SaaS (Software as a Service) can help organizations improve their processes, increase efficiencies and reduce costs. By doing business in the Cloud, it’s possible to swiftly position an organization for significant growth and increase its competitive advantage.
Here at Smart Business, our question was: How aware are small and mid-sized business (SME) leaders of SaaS, the Cloud and their potential?
To better understand this issue, as well as the adoption of SaaS by SME executives, Smart Business surveyed 1,000 of our senior-level executive readers from organizations with $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenue.
Our premise was straight-forward: Cloud Computing is growing in popularity. Organizations in the middle market have traditionally been quick to adopt new technology as an effective tool to accelerate business growth and differentiate themselves from the competition. We wondered:
- How many companies were doing business in the Cloud?
- What was the depth of their Cloud knowledge?
- What perceptions – and misperceptions – did they have regarding Cloud?
To accomplish this, Smart Business partnered with SAP, whose SAP® Business ByDesign™ is a SaaS product already used by 85,000 SMEs around the globe.
What we found surprised us.
Most intriguing was that there was no clear understanding of SaaS and Cloud Computing, despite 100 percent of those surveyed – who included C-level executives, IS and IT directors and managers – saying their organizations used software and technology as a strategic tool to make them more effective and efficient.
Also, SME leaders were worried about the affordability of SaaS, believing that the costs are high and that there is no clear path to achieving an ROI.
There were concerns about accessibility, primarily whether doing business in the Cloud ceded control of an organization’s data or made it less accessible when it was most needed.
And, a majority of those surveyed mentioned their belief that SaaS held inherent security issues that put their data at risk.
Smart Business’ exclusive white paper is designed to address each of these misconceptions – and others – expressed in the Smart Business survey and dispel the myths that we found exist among SME business leaders. Get a copy of the white paper here.
And then, join us from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday, October 12, 2011, for a special Webinar where we’ll present business leaders and an SAP expert, who will bust myths about the security of doing business in the Cloud. Click here to register!
