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.