Archive for the ‘Small & Medium sized business’ Category

By Vivian Yeo, ZDNet Asia

While organisations are dipping their toes into newer technologies such as social networking as a means to communicate with consumers, traditional tools particularly SMS (short message service) is still proving to be an integral outreach tool.

According to Shalini Verma, principal analyst at Gartner, SMS, MMS (multimedia messaging) and voice-related technologies are perceived as traditional, and newer tools such as social media have “come up and taken over”.

“There are traditional tools that have been perceived as outdated because when we come from a smartphone standpoint–the high-end devices–definitely some of these [older communication] tools are not a big focus,” Verma noted in a phone interview.

How high up the corporate agenda is greening IT? Is the pursuit of profit really able to sit side-by-side with helping protect the planet and its people?

Yes, according to CompTIA’s survey of 650 IT and business executives involved in green initiatives or strategies in the US, UK and Germany. “IT is coming out of the server closet,” said Seth Robinson, the organisation’s director of information technology analysis.

More than a third of specialist publishers in the UK are charging for online content, the InPublishing/Specialist Media Show survey has found.

Preliminary analysis of the cross industry research found that 34 per cent of publishers provide paywalled content now and 15 per cent plan to so so in the next two years.

The survey, carried out by eDigitalResearch, is backed by the PPA, InPublishing, University of Leicester and Wessenden Marketing. It questioned around 200 MDs, publishers and owners of consumer and B2B niche publishing companies with a turnover of under £10m, asking for their views on paid online content, live events, apps, digital editions, social media and print.

2011 End User Device Survey

Cloud, mobility, and consumerization are stressing corporate IT, says Jonathan Feldman of InformationWeek

 Think you can hold the line against the forces pressuring the corporate desktop as we know it? Maybe, if you’re in a very security-conscious or heavily regulated company. But the better question is: Should you?

Microsoft’s  global “SMB Cloud Adoption Study 2011,” research finds that 39 percent of SMBs expect to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years, an increase of 34 percent from the current 29 percent. It also finds that the number of cloud services SMBs pay for will nearly double in most countries over the next three years.

The findings show an increasing opportunity for hosting service providers to profit in the cloud from offering services such as collaboration, data storage and backup, or business-class email. Some key findings include the following: