It’s an interesting period for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). While emergence of Internet as a premier medium of collaboration and commerce has presented small and medium businesses an unparalleled opportunity to compete on an even keel with their large counterparts – the same medium has also brought forward a host of new challenges. An explosion of content, and arrival of new Internet-based social computing technologies and concepts such as Wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and Web 2.0, has left SMBs scrambling and struggling to ensure an interactive customer experience.
The Website is the face of the SMB, and one of the most visible and influential customer touch points – especially when the SMB is trying to reach global customers who are not aware of its brand. A Website with inappropriately tagged content or a few missing links can turn away a prospective customer into the hands of the competition in a matter of few seconds.
To address this, many SMBs have considered traditional installed content management systems, only to realize later that these applications are far more expensive to implement and maintain than they are worth. This problem is compounded by the fact that most SMBs have skeletal IT staff and, at best, limited IT budgets. Even Open Source CMS options suffer from these same limitations because while the software code may be “free” everything else comes with a price tag. Much like installed software there are substantial costs with implementing it to your requirements, managing, upgrading and maintaining the software and hardware, support, and all the things that go along with the lifecycle of your site like template changes, site redesigns, workflow tweaks and navigation updates.
As a result, the CIO can seldom justify the high cost and long implementation time required to install a content management system. Additionally, as content management involves a host of tasks including usability, design, and information architecture – SMBs face an uphill task in ensuring that the Website reflects the dynamic needs of the business.
Using SaaS to level the playing field
To compete effectively, SMB’s need content management solutions that are easily configurable, are economical to purchase and maintain, and quick to implement. This is difficult to achieve in a traditional CMS, which are expensive to procure, complex to implement and configure, and even more difficult to maintain.
It is in answer to these problems, that specialist players like CrownPeak have emerged and grown rapidly. CrownPeak is one of the leading torchbearers of the ‘Software as a Service’ SaaS model, and has turned the disadvantages of the traditional model to its advantage. By letting customers access ‘software’ as a service, CrownPeak ensures that organizations are spared the high cost of purchasing software. Moreover, as the software is hosted, there is no hardware to buy and no software to purchase and install and you get the same CMS functionality as you do with traditional installed vendors or open source solutions. As a customer, you just pay on a fixed monthly or quarterly basis and leave the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor. You don’t pay till an application is fully running and completely configured to your environment. Try telling this to a traditional CMS vendor!
Organizations also save cost as they do not have to employ IT, system integrator, developer or Web agency resources to tweak the HTML, workflow, or to take care of hosting. The real work in a CMS implementation begins after the site goes live which is when most vendors leave you the keys to the CMS and say good luck. But players such as CrownPeak provide a dedicated account manager for the lifetime of the service, who is the same person who actually implements the CMS for your site, as part of your monthly cost. This is an extremely attractive value proposition when compared to the traditional software model, where costs are paid upfront and the risk of product implementation and adoption is totally on the customer. With SaaS, SMBs can compete with the big players on an even footing, as they can have access to the best software, the best support, and at the best price. For instance, a player like CrownPeak offers service that covers the entire spectrum of the content management lifecycle at a monthly subscription cost. This includes licenses, hardware, hosting, bandwidth, management and support.
Improved usability and accountability
To understand how a small or medium organization can benefit from using a SaaS model, let’s take the example of School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), a non-profit dedicated to educating artists and fostering their creative abilities. As a non-profit organization, the school had limited IT staff due to budget constraints, which in turn made the task of keeping the online content up-to-date an extremely challenging task.
By subscribing to CrownPeak’s SaaS model, the School has been able to enable even non-technical users to contribute and update content on the site. Through the ability to quickly and easily update new content, the Boston based school has expanded its web presence by including art galleries, calendars and other relevant information. The benefits are obvious – improved web presence leading to increased web traffic at an economical cost. The site won the American Business Award for Best Design and Best Software Development in 2005. As this example shows, organizations can easily accelerate their speed of publishing content by giving subject matter experts tools that are simple to use. Maintaining a uniform look and feel across the site is also far simpler leaving content specialists to focus more on their core competency of content creation rather than worrying about formatting changes.
With features that provide a higher ROI than traditional systems, it is not surprising that SaaS players like CrownPeak have rapidly found acceptance in the marketplace. Features like complete system auditing and reporting provides even mid sized enterprises an ability to manage and track the history of all work, easing adherence to compliance of regulations. Files can be tracked through a complete document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling.
Small and medium enterprises will also appreciate the ease with which they can simply browse their Website and click ‘Edit’ on the tool bar. Completely configurable workflows enable organizations to assign tasks to any person, and escalate in case defined thresholds are crossed. For example, e-mail alerts can be sent to content owners of specific sections on a Website, when these sections don’t get updated after a specific time period. This is difficult to do in a manual system. With the SaaS vendor taking full responsibility of configuring and integrating back end systems, SMBs also do not have to worry about integration hurdles.
Using Web 2.0 to your advantage
With Web 2.0 radically changing user experience and preference, it is imperative for SMBs to adapt and give the same level of service that their large counterparts provide. They can look at vendors like CrownPeak to create multiple presentation of content fed from a single source. With a single centralized interface, customers can manage their different digital assets in a far more effective and efficient manner. As an example, content in a corporate blogs can be controlled and managed by employing workflow and approval rules. Similarly, RSS feeds can be created easily and automatically by simply publishing a piece of content on an RSS feed. What’s more, visitors to a company’s site can personalize their RSS feeds by defining a keyword or phrase. When new content related to the keyword or phrase appears on the Website, personalized content is automatically pushed.
The widespread adoption of CMS delivered as a SaaS points to a healthy trend that has been proven to improve the competitiveness of small and medium businesses. Through the ability to scale flexibly without the hassles of integration and maintenance, the SaaS model offers SMBs the power to fully leverage the power of the Internet and compete on an equal footing with their more established larger counterparts. Similar to the outsourcing wave which analysts now say is an irreversible trend; SaaS too is an irreversible trend that has the potential to catapult the proverbial David into the league of the Goliaths.
This article is contributed by Rob Rose – Vice President of Crownpeak. Crownpeak offers a cost effective and user friendly Content Management System (CMS). The Article talks about how the Small and Medium Businesses can compete with larger counterparts. It discusses the various strategies that Small and Medium Businesses can adopt to compete with Large Businesses on the web space.
