It’s Time to Tell Small Businesses to Break Up with Their Server and Jump Ship for the Cloud
If you’re like most resellers, your customers are predominantly small businesses, and IT costs are a significant overhead expense. But without technology underpinning their business, everyday processes would be incredibly inefficient—ultimately killing their bottom line. Talk about a rock and a hard place. But since the emergence of the cloud and mobile technologies, IT doesn’t need to be a small business’ Achilles Heel. All you need to do is convince your customers to chuck that resource-sucking server and embrace the cloud.
Convince Them That Breaking up Is a Good Thing
Fortune 500 companies process an unimaginable amount of paper and electronic documents every day. Without the power provided by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Automation (BPA) giants such as DocuWare, EMC (soon to be a Dell company), Therefore (a Canon subsidiary) and Perceptive Software (a Lexmark company), these corporate behemoths would be incredibly inefficient, with high labor costs and sluggish customer service crippling their profit margins.
This isn’t the case for your small business customers. Undoubtedly, they process their fair share of documents, and may even require a degree of sophistication to get the job done efficiently. However, they don’t need to use a Howitzer when a slingshot will suffice. Dealers should advise small businesses to embrace their nimble size when it comes to IT and opt for scalable software based in the cloud in lieu of the costly on-premises solutions.
Things to Consider When Making Your Pitch
According to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), a market research community for information professionals, 44 percent of companies that switched from an on-premises ECM deployment to its cloud counterpart were able to reduce operating costs. Your sales pitch should focus on eliminating costly software and the servers that house them—substituting in cheaper cloud-based document management systems (DMS) and other business applications—so small businesses can drastically reduce their IT costs while remaining productive and efficient.
Lower costs aren’t the only benefit of jumping to the cloud. From a security standpoint, AIIM found that 75 percent of surveyed organizations said cloud services offered similar or better security than they could provide for their own servers. The report adds that the “size of an organization is a factor here, with 24 percent of the largest organizations feeling that their own servers offer better security, but this drops to just 17 percent of the smallest.” In other words, larger organizations that don’t feel comfortable relinquishing their data to outside sources, presumably can afford to store data on-premises under lock and key, whereas their smaller counterparts cannot. The silver lining, of course, is that small businesses can obtain the same level of security at a lower price, albeit, at the cost of “losing control” of their data. And that sentiment should be another focus on your pitch: enterprise-level security at SMB costs.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the survey, and most damning for salespeople pushing cloud-based products, was the disparity of favorable opinions about the cloud between individual users and management. The survey shows that while 70 percent of individuals had a positive outlook when it comes to the cloud, only 38 percent of company leadership shared that opinion.
But this disparity shouldn’t discourage dealers pushing cloud-based solutions. AIIM’s survey found that cloud-based offerings for communications, personal note synchronization, file-share-and-sync, workplace or public social sites, and cloud office or email apps, are used by many among those who were surveyed. The survey also confirmed how prevalent the “bring your own device” (BYOD) movement really is, with nearly half of the surveyed users telling AIIM that they access their cloud services via mobile devices. This is key data that can be leveraged in order to convince the 62 percent of leadership with unfavorable opinions on the cloud. It’s likely that these employees are turning to these services because they deliver flexible, collaborative avenues that the existing platform does not. Aside from the costs savings, your pitch should include how your employees want and need 24/7 access to data regardless of where they are, and what device they are on.
Convincing the 68%: The Cloud vs. the Server
How can you go about convincing the 68% of AIIM’s poll that the cloud isn’t a nightmare? It wouldn’t hurt to start by speaking their language: money. Let’s take Cabinet SAFE CLOUD 10 as an example, and use it to put together a pitch that will grab all of your customer’s attention.
Cabinet SAFE CLOUD 10 offers everything businesses need from a document management system without the overhead of an on-premises deployment. The system delivers an all-in-one solution for document capture, routing, workflow, processing, management, and storage. And with API’s available from the company, organizations can dovetail essential line-of-business solutions with Cabinet, making it a central hub that facilitates all of an organizations document-centric business processes and workflows.
The solution captures and OCRs paper and electronic documents, rendering them full-text searchable, then indexes and routes them to a repository and/or workflow. SAFE Cloud can build automated, rules based workflows that mimic any organizations existing business processes. All of the necessary tools for handling documents are provided, including the ability to add annotations, combine or separate documents into multipage or single-page documents, along with the ability for users to check-in/checkout documents while the system maintains full version history.
While the increase in operational efficiency is the main draw, the price tag will also bring a smile to your customer’s face. According to BLI Solutions Center, the price for typical deployment includes a one-time, $750 setup fee, plus $300 per month for 6 named user licenses and maintenance—leaving an organization with a total cost of ownership at $4,350 for the first year, and $3,600 a year from the second year on. That’s a five-year cost of $18,750.
In contrast, its on-premises counterpart’s cost of typical deployment sits at $15,000, according to BLI Solution Center, which includes 5 named user licenses, 4 concurrent user licenses, and 46 hours of remote consulting to configure, implement, and train system users. Then, you can tack on another 20% for maintenance fees, and the typical cost of deployment for SAFE tallies in at $18,000 for the first year, then $3,000 (maintenance fees) a year moving forward. Deployment costs in licensing and maintenance fees for SAFE on-premises in the first year alone nearly equals the five year cost of its cloud-based counterpart.
Deployment costs don’t end there. According to specifications obtained by BLI from Cabinet, SAFE on-premises requires a SCSI RAID-5 or RAID-10 server with a minimum CPU to run the server’s operating system (Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2012), appropriate RAM to accommodate the number of connected users, and disk space to accommodate the estimated data volume (1GB per 20,000 pages is typical, according to Cabinet). For the sake of argument, we will use the minimum hardware specifications needed to support a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, per Microsoft. First, the hardware cost to support Cabinet SAFE on-premises starts at $899, according to quotes received from Dell, NewEgg, and Thinkmate. Add to that, cost of Window Server 2008 R2, ranging between $500 and $1,000 and you can expect an investment of $1,399 at the least.
Combined with the SAFE on-premises deployment costs, organizations can expect to pay $19,399, or more than four times the amount than the cloud alternative, in only one fifth of the time. It should also be noted that these are low-ball estimates, and real-world deployments may carry a heftier price tag than noted here—and that’s not even factoring in the “soft” costs, such as IT overhead to keep it all updated and running.
The Bottom Line Isn’t the Only Bottom Line
As noted above, cost doesn’t have to be your only selling point. Let’s explore additional selling points that can be the little push you need to get customers to sign on the dotted line.
Huge leaps in mobile device and cloud technologies have liberated employees from their desks, enabling them work from virtually anywhere. With the shackles removed, on-the-go employees can be much more productive, having access to everything and anything they need to get the job done. AIIM’s study found that 42 percent of respondents benefited greatly from the ability to telecommute, which eliminated “the old way of taking home copies of work-in-progress, and then syncing back on return is apt to result in multiple duplicate copies, whereas the cloud offers a much better option of one version, one set of comments, and one truth.”
Not only does the cloud reduce employee downtime, but it has a synergetic effect, increasing the efficiency of their increased uptime. Moreover, users are afforded more avenues in which they can use to collaborate on content in the cloud than they could in their on-premises flavors. AIIM notes that these collaborative benefits aren’t just for employees. In particular, the cloud extends this to partners and customers outside the firewall without the need to set up VPNs and secure gateways. That’s a relief for IT personnel, who now have one less problem, and a win for the organization, who now has a direct line of communication with their customers.
The cloud offers unique protections that an on-premises deployment would have trouble with, or simply can’t offer. The first thing that comes to mind is protecting data from natural disasters or other catastrophic events. For one, if a local disaster such as a fire or a flood compromises your hardware, and you don’t have any backups in a separate location, you can kiss that data—and maybe even your business—goodbye. Often, cloud-based solutions are housed in ultra-secure data centers, sometimes across different regions, with full-redundancy to protect your data from power-failures to the storm of the century, and everything in between.