Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

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Small Businesses Cloud Adoption Rising

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Another interesting point from the recent study by Spiceworks highlights the aggressive level of cloud adoptions that we are seeing in the small business space. SMBs are very quickly turning to the cloud for their basic application needs. Email leads the list, but other important, cloud-delivered, applications are on the upswing as well.

The study claims that cloud services are now used by 48 percent of SMBs, up from 28 percent for the first half of 2011. That’s pretty amazing growth in less than half a year!

Other interesting small business cloud adoption stastics

“The top five cloud services by usage are web hosting (49 percent), e-mail hosting (32 percent), data backup (25 percent) content filtering (24 percent) and application hosting (23 percent). The top cloud services respondents plan to purchase in the next six months are data backup (17 percent), application hosting (12 percent), data storage (12 percent), and e-mail hosting (11 percent).”

Posted in cloud computing, Small Business | No Comments »

SMB Tablet Deployments to Rise

Monday, May 14th, 2012

A recent study by Spiceworks (an IT network) has some interesting facts about small businesses’ planned tablet adoption. It’s no surprise that SMB’s are bringing on the tablets – we are seeing huge growth here in the use of the OfficeDrop iPad app.

The study states, “Tablet purchases and planned deployments rise… Sixty-two percent of SMBs have deployed or plan to deploy tablet devices, such as iPads, within the next six months. That figure is up from the 50 percent reported for the second half of 2011.”

62% of small businesses will have deployed tablets in the coming year! That is amazing.

Other good news from the study is that small business IT budgets are holding steady. A good sign for the economy, and also a sign that technology investments continue to help small businesses become more efficient.

Posted in iPad, OfficeDrop, Small Business | No Comments »

SaaS to Grow to $14.5 Billion in 2012

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Gartner is predicting that Software as a Service will hit $14.5 billion in 2012 – 17.9% growth off the previous year. SaaS grow will stay robust until 2015 when it should be $22.1 billion. At OfficeDrop, we happen to think it will stay strong beyond 2015, but I’m pretty sure that this just a limit of how far out Gartner wants to make a prediction at this time, not an actual limit of how long SaaS will continue to grow.

A quote from the release: “After more than a decade of use, adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve regionally within the enterprise application markets,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. “Increasing familiarity with the SaaS model, continued oversight on IT budgets, the growth of platform as a service (PaaS) developer communities and interest in cloud computing are now driving adoption forward.”

Another cool thing about the Gartner press release is that it’s dated May 27, 2012 – they are really forward thinking over there! ;)

North America Leads SaaS Adoption

According to the release,  ”North America, specifically the U.S., currently represents the largest opportunity for SaaS, and it is the most mature of the regional markets. SaaS software revenue is forecast to total $9.1 billion in 2012, up from $7.8 billion in 2011. Consistent with other regions, North America shows the highest SaaS deployments in expense management, financials, email and office suites. Use of Web conferencing is higher in North America than in other regions, in part because of a highly distributed workforce.”

(You can read more here in Computerworld.)

 

Posted in cloud computing, Small Business | No Comments »

PCWorld – OfficeDrop is One of 20 Clever Cloud Apps

Monday, April 9th, 2012

PCWorld has a slideshow showcasing 20 apps that make great use of the cloud – and OfficeDrop is on the list! Click through to the 20th to see an image of the OfficeDrop iPad paper app and read what PCWorld has to say.

PCWorld OfficeDrop cloud app

The article says:

“Why You Need It: This digital filing system handles any kind of paperwork. Imagine you’re at a business lunch, and you take notes on a napkin. With your iPhone, Android handset, or iPad camera, you can scan your napkin scribbles, a paper contract that someone else at the table needs you to sign, and the receipt for your meal.

OfficeDrop saves them all to the cloud as PDF files that are instantly searchable. While you sit there, you can share everything with your assistant back at the office.”

Check out the PCWorld article now!

Posted in android, Awards, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Management, iPad, iphone, OCR Scanning, OfficeDrop, Paperless, Paperless Champions, Press coverage, Product, Small Business | No Comments »

Small Business Innovation

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Sparking innovation in a small business isn’t just a matter of sitting around waiting for good ideas to pop into your CEO’s head. Innovation comes from a lot of places, and the right environment can turn all of your employees into idea generators.

Recently Karl Start and Bill Steward of Avondale Strategic Partners, a business advisory company, posted an article on Inc about reigniting innovation in a business (read it here). It was a great post that focused on getting ideas from the field – customers and employees who spend time with customers. The three principal actions they proposed were:

  1. Get cozy with customers
  2. Empower your team
  3. Execute fast and revise quickly

Excellent ideas and you should read the post. It also reminds us of a post that our CEO & resident cloud computing expert wrote a couple of years about entitled “4 Tips to Spark Innovation in Your Small Business.”

Prasad’s small business innovation ideas

Prasad’s ideas were different, but along the same lines as the executives from Avondale. Prasad said, “Small businesses are the major driver in both job growth and innovation in the United States. But when you are actually running a small business, finding the time to foster innovation can be overwhelmed by cash, economic, resource and time constraints. Here are four tips that I have found that foster innovation at my company and that I believe can be applied to most businesses.”

  1. Encourage all employees to solve company problems
  2. Allow individual employees time to work on a project of their choosing
  3. Provide employees experiences in every aspect of the company
  4. Consult customers for improvements and new ideas

Innovation can happen in a vacuum, but usually it is driven by the right work and team environment. We hope that another way you can generate innovative ideas to grow your small business is by letting the power of cloud computing free up your time and resources so that you can focus on solving problems for your customers.

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Market Research, Small Business | No Comments »

How Cloud Computing Helps Get Startups Off the Ground

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

I came across a cool write up on an HP blog about how small companies can get ahead of the game using cloud computing. It’s called “What Your Company Can Learn From Startups: How Cloud Computing is Helping to Get Them Off the Ground.”

Ok, so that’s a long title.

But the article is very solid.

cloud for smb

Basically, small companies can leverage the power of cloud computing to get the advantages of having a large IT department – without having to spend a lot of money. As the article states, “It’s where the cloud can be a business equalizer and help your small- or medium-sized business move to the next level by bringing in IT capabilities you may only have dreamed of in the past.” It goes on to talk about several startups and new products that companies have launched for very low costs by using cloud computing and outside cloud vendors. Great piece – check it out!

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Small Business | No Comments »

Small Businesses are Going Mobile

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Fox New’s Small Business Center has a new piece on how small businesses are going mobile and “cutting the cord” – read it here. This is a trend we’ve seen here at OfficeDrop. Our customers have aggressively navigated to our mobile apps, like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app and our Android scanner app.

The Fox article has some interesting facts and figures in it (the following are quotes from the article:

  • More than four in ten (43 percent) small businesses reported that all their employees use wireless devices or technologies to work away from the office, a nearly 80 percent jump from three years ago.
  • Tablet computers are now being used by two-thirds (67 percent) of small businesses surveyed, up from 57 percent a year ago.
  • By the end of the year, about 50 percent of small businesses reported that they expect to have all their employees using wireless technologies to work away from the office.
  • Almost all (85 percent) of small businesses reported using smartphones for their operations, more than double the usage of five years ago.
  • Almost a third (30 percent) of small businesses surveyed reported that they use mobile apps for their business to save time, increase productivity and reduce costs.
  • Half of the small businesses that use them say they could not survive—or it would be a major challenge to survive—without mobile apps, a 31 percent jump over last year.

That’s right! Get your mobile on small businesses!

Posted in android, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Scanners, Entrepreneurship, iPad, iphone, Marketing, OfficeDrop, Small Business | No Comments »

Getting Files into OfficeDrop

Friday, December 30th, 2011

It’s easy to get files into OfficeDrop. We offer several ways you can quickly get your important documents into the OfficeDrop cloud filing system.

Here are the different apps you can use to get files into OfficeDrop:

OfficeDrop on Android
OfficeDrop on iPad
OfficeDrop on Windows Desktop (note: download starts immediately)
OfficeDrop’s Windows ScanDrop Scanner Software
OfficeDrop’s Mac ScanDrop Scanner Software

And, of course, you can always login to OfficeDrop via the web to upload and manage your documents.

We’ve recently created a video explaining some of the ways you can get your files into the system.

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Management, Document Scanners, Marketing, OCR Scanning, OfficeDrop, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions, Product, scanning software, Small Business | No Comments »

The Cloud Makes All Services Frenemies

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

An important business philosophy that we have here at OfficeDrop is the concept of “Frenemies” – we will work with other services that would historically have been considered competition if it makes sense for our customers. It means that we value our customers’ workflow and actively look to integrate our cloud filing system with other online, cloud and SaaS services that our customers are using. Our customers are small businesses who want to move to a “digital office” and away from having their different work processes silo’ed into particular, proprietary applications.

What’s a Frenemy (or Frienemy, depending on how you spell it)?

We believe that the cloud has changed the way software will be used. Old, desktop software that wrote special, unique and proprietary files and that trapped your data are out. Remember when a file could only be opened by the program that created it? Well, in the cloud all the smart providers have open APIs, which means your data can now be pushed (securely, of course!) from one application to another – making it easier for you to get your work done. This means that our service may have to work with other online storage companies, or companies that have overlapping features. Should we be competing with these companies and avoid integrating with them?

No.

We can only survive if our clients WANT to use our service. They can get their data out at any time, so we need to offer the best paper-focused, searchable storage service we can – and let customers use other best in class services in conjunction with ours – like our FreshBooks document management integration. We’ve got an open API, and if someone who might be close in features wants to connect with our service they are very much able to create a tight integration with the OfficeDrop service.

OfficeDrop Articles on the Frenemy Concept

Prasad wrote about how competing in the cloud is making companies frenemies in TechCrunch. Today he penned one on “Building a Business Around Frienemies” for FastCompany.

Frienemies

Posted in cloud computing, Customer Satisfaction, Digital Office, discussions, Document Management, Entrepreneurship, Freshbooks Document Management, Market Research, OfficeDrop, partnerships, Press coverage, Product Features, Small Business | No Comments »

Prasad Thammineni Post on Managing Your Company From Home

Monday, September 5th, 2011

Our fearless CEO, Prasad Thammineni, has another great post on tech tools to help you manage your business from home on SmallBizTrends. Why does this matter? Well, he’s recently had a child and has been managing the office from his home office recently!

I don’t think that keeping things going from home would have even been possible a few years ago before the recent technology revolution. Communication tools and collaboration tools are a lot more powerful and affordable than they’ve ever been. Prasad touches on some of the ones we use aggressively here at OfficeDrop to keep things going smoothly.

Posted in cloud computing, Entrepreneurship, Home Office, Press coverage, Small Business | No Comments »

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