Why Small Businesses Need to Invest in SaaS Delivery Model

The widespread adoption of Software-as-a-Service or SaaS model of technology deployment is undoubtedly a key driver of digital disruption across industries. Studies show that the global SaaS market is expected to touch or exceed a staggering USD 623 billion by 2023. And the biggest beneficiary of SaaS across every industrial sector is small and medium businesses operating in these sectors.

While big players do have their own key advantages, it is the smaller players who can truly transform their business. With SaaS, they get access to powerful tools that can enable them to compete with the best in the business without worrying about costs. With SaaS, they only need to pay for the resources they use, can scale up or down depending on business needs and enjoy hassle-free technology deployment without dedicated monitoring staff. This allows them to offer the best of services to customers using the same digital solutions as used by leaders in their industry.

Still skeptical about making the SaaS switch? Here are 5 reasons to transition your small businesses digital infrastructure into a SaaS model:

Related Reading: Private Or Public Cloud: Where Should My Business Invest?

1.Save on Costs

As a small business, you need considerable investment in core business processes and resources like for example, inventory for a retail business. There isn’t too much scope for spending heavily on IT projects if your core business is not technology related. But you need the best of digital solutions to serve the savvy and demanding consumers of today. Here is where SaaS-based software can be your best friend.

SaaS solutions typically work on a subscription basis, where you pay for what you consume: be it storage, computing power or number of users. And most cloud software is available for ready deployment with easy customization to suit your unique needs. This enables small business players to use world-class software without worrying about hefty license fees and implementation costs.

2.Flexible Infrastructure

By infrastructure, we mean the technology back-end of SaaS solutions that can accommodate any fluctuations in usage patterns. For example, a retailer may see increased use of technology services during peak holiday seasons. This scenario may require extra storage space or computing power to process transactions faster and deliver constantly seamless customer experiences. If you were to have an IT infrastructure on-premises, then jacking it up to meet the extra demand would involve a Herculean effort. Not to mention, the cost overhead for extra capacity, which may find a use for only a few days or months every year.

In a SaaS model, small business owners need not worry about scaling their technology infrastructure in pace with the demand from consumers. SaaS providers offer easy scalability and managed services to ensure that your technology rises up to the occasion when it’s needed. This flexibility empowers small businesses to focus on improving their business processes while trusting their infrastructure to run on its own risk-free.

Related Reading: Why Should Your Business Invest in Cloud Native Digital Technology?

3.Access to Innovations

Today, every successful business, across any industry relies on powerful technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics and so on to serve customers better. As a small business, you may not have the financial muscle or technical skill to build and use such technology in your daily operations.

However, with SaaS solutions, the story is completely different. SaaS vendors continue to invest heavily on incorporating market innovations such as AI, machine learning, etc., to enable their solutions to deliver more value. When you subscribe to their solutions, your business stands to automatically benefit from using this technology from day one.

4.Zero Maintenance Effort and Cost

Unless your small business opts for a private cloud infrastructure hosted on your own servers, you are less likely to incur any costs of maintaining your SaaS solutions. There is no need for dedicated staff to monitor availability or conduct periodic maintenance of hardware. All these would be managed by the SaaS vendor themselves and you only have to pay for the subscription plan you opted. This can be extremely useful for small players as they can control IT costs significantly and channel their savings into their core business.

Usually, all SaaS vendors commit to near 100% availability for their services and for cases of technical downtime, they usually notify customers well in advance to be prepared for any disruptions. Not having to hire technology professionals to run these solutions enables you to recruit more talent having niche business skills to grow your business.

5.Faster Deployment

SaaS software usually goes live in a matter of minutes for small businesses that have no or minimal customization requirements. Once up, any incremental changes or new feature additions can be rolled out without causing any disruption to the customer’s business processes that rely on these solutions. Vendors can roll out these updates at any convenient time without having to disrupt the customer’s business operations and without having to involve stakeholders from the customer’s side for every deployment. As a business owner, you can sit back and relax while new features get added seamlessly to your digital solutions faster and with more robustness.

Related Reading: INFINCE – A One-Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

SaaS is the future of small business technology as evident from the high rate of adoption it has found globally. The large plethora of benefits that customers get to enjoy while subscribing to powerful SaaS solutions with significantly low investments on cost and effort is a key driver of this adoption trend.

All you need is a strategic technology partner to enable the best value from your SaaS investments by offering you a powerful solution and tailoring it to suit your unique business needs. This is where INFINCE can be the game changer in your journey. Get in touch with us to know how your small business can leverage the power of SaaS with INFINCE. 

Top Must Watch Trends in Enterprise Video Conferencing

In an office environment, a meeting is scheduled often to not just communicate information, but as a means to establish, nurture and prosper relationships- both new and existing- between all involved stakeholders. This calls for a better solution for conferencing than conventional telephone and audio conferencing solutions. Videoconferencing has become a mainstay in today’s dynamic workspaces where technology facilitates remote working from anywhere in the world. The added benefit of sourcing talent from across the globe for your unique needs and not having to spend on physical infrastructure to accommodate them is a boon, especially for small and medium enterprises. Video conferencing offers far higher levels of engagement and collaboration opportunities when compared to other employee communication channels. So what will video conferencing enable for your workforce today?

Here are 5 trends in the workplace that find seamless adaptability with the aid of video conferencing.

1.Accountable Remote Workforce

As mentioned initially, today the large millennial population in the workforce has made the demand for remote work options quite high. Employees want to work out of their own comfort with more freedom than a typical office environment. As for employers, they are left with no option but to allow this flexibility for hiring the best talent to enable their growth. This is precisely the area where video conferencing can bring in the most impact. Today, successful organizations manage their remote workforce efficiently through video conferencing.

Team meetings and presentations involve live video streams from every employee location to ensure that all team members are present and aware of their roles and responsibilities. This is the next best thing to having everyone in a single room and sharing their responsibilities in front of the large group. So the video collaboration platform that is deployed across your enterprise requires a transparent login and access control policy that will ensure participant interactions are tracked and logged for future reference.

2.Smaller and Smarter Meeting Rooms

When you have fewer employees in the office and more on a remote basis, the need for physical meeting spaces diminishes inside the office. However, meeting rooms need to have, smarter equipment to ensure that team meetings conducted over video conferencing can be efficiently executed. Proper projection screens or televisions, audio, lighting and camera infrastructure that is able to vividly capture and present video streams for everyone involved in the meeting are an absolute necessity.

For remote working staff, they need a simpler solution like a mobile app which allows them to easily join the video conferencing stream and share information with their peers. While choosing your video collaboration platform, ensure that it offers all these levels of flexibility that will enable all stakeholders to seamlessly engage in video conversations.

Related Read: Why should a small business opt for INFINCE?

3.Content Sharing Platforms

In addition to enabling every team member to see each other, video conferencing platforms need to provide the ability to share files and other content in accordance with better compression and security policies to ensure lower bandwidth consumption and safer data transmission. This is vital for remotely working employees as they often have to collaborate with their peers in office for reviews and clarifications on their work in progress which may be files, documents, etc.

Your video conferencing solution needs to take into account the desired storage and streaming requirements for file sharing as well as the capability of doing so from even a mobile app. With flexible content sharing ability, employees will be empowered to work better from anywhere as they already have an efficient video communication channel which is also a powerful collaboration system as well.

4.Cloud-Enabled Video Conferencing

For small and medium businesses to remain competitive and cost-efficient in the market, they need to have flexible spending and management ability for their IT infrastructure. Video conferencing being a part of this infrastructure needs to follow a similar trend as well. This is why enterprises need to focus on cloud-based video conferencing solutions like INFINCE that offer easy scalability and better cost efficiency when they need to dynamically scale up or down their usage patterns over time. Additionally, adding new capabilities to your video communication and collaboration infrastructure is easier when it is cloud-based and depending on your needs, the most appropriate pricing plan can be easily configured.

5.Unified Communications

If your core business is not technology, then having to manage a host of solutions for team management and communication like video conferencing, audio conferencing and other intra-organizational collaboration will be a difficult activity requiring considerable workforce effort. This is where unified communication platforms make a difference.

They allow employees to easily switch between communication and collaboration channels on the go depending on their convenience. This will certainly improve productivity as employees are not forced to shuttle between various apps during a conversation. Enhanced collaboration would also enable teams to quickly arrive at decisions and enable work to be done collectively and within stipulated timelines.

Video conferencing is an irreplaceable communication channel for today’s organizations if they aim to build a robust and reliable work culture both in-house and with their extended remote peers. It will be best to have a scalable and cost-efficient technology backbone in your organization that will offer solutions for management, video conferencing and integrated employee collaboration all the same place.

By seamlessly, enabling businesses to build their technology infrastructure on the cloud, INFINCE is the right choice for a better workplace in your business. From providing powerful collaboration and IT deployment options in the cloud to facilitating highly engaging video-enabled collaboration, INFINCE can be your businesses best bet for digital transformation. Talk to our experts to know how your business can utilize the power of INFINCE.

Why Is The Public Cloud A Better Digital Transformation Option?

A decade ago, only a fraction of large scale enterprise applications, as well as consumer-facing applications, were in the cloud. Today, everything, from video and music streaming services to enterprise systems like ERP resides on cloud-based platforms. The large scale disruption that occurred due to the widespread adoption of cloud computing was the transition of one-time expensive licenses for software into highly affordable and flexible usage.

The benefits do not end with just cost but also the improved scalability that organizations were able to enjoy when their business or transaction volumes fluctuated during peak and non-peak market conditions. This is precisely the reason why the enterprise SaaS market is generating revenues of over $20 billion in a quarter for software vendors with a 32% year on growth. Industrial sectors ranging from banking to healthcare, retail, utilities, public services, and manufacturing have all made massive strides in cloud technology adoption. In fact, studies have shown that one-third of all IT budgets from enterprises now go into cloud solutions and platforms.

So cloud computing is here to stay and grow. The question now is what type of cloud, enterprises should invest in to ensure that their digital aspirations are offered the most compatible and progressive growth platforms. The major cloud options available for enterprises are public and private cloud systems. So what exactly are these? Here’s a brief explanation:

Private Cloud

A private cloud system is one that resides purely within an enterprise IT infrastructure and managed comprehensively by their own in-house technical team. From the deployment of applications to maintenance and upgrades, every activity that happens on such a cloud environment is owned, controlled and managed privately by the enterprise themselves. In short, the enterprise builds its own controlled cloud environment for internal usage and restricts any external access.

Public Cloud

A public cloud system is one in which your data and or applications reside on a cloud platform provided by reputed cloud vendors. The vendor is responsible for managing the data center requirements such as storage, application development support, processing and computing power, security and other infrastructural requirements.

So how can enterprises decide on choosing what’s best for their business? Let us examine the top 5 parameters every enterprise must evaluate before selecting their cloud infrastructure and how public and private cloud systems fare in each of these parameters.

1. Security

Every modern-day organization has to deal with truckloads of data that needs to be processed for decision making across different departments. When this entire process is transitioned into cloud-based systems where data is communicated over the internet, then security is a key concern. If an organization were to build their own private cloud infrastructure, then they would have to invest heavily on fortifying their cloud environment from threats. They could argue that external threats are lower than in the case of public cloud systems, but the effort involved in deploying and managing security protocols especially physical security of data centers is humongous.

Besides the right knowledge on how to thwart different levels of threats that arise in the industry from time to time will be limited if you engage internal staff to handle these security issues. As for a public cloud system, they would be aware of how to manage and neutralize the latest threats in the industry. In addition to that, the advantage of dedicated physically secure data centers, public cloud systems offer cloud infrastructure in your desired level of security preferences.

2. Technical Workforce Requirement

If your core business is non-IT, then the number of staff required to maintain a private enterprise cloud ecosystem within your business would be considerably larger if your business deals with a sizeable volume of IT transactions. This workforce requirement spans across different categories of IT technical staff like network administrators, physical and cyber security experts, database management teams, application maintenance and environment support teams, etc. Having a large dedicated IT workforce would result in significantly higher manpower requirements for a non-revenue, operational stream within your business and hence could impact staffing requirements across other key functions gradually due to budget constraints.

Additionally, your in-house technical team may not have access to industry awareness sessions and workshops that dedicated public cloud service providers offer to their staff. Hence, they would not be in a position to handle complexities that may arise from time to time. Public cloud service providers, on the other hand, invest in R&D, training and learning sessions to keep their workforce aware of what’s new and innovative in their industry. By preferring them over your own private cloud infrastructure, the knowledgeable workforce requirement challenge is mitigated considerably.

3. Scalable Infrastructure

Today’s businesses need a flexible technology infrastructure that can handle large fluctuations in their consumer demands and market conditions. For example, if you are an online retailer, then your technology backend will witness massive loads during the holiday shopping season and hence may need to scale up bandwidth, storage, computing, and analytical power, during this season. If you have private cloud infrastructure, then scalability will not be a flexible advantage since it would involve upgrading your own hardware infrastructure as well as other platform strengths to handle surges in usage.

Maintaining this high level of operational infrastructure all through the year is an expensive affair since the surge may be restricted to just a few months, but the hardware maintenance needs to be an ongoing activity all through the year. This is where public cloud systems offer an on-demand scalability advantage to your technology infrastructure. You can increase your cloud environment, performance, storage, and computing power in times of sudden business spikes and transit back to normal usage levels once the peak usage period is over. This will result in huge savings in terms of cost as well as management of cloud infrastructure as you only need to dynamically manage requests for increased transactions and not have the infrastructure boosted up always.

4. Ease of transitioning

Migrating your legacy on-premise system to a cloud-based platform is not a cakewalk activity. It involves careful planning, strategizing and prioritizing of business functions that need to be migrated to a cloud-based platform. If you are to building a private cloud system for everything, then the overheads involved in project management, application development, data migration, hosting and ultimately the availability of the system for consumer-facing business operations will be a challenging one.

If you opt for ready to deploy public cloud systems on the other hand, then all it takes is your data to migrate into the new cloud ecosystem after a small personalization or customization exercise. Or if you want to transition your proprietary enterprise applications in a cloud environment, then again the stability and support offered by public clouds can in no way be matched if you were to build a private cloud ecosystem to facilitate the transition.

5. Cost of Operations

The cost factor is a culmination of all the above parameters mentioned in this blog. As you can witness clearly, a private cloud requires quite a big investment to ensure that the organization’s technology infrastructure is on a secure and scalable cloud ecosystem with skilled and technically competent staff. This investment is not a one-time activity because technology evolves over time and you need to constantly transform with the changing technologies. With a public cloud system, you only incur the subscription cost while all other management and periodic feature upgrades are intelligently handled by the vendors themselves without passing on a heavy cost to users. This would mean that your organization would be able to significantly lower IT investments and hence core business operations would receive a higher budget allocation.

Related Reading: Migrate to the cloud efficiently! Check out our free guide to enable effective cloud transformation.

Thus, a public cloud system is the most feasible solution for enterprises to transit their digital assets into a cloud ecosystem. As more and more technology vendors bring newer innovations in the form of cloud-based ready to deploy platforms, it becomes easier for businesses to concentrate more on their core operational matters and less on their IT investments. With an infinite cloud platform like INFINCE, transform your business into a truly digital enterprise. Get in touch with us now!

Top 5 Possibilities You Must Explore to Build The Office of the Future

While most leaders look at ways to keep their business competitive with upcoming market trends, they often fail to look at areas that may seem less important. But in reality, these few areas can make a huge difference in improving the competitiveness of your workforce. This will ultimately impact your business’s bottom line as well. One such area is re-imagining your office to empower your workforce to work better in an increasingly innovation led landscape. The office of the future is beyond the four walls of a building and focuses more or deriving value from resources rather than enforce policies to keep them engaged at work. From communication to collaboration, the digital transformation wave has created new possibilities in every aspect of an office environment. It’s never too late to re-imagine your office to suit the needs of tomorrow, but the longer it takes for you to note the trends that shape the future, further down will be your innovation index in a competitive market. To solve this dilemma and empower you with the right decision, we have compiled a list of the top 5 trends, every future office will witness in the coming years. Make sure you explore each in detail and invest wisely.

Remote Work

Studies show that at least 70%of the global workforce works remotely at least once a week. In fact, the millennial generation rarely opts for a company that forces them to relocate from their hometown and be at the office physically all through the year. By offering a flexible work environment, it has been proven that employees are happier and feel more engaged at doing their work which will reflect positively on their output and productivity. The question now is “How can a remotely located workforce work together with in-house staff to drive value for the company?”

The answer lies in technology solutions like INFINCE, that help organizations manage their employees irrespective of where they are located. INFINCE enhances collaboration and work quality by creating a virtual unity for the entire workforce irrespective of their location. Besides, such a cloud-based platform can save cost considerably by allowing employees to work remotely and save on infrastructure.

Diverse Communication Platforms

When we say office communication, the common items that run into our minds are email and VOIP calls. But today the horizon of office communication has evolved considerably from just these two options. There are social media styled intranet tools available to help employees engage better with their peers and these intranets also serve as announcement boards for various purposes. Open positions, important event announcements, new policy or process announcements, are just some of the key elements that can be communicated through such platforms to your organization as a whole.

Besides, such platforms also offer multiple levels of access controls and permission-based roles for different teams to communicate with other internal employees as well as with external vendors and partners. The office of tomorrow definitely needs a big boost in terms of offering flexible communication platforms and very often scenarios demand multiple communication tools be integrated to work together efficiently and offer the best experience for employees in all your office locations both in-house and remotely. Having the right technology infrastructure to promote open communication is a key factor in keeping your office communication standards competitive with the best in your industry.

Digitally Empowered Workforce

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will seek its entry into mainstream office culture in the near future. Smart office assistants will be guiding employees through business processes just like how virtual assistants like Google Now and Siri guides consumers. Intelligent notifications, schedules, alerts, and information discovery assistants will help employees work better and faster to deliver better value to the enterprise.

Additionally, organizations can keep a check on their employees’ health through smart wearable tech devices like bands and watches. These can double up as digital access cards to help employee’s access office infrastructure without having to carry an ID card and similar items. The stage is set for large scale digital transformation of employee productivity and a combination of intelligent data processing as well as connected hardware will form the basis of this transformation. Your workforce will be more empowered in the office of the future and will require less time to adapt to new work requirements and office spaces.

Innovative Meeting Spaces

Workplace interactions are pivotal in fostering a healthy work culture irrespective of the industry your business operates. Very often, there are requirements where multiple folks have to brainstorm and discuss to arrive at a solution for a business or operational challenge. The traditional meeting rooms where such solutions get their starting are evolving rapidly. In the future, we will witness the rise of virtual meeting rooms that combine multiple telecommunication mediums with technology innovations like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR).

Presentations will never be the same as in the future, you can expect human presenters to remotely take sessions through VR or AR guided imaging. While teleporting and other similar sci-fi movie stuff is not a guaranteed innovation, virtual meeting rooms where teams across the world can communicate through an immersive video conferencing platform is sure to take off in the coming years. This will transform meetings from their boring themes of today and make the audience and participants more engaged with facts and interactive presentations. This also interleaves with our first prediction of flexible remote work as employees who are away from the office can also take part in interactive sessions through such innovative conferencing solutions.

Greener & Smarter Buildings

Across the globe, entrepreneurs are becoming more aware of their role in creating a better working world by contributing not just social wealth but also by creating an environment-friendly workspace. In the US alone, the number of construction projects that have LEED certification has risen from just around 296 in 2006 to over 65,000 in 2017. While remote work options will be in plenty in the future, the demand for a solid physical office space for corporate affairs will always be there. This need will be transformed into a need for greener buildings that consume less of our energy resources to keep the building ventilated, illuminated and visually appealing.

From conserving water to harvesting solar energy to power electrical systems, companies will continue to invest in making their businesses as environmentally friendly as possible. For such aspirations to reap value at the earliest, future office spaces will make use of the Internet of Things (IoT) powered sensors and hardware to ensure that their efficiency levels are high. Automatic lighting and cooling systems based on occupancy, smart cleaning and maintenance infrastructure, intelligent water and waste management systems, etc., will be crucial in creating a higher green print for office buildings of the future.

The office of the future will have a large number of revolutionary innovations to help employees deliver better work outputs. We have captured the 5 most important possibilities that will become a reality soon at future offices. The digital wave will continue to disrupt the traditional workspace culture and employees will witness a new era of connected and secure workplace that help them work from anywhere and anytime without glitches.

Businesses need to invest in making their technology infrastructure secure and more flexible to adapt to innovations such as the ones we explored in this blog. The best way to begin will be to onboard next-generation enterprise technology platforms like INFINCE to seamlessly transit into a digital-first business. Talk to our experts to see how your business can compete with the best in the industry through digital excellence.