Two recent articles, one from the Wall Street Journal, “Forbidden Fruit: Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones,” and the other from the New York Times, “Apple’s Spat with Google is Getting Personal,” are reminiscent of the atmosphere in Detroit and the rivalry between the big three automotive companies in the US in the 70’s and 80’s as described in Arthur Hailey’s book, Wheels. Interesting to note is that 20 years later the Big Three all lost out to Japanese and Korean companies who weren’t even on their radar at the time.

Apple, Google and Microsoft may be looking down the same road as they focus on battling each other rather than putting their energies toward innovation and user needs.

 What do you think?

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The article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, Tech Start-ups Cope with Data Flood, brings up a pressing business problem: the handling of ever increasing volumes of data.

The article’s emphasis is on tech companies that make systems to handle greater amounts of data at a lower cost. This is definitely needed. However, the article misses a larger point – the problem small companies face dealing with disparate sources, types and locations of their data.
Continue reading, "Small Business Data Problem – Web 2.0"

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Recently, we announced that Intermedia is now hosting over 200,000 premium Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, a sign of growing optimism among our 11,000 small and medium-sized business customers. The 200,000+ total puts Intermedia ahead of any other Exchange hosting provider. The premium mailboxes come with Microsoft’s full MAPI license, which includes a downloadable copy of Microsoft Outlook, the power to share calendars and other features that are essential to business users.

Continue reading, "200,000+ Premium Exchange Mailboxes; Thanks Small Business Owners!"

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Customers, especially small and medium businesses (SMBs), are increasingly adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) as their preferred model for procuring and consuming software. This makes lots of sense, as SaaS provides customers with many cost, productivity and flexibility benefits.

The problem today with most SaaS offerings, however, is that they are designed as self-contained silos. This of course makes sense, as much of the value of SaaS solutions stems from the fact that they are turnkey. Silos are OK for a single application, or even a small handful of apps. But the reality is that most businesses utilize a wide portfolio of software for different functions. And while businesses are embracing SaaS, few if any, will be able to move completely to the cloud. Most will end up with a hybrid environment, where some apps are hosted in the cloud, and some remain on-premise. Even those who plan to ultimately move entirely to the cloud cannot do so in one mass migration. They will need to phase out on-premise applications in a staggered approach, and will have to manage a heterogenous environment of hosted and on-premise software throughout the process.
Continue reading, "SaaS 2.0: Clouds Don’t Exist in a Vacuum"

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