KDB Systems

The current IT buzzword is “cloud”. Most small business owners don’t know what this means and they don’t care. To them it’s just another word for Internet. They already use the Internet so selling them more Internet is a hard sell. Personally at this point in time I mostly agree with them. They don’t need more Internet and that’s all most of the current cloud offerings are, piecemeal offerings that don’t add much value but cost more than what they already use. What they need is a managed Internet service that they can afford. All the current cloud offerings that I’ve seen are too limited or too specific in what they offer, e.g. email, computer management of some sort, backup, etc. Someone needs to offer an all encompassing Internet service that includes email, computer and security management, backup, domain hosting, web site hosting, in other words – their Internet and more. This needs to be inexpensive to set up. Less than $1,000 to pay someone to do it for them would work. It needs to be inexpensive on an ongoing basis. $10 per PC per month would be good. This I could sell. The current setup of overpriced piecemeal solutions I can’t. I don’t even care if I get a cut of the $10 per month. I’d actually rather not. It would be too much paper work. I don’t want to brand this with my name. I want to sell it as I do with any other piece of technology. If it’s not working I don’t want the customer to blame me. I want to phone up the vendor, get it working, and get paid for my time to do this. I want the ongoing business of maintaining their network infrastructure, dealing with the problems the cloud management finds with their PCs, advising them on new products or upgrades, etc.

The other cloud thing that would work in a very big way for small businesses is line of business (LOB) applications. These are a real pain point for most small businesses. They usually need a dedicated server. They’re usually hard to backup properly. They are a major pain to upgrade. Whenever you call for support invariably it’s your network, software, or hardware that’s at fault not the vendor’s application. If all the small business user had to do was point their browser to the app and logon they would be in LOB app heaven. They pay many thousands of dollars yearly for the current terrible support. They would gladly pay for this. The only problem would be a prolonged Internet outage. Some LOB apps that control local equipment wouldn’t work. I can think of many cases where it wouldn’t work but when it did it would be the best thing to happen for a small business since spreadsheets were invented. I’m pretty sure the vendors would love it as well. It would mean far less support problems for them.