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Duncan Campbell shows how online computing resources are making services previously reserved for large corporate firms both available, and affordable, for small businesses.
You’d like to work smarter – do some of the clever things that larger businesses do: update your data automatically; ‘mine’ the information it contains to give you specific reports on how your business is performing; communicate better with your staff and customers.
What’s been holding you back is the lack of tools to do this – more specifically, the cost of acquiring these tools has previously been beyond your pocket.
This is no longer the case. You don’t need to have a large, expensive server in your office (with its associated installation and maintenance costs); nor do you need to purchase costly software to run on that server and which requires updating (at extra expense) within a few years.
Online resources, backed by cloud computing services, have changed the game plan completely and made services that were previously reserved for large-scale enterprises available, and affordable, for SMEs.
If you’ve switched from a server-based email system like Outlook to Gmail, you’ll already know the benefits of an online resource. While Gmail lacks some of the functionality of Outlook, it is free (unless you want larger email storage capacity, in which case you may want to spend some money on Google Apps for Business – see below).
“There are many, many online services,” says Dan Ballard, managing director of hosting service provider Cyberhub (www.cyberhubhost.co.nz). “I think these types of opportunities are really good for SMEs because as a small business you don’t have a lot of money to buy servers, to buy licences, to set up big infrastructure – all you want to do is pay a monthly fee, forget about it and use it whenever you need to use it. Cloud computing brings that ability to SMEs. I’m a big fan of cloud computing and encourage all my clients to get onto it whenever possible.”
Licensing for out-of-the-box software can be both costly and complicated. What’s worse, you may discover once you start using the product, that it doesn’t fit your requirements. Can you return it to the vendor? Probably not.
By contrast, some cloud offerings come as freeware or trialware, so you can test them before committing long-term. One example is Salesforce (salesforce.com/au/smallbusinesscenter), a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that comes with a 30-day free trial offer. It can capture website leads, track sales deals and provide business analysis, among other functions, and a basic package for up to five users costs $A35 per user per month.
“If you compare that to buying your own server and having software sitting on-site locally, paying for that with maintenance and backups, it’s much, much cheaper,” Ballard says.
Software makers who previously insisted on selling their products out of a box with requirements for upgrades or replacements at further cost, are now playing catch-up and offering online versions of their products which are hosted on their own cloud servers or those owned by partners. These versions can be scaled up or down in terms of features according to the user’s needs, and are updated without the user having to do any downloads or installations.
Having all the infrastructure stored in the cloud, rather than on your premises, has other financial benefits too. “Cloud computing enables CIOs and business owners to predict monthly budgets with certainty,” says Ballard. “Because although in the backend, in the cloud computing sphere, they might be changing drives and fixing motherboards, etc – that’s included in the costs and they don’t pay any extra for that.”
Online services have revolutionised accounting. Another prime example of how switching to online resources can save has been at NZ Post, which has saved millions in infrastructure costs by adopting Google Apps.
The Google difference
Google says more than three million businesses are now running its online applications, and claims another 3000 per day are signing up.
“Our belief is that having your data in the cloud, where you can access it at any time from any location from any platform or device, really makes sense,” says Henning Dorstewitz, Google’s global communications and public affairs manager, Australia and New Zealand. “Your employees can work together on documents, even if they’re not in the same room or city. Software can be improved as often as needed, and updated through the cloud.”
Along with Gmail, there’s Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), a free tool that enables businesses to analyse their website traffic and so improve its performance; Google AdWords (adwords.google.com), which lets businesses boost their sites by lifting their placement in search results; and Google Blogger (tinyurl.com/2conctl), which not only helps you to set up a blog, but explains the best blogging techniques and even offers a set of attractive templates.
For more functionality, Google Apps for Business (tinyurl.com/4dmaywe) offers messaging and collaboration apps, business controls, 25GB of email storage per user and – perhaps crucially – 24/7 support services (if the free ones break down, you need to search online forums for solutions). The cost is $US50 per user per year.
Last year, Google launched Cloud Print, which allows printing from any app on any device, OS or browser without the need to install any software. Recently launched in beta form was Google Cloud Print for mobile documents and Gmail for mobile. It should go global fairly soon (see tinyurl.com/4g2kjfo).
Google has set itself squarely against Microsoft with its cheaper online offerings. But the software giant is quickly making up for lost time.
Microsoft on the move
The general perception out in the tech community is that Microsoft missed the first cloud computing bus – underestimating its user appeal – and has had to play catch-up.
“While we lagged a bit in the consumer space from some people’s perspective, I think our momentum from here on in is going to be pretty telling,” counters Dirk Develter, Microsoft NZ’s online services specialist.
Microsoft now has 90 percent of its 40,000 developers worldwide working on cloud products. It’s also built major cloud infrastructure to host these services. Its work ethos has shifted to ‘cloud first’ and it expects that the vast majority of its products will be available as online resources before long.
“The next two or three years are going to be key,” Develter says. “We’ve already seen massive growth since we started our online services, and given that we’re a company of over 100,000 people, it’s quite staggering how fast we’ve been able to change our business to suddenly really push out cloud, because the need is out there.”
This commitment is reinforced with Microsoft’s latest offering, Office 365 (tinyurl.com/2c48n35). This is the new iteration of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft’s first venture into online services, which has been running now for nearly two years. BPOS itself was the online rendering of Exchange 2007; the difference with 365 is that it combines the features of Exchange and SharePoint as a cloud-hosted service. Exchange’s major features consist of electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage. SharePoint handles collaboration, file sharing and web publishing.
Develter says 365 is “quite a leap forward”, also including the Linq or communicator for live meetings and instant messaging. “The difference with 365 is that rather than paying a lump sum purchase, you can essentially subscribe to Office, so you’re paying on a per-user, per-month basis to use office productivity software.”
While BPOS has a minimum licence offering of five users, 365 will be available to single users. He adds that by bundling all the elements of Office, Exchange and SharePoint, the user gets a “unified experience”, coupled with all the backup and support of Microsoft’s infrastructure.
“A whole new world of functionality” is the promise of 365, Develter says. In SharePoint, for example, you’ll be able to build an extranet or a simple website, and mine some low-level business intelligence. “I’ve got document management, I can have meta data defining the document types, I can have versioning and workflows on the documents, notification, create forms – all online.”
The growing consumerisation of IT – using one device at home and work, or accessing a network from multiple devices – is also accommodated by 365. Disconnect from the network, add new data while offline, and it will update files automatically when you re-connect.
An important selling point for Microsoft is flexibility – being able to offer customers a fully on-premise service, a total cloud-based service, or a mixture of the two.
“There has to be a solid reason for any business to want to go to the cloud,” Develter says. “It might be a reduction in cost; it might be a need for flexibility or scalability or security, or a contained environment separate for their standard premise infrastructure. We don’t walk in to a customer and say ‘cloud is where it’s at’ – we listen to what it is the customer needs.
“There are the drawbacks, and the very common one is bandwidth. When you’re paying a disproportionately high amount compared to other countries for your international bandwidth, and say you’re a media company that’s sending a lot of email and receiving large attachments, that could potentially blow your whole TCO or ROI on your move to the cloud. So you have to weigh up what’s right and what’s not right for that customer.
“Microsoft is still learning where we’re going with some of the cloud to some extent, we’ll make some mistakes along the way but it’s nothing we haven’t done before in the start of a new enterprise,” Develter says. “It’s pretty exciting.”
CRM online
Office 365 is out in beta form now, but the full release date has yet to be announced. Another online product available now, however, is Dynamics CRM (crm.dynamics.com/en-nz), a fully fledged customer information and productivity tool priced at $NZ52.50 per user per month.
“In New Zealand today, businesses can sign up for this with a minimum of one user, get a free trial online for 30 days and then convert it to pay using a credit card,” says Paul Bowkett, Microsoft NZ’s CRM business manager. “It’s much the same as going to Amazon and buying a book.”
Microsoft’s CRM product can be deployed on-premise, via a hosting company’s servers, or in Microsoft’s cloud. It can be accessed through a browser or in Microsoft Outlook. “It’s about ease of use,” Bowkett explains. “You can run CRM in offline mode in Outlook and store your data locally, or you can run it in a synchronised state, which is quite powerful, so people can pick up their laptop, walk out of the office, and have all their CRM contact data inside Outlook available as well.”
All Outlook functions can be driven from CRM. Emails and calendar items can be linked back to CRM with one click. CRM focuses on three core functions:
1. Sales force automation (tracking contacts, activity, managing sales pipelines, large deal opportunity tracking, quotation, order entry, etc).
2. Customer service (post-sale support, tracking customer incidents, surveys and complaints, and service scheduling for mobile workforces).
3. Marketing (tracking, segmenting and profiling customers, doing marketing campaigns, etc).
CRM 2011 features a new dashboarding capability; it’s capable of such things as tracking and analysing sales and product demand, identifying new opportunities, and checking customer feedback and support requests.
“If you’re a small business it’s important to be able to say who your key customers are,” Bowkett says. “Maybe a small business only employs one sales person, but that person holds all the information today in their head, so being able to get that into the CRM tool – and for the owner, sales manager or operations manager to have access to it – is quite key.”
CRM 2011 can be tailored for individual users within a business, so they get a dashboard that delivers the data they personally require whenever they log in. While the manager can set levels of access according to ‘need to know’, the user can also adjust the settings to deliver specific sets of data and even advanced queries to track such issues as sales performance over specific time periods.
Other new features include a topline ‘ribbon’ that is context-sensitive, delivering specific functions relative to whatever document the user is viewing, integration with SharePoint online and Linq, and a Dialogue tool that lets the user create a communication ‘file’ with customers and colleagues on a particular job or account.
For mobile use, CRM 2011 works in offline mode with iPhone and Android-specific apps, and has a lightweight HTML client for use on the iPad and other tablet devices. Microsoft is aggressively marketing CRM 2011 – offering Salesforce and Oracle CRM users $US200 per user to switch products.
SBS online
Small businesses that move a lot of data around tend to prefer having their own server. Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2011 (tinyurl.com/5n9l8r) provides core functionality for networking, security, advanced email and calendar capabilities, database and line-of-business support, document and printer sharing, and remote access.
Right now, it’s still an on-premise solution, but a partially-online version, SBS Essentials 2011, is currently in beta and due for release later this year. Previously tested under the name Aurora, it will be a hybrid product for one to 25 users. Some services will be on-premise (Active Directory, File Imprint, and patch management using WSUS), while all the heavy-lifting technologies (Exchange, SQL, SharePoint) will all be consumed as a commodity service in the cloud.
“Small businesses will know what their costs are on a weekly or monthly basis,” explains Bradley Borrows, Microsoft’s product marketing manager. “You’ll be able to buy your email per month, and not have the ongoing operational costs of running Exchange and having an IT admin looking after it and doing backups, etc. So you’ll be able to manage your operational costs a lot more accurately.”
Because SBS Essentials is based on Windows Home Server technology, it will automatically do a lot of the things out of the box, including desktop backups and remote intranet access. You can keep tabs on the full release date and other developments at connect.microsoft.com/sbs.
More online resources
Shrinking IT budgets mean online and cloud-based services are the growth industry for computing in 2011. A recent Gartner survey of more than 2000 CIOs in Britain revealed that 43 percent expect their company to transact over cloud-based IT platforms within the next two years.
Many IT service providers are seeking to cash in on the demand for ubiquitous computing (accessible anywhere, from any device), and are building larger data centres to respond to the demand for online/cloud services. IDC New Zealand predicts a price war as providers battle for business – meaning SME customers are poised to demand very affordable deals to get the services they want.
If you’re looking to upgrade your infrastructure, it’s a good time to shop around for online alternatives to on-premise computing.
A time-saver from Inland Revenue
Pressed for time? You may not always be able to contact Inland Revenue when it suits you. The answer is to go online. In this article, Inland Revenue explains what you can do when you visit www.ird.govt.nz.
You may be familiar with, and already use some of our online services. We’re continually developing further online services for both our business and non-business customers so why not have a look at what’s available?
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Your account
With your secure username and password, you can view all your account information that we hold for you, such as your income tax or student loan account. You can get up-to-date information of all transactions and balances. Individual customers can update their bank account and contact details, and request and confirm personal tax summaries immediately.
You can also make payments, file your GST returns, and keep track of due dates with your personalised calendar. If you wish to contact us you can use our Secure Mail service which is quick and easy.
IR 3 tax return filing via Online Services
You can file your IR 3 tax return online; all information we hold is pre-populated for you. And you don’t have to do your return all in one go as you can save a draft and return to it later.
Managing your account access
You can give others controlled access to your business accounts through the Manage account access (MAA) service. Different levels of access can be granted to suit the differing roles and responsibilities in your organisation. A demonstration of MAA is available at www.ird.govt.nz.
How do you get an online services account?
It’s easy. Visit www.ird.govt.nz and go to “Secure online services” at the top right-hand corner of the home page. Click on “Register now” and follow the onscreen instructions. You’ll be asked to choose a username and password. You can confirm your password over the phone, or you can get a temporary password in the mail.
Support for business
Our “Tool for business” is specially designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It has all the tax information you need in one convenient place. You access it on our website by using the search term “Tool for business”.
If you’d like face-to-face assistance, come along to one of our tax seminars. You can find out about a range of topics including record keeping, expenses and filing returns as well as how to use our online services. There are seminars in most regions – you can book your seat online (search term “seminar”).
Cloud computing
We are aware that “cloud computing” is becoming a popular way for businesses to set up their IT infrastructures. The use of cloud computing may mean businesses are not meeting their record keeping obligations under the Inland Revenue Acts. You can read more about this on our website – simply search for “cloud computing”.
Our online services are secure and easy to use. With tax time approaching, why not register for an online account now?
New Web Resources for Business Owners
The Department of Labour has launched a new web resource called Infozone: Business Essentials. This resource helps employers, particularly those with small and medium businesses, understand the law relating to employment relations and health and safety. The Department of Labour also maintains other online resource that includes information on a wide range of workplace issues.
How Infozone can: Business Essentials help me?
Infozone: Business Essentials helps support businesses to set up that safe and healthy work environment by providing templates, examples and links so you can see how it can be done and gives you further information you need, to get it right
Health and Safety: A safe and healthy work environment is essential. Not only will it help avoid tragic and costly accidents, but good health and safety practice encourages staff retention and contributes to improved productivity, efficiency and profit.
Employment relationships: Having good employment relationships is essential for a happy and productive workplace. Employing and retaining the right people is vital to every business, and written employment agreements are a key step in that process.
Infozone: Business Essentials can step you through the correct employment procedures for hiring, managing and paying people, and when it’s time to end a working relationship. There are templates, documents and calculators available to help.
To find out more about the Infozone: Business Essentials website, visit www.dol.govt.nz/infozone/businessessentials
How can online tools help me?
The Department of Labour maintains a comprehensive online resource base that includes information on a wide range of workplace issues. See below the three most popular online tools
Employment Agreement Builder
Written employment agreements are a legal requirement, and that’s where the Employment Agreement Builder comes in. You can use the Employment Agreement Builder to select the legally required clauses and also choose from a range of optional clauses that may meet your business needs. When all the clauses have been chosen, they can be saved as a single document. You can also use it to draft a cover letter to accompany the employment agreement. This is completely free and can access it whatever time that suits you.
Holidays Calculator
This tool provides guidance on whether an employee is entitled to a paid public holiday, sick day or bereavement leave day (ie: whether the day would “otherwise be a working day” for an employee) and what an employee should be paid (ie: their “relevant daily pay” for their day off or for working on a public holiday).
Employment Relations and Health & Safety FAQs
These frequently asked questions provide information on common issues or scenarios about health & safety and employment relations. If your question or issue is not covered you can use the “Need More Help?” option to send your query to our Contact Centre who will respond back to you.
To find out more about the online tools, visit www.dol.govt.nz/onlinetools
Online with ACC
New online capabilities at ACC give tax agents and advisors access their client information 24/7. Go to www.acc.co.nz, send back the registration form and you can start.
You can access and update your clients’ details, including classification units, full-time/part-time status and earnings. You can also apply for ACC CoverPlus Extra and view transactions and upcoming payments, all online.
Check out current and historical transactions, eligibility for discounts, payments, non-payments and much more, all on behalf of your clients. To register go to www.acc.co.nz/online, click: Agents and Advisors, then Register for ACC Online Services. Once you have completed the self-registration, please provide 10 client authorities by using the ACC1766 Giving Access to your ACC Levy Information form.
Alternatively, email your company’s engagement letter or annual questionnaire. Your letter needs to mention ACC as an organisation you hold authority to link to. For more information or a sample paragraph for your letter, please email [email protected].
ACC will send you a confirmation email, and then you can log on and begin. Remember to get your client’s permission before you add their details to your online account, and keep this on file in case of an audit.
For more information, ph: 0800 222 991 or to arrange a visit from your local ACC Business Relationship Manager. Email: [email protected].
Free business information and training at your fingertips
Whether you’ve got a business issue and don’t know what to do, need marketing advice but lack the budget for experts’ fees, or need a business plan template or help to start your business, Business.govt.nz (www.business.govt.nz) offers free, relevant training and information. The topics covered include the four main stages of a business: starting up, managing, growing and exiting your business – as well as the legal or compliance issues businesses need to attend to stay on the right side of the law.
Designed as a one-stop-shop for small business owners, the site is easy to navigate through the use of drop-down menus and links to related information and resources. The information on the site is intended to be of practical use – anticipating small business owners’ questions and providing answers by telling them what they need to do, showing them how to do it, and providing tools and resources to support the required actions.
With so much helpful information in one place, it’s easy for small businesses to find best-practice advice, saving business owners both time and money.
Free training
The site has many useful articles covering topics, from whether your business idea is viable, to where to find investors or how to plan an exit strategy, all of which are accompanied by a range of free interactive tools and training. All you need to do is click on an interactive tool to be taken through a series of questions that will help you understand the tax implications for different types of businesses (tinyurl.com/29xhqen), what GST records you need to keep (tinyurl.com/4mjwk6t), or how to get the most from your advertising budget (tinyurl.com/4huw4jq).
There are also six interactive ‘Business Healthchecks’, each of which takes you through 10 questions to assess and provide assistance on starting up (tinyurl.com/26cbun7), finance (tinyurl.com/22tq8pv), future direction (tinyurl.com/2f7ujqo), products (tinyurl.com/4mz7nga), marketing (tinyurl.com/28xg5ws), and your overall business capability (tinyurl.com/24v7663).
For example, the Financial Healthcheck asks questions such as: “Do you know what sales you need to break even each week?” Based on your answers, a diagnosis of both critical and important recommended actions is generated. Each recommended action links to advice and free tools to assist you to take action on the advice (such as a template to download to help you calculate your own break-even point).
Templates and tools
You can download and fill in a business plan template (tinyurl.com/24etsew), which can be used to plan your business’ direction and goals, or used as the basis of your application for finance. You can also use the online interactive quick-start business plan (tinyurl.com/22nhown), where you work through 25 steps. Each step prompts you to explain, for example, how your products are made, who is going to help you run the business, and how you will manage your finances.
At each step, you type information into boxes onscreen, describing how you will tackle various aspects of your business. At the end, you are provided with an Action Plan that has recorded all this information, in the form of a Word document you can save and refer back to as your business grows.
If you need to obtain tax forms, find out how to comply with employment laws, or register a trademark, for example, the Business.govt.nz section titled ‘Do it online’ (www.business.govt.nz/do-it-online) contains links to various useful government department pages at Inland Revenue, the Intellectual Property Office, ACC, Government Procurement, the Department of Labour, the Ministry of Economic Development, and a link to search the Insolvencies Register. In addition, you can search the Companies Office register (tinyurl.com/2bf9zpn) within the Business.govt.nz site.
The site also contains links to useful third-party sites, such as Statistics New Zealand, which offers the Business Toolbox (tinyurl.com/2a5cpen). The Business Tool box features the Industry Profiler tool, which gives the number of businesses in your industry by region, the number of new and ceased business in the last five years, survival rates, and average earnings for staff. It also has a Market Mapper, which allows you to learn more about the demographics in the city or suburb where you’re establishing your business. Altogether, Business.govt.nz is a user-friendly, first-stop-shop for small businesses.
New articles and tools are constantly being added to Business.govt.nz, like the new Healthcheck (due to go live in February) to assess whether your business is ready to enter to export market. To keep up to date, sign up for the informative free e-newsletter (tinyurl.com/2vxnd8e) via the link on the Business.govt.nz homepage.
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