 technologies, it may be very efficient for you and your businesses, but your clients may not be comfortable with it.  Digital signatures, submitting complex work requests, and smooth sailing one click credit card ordering is ONLY viable for advanced societies like the US. In other markets (like the UK), for instance, people are more comfortable exchanging word documents by email rather than by submitting all of the required information via an online form. So, don’t do what looks good and efficient, do what people will work with, because that’s how you will run your business.

6.  Once you’ve captured your market, evolve your product or service to keep the client engaged. Businesses are always looking for more and better. That’s the reason why Microsoft sells millions of copies of every new version of windows and office that it releases. Stay on top of your game and know your market to keep the customer engaged.

Lastly, don’t let the bad news get you down. Remember, this may very well be an opportunity for many of us to grow our businesses!

Several of us, including myself, at some point, had decided to make the leap from being employed to going self employed. I, myself, had bought into the whole concept of being your own boss, working your own hours, and marking and measuring one’s own success. Indeed, having your own business, generating your own income, choosing your clients and the people you work with are all big pros of being self employed. In fact, having everything in a business work the way you want it to work is fantastic! What else? You get to have a fancy business card that says Managing Director or Chief Executive Officer, and you stick your neck out and talk to everyone like you own the world. That’s all great, and the feeling of success if you thrive at being self employed is unmatched, but what are the odds that you will succeed?

Let’s be honest; odds are a big part of this whole deal. However, that is not all there is to it. What I want to do in these sets of “Running your own business” articles is to tell you part of what it will take to make the shift from becoming employed to becoming self-employed. What that means in English, for those of us who don’t like fancy corporate talk, is that I will try and outline what it will take you to go from being someone’s bitch to becoming your own boss.

Let’s get the assumptions out of the way first. You have an idea, and you’ve done your market research. If you haven’t, look for any book that tells you on what research you need to do to get your business off the floor. Market research is critical, as is good marketing. But what you need to keep in mind is that having a good product / service and a good marketing strategy is not all you need for your business to succeed. These are your basic requirements. No product / service = no business = no money = keep the job = stay in bitch mode.

So, what do you need to execute your own marketing strategy, sell your product or service, perform, and walk away with or retain a happy customer and a big cheque (or check if you’re in the US)?

The Three Ds of Entrepreneurship

Drive

Drive. Drive. Drive. By the way, that’s just ONE of the 3 Ds spelled out 3 times. Yes, you need drive. The drive to succeed, to sell, to perform, to win, to dominate and to not be somebody else’s bitch. What is important here is for you to have the mind set to break out of taking orders from someone else. That was the reason I chose to become self employed. I knew I had the skill set. I knew I had a unique deliverable, even if my service was competing with others out there, and I knew I had a decent marketing strategy. But above all of that, I had the drive to do business. The drive to be better than my former co-workers, and the drive to make it happen. Unless you cannoy work 16 hours a day 5 days a week and survive on 4 hours of sleep every night, going back to a job should not be an option. Business is going to succeed if you go all in.

For a more graphic explanation, think of driving only ONE car at a time. You can’t drive two, and if you try to drive two, you will wreck both. There are few who can handle both a job and a business, and unless you are that hardworking, I suggest you stick to one thing, and give your whole hearted attention to driving that one vehicle, which, in this case, would be your business.

Dedication

Remember how you sometimes had nothing to do at work and you went around chatting to all the different people at work, browsing the web, looking up old friends on Facebook and waiting for that clock to get to 5 pm so you can get up and go home? Well, those days are over. With a business, with an entrepreneur, with the drive you need to succeed, the clock does not tick from 9 to 5. It’s more a case of 9 AND 5. You have to get the job done if you want to get the money: it’s just that simple. This means working many extra hours even if you undersold yourself, delivering an excellent end product because you are the boss and no will be around to check your work), and not wasting any time doing silly things you did on the job. You must dedicate yourself, your attention and your energy to your business. If you aren’t dedicated, it becomes extremely difficult to manage your time (especially if you’re working from home), deliver a customer satisfying product, or resisting the temptation to log into MSN and Yahoo Messenger and chat up your old friends. You must re-arrange your priorities and dedicate a specific number of hours to your business DAILY, or you will never get around to actually doing the business.

Determination

This is probably the D that most startup and small business owners struggle with. You have to be totally and utterly determined to succeed, or you simply won’t. Get used to hearing know and listening to negativity. The odds are against you, but keep in mind that knowing that only puts you in a position to be better prepared for these odds. It’s not easy running your own business, and many people struggle with how difficult it is to get things done, primarily because as a small business owner you are dependent on other people. But the trick is to keep plugging away. If you are determined to succeed, you will eventually make it happen.

Ultimately, determination is about mindset. For someone who is determined, something that goes wrong is one failed attempt at doing something. For another person, the same thing going wrong could mean loss of hope, and that’s the one thing you cannot have as a small business owner: loss of hope. Stay focused, stay determined, stay on track and make sure that you are persistent and remind yourself of how determined, dedicated, and driven you are to succeed and get the job done.

Stay tuned for more small business and entrepreneurship articles.