Small business, big technology

Andrew Boyd explains how embracing the cloud is critical to business success if you’re looking to grow, innovate, and deliver better customer experiences.

The big benefits of being a small business in New Zealand is the ability to move quickly, test new ideas, and bring your products and services to market sooner than most large enterprises. Being a small business means you can scale fast while maintaining quality customer experiences, expand into global markets, and manage an ever-changing range of data for insights that can unlock success.

But not having the right systems in place can be a real challenge for your business, especially when you’re trying to compete with experienced market players.

The availability of cloud services opens doors for you to access the same resources that were once considered to be only the domain of big business, without the need for physical IT infrastructure and overheads. Cloud also reduces complexities by providing solution frameworks that not only level the playing field but gives fast-moving small businesses an edge in the market.

The most important question for a small business founder, leader, or decision-maker is – are you thinking big enough about your market opportunity and leveraging technology like cloud to innovate and reach your customers?

Here’re four trends you should consider before answering that question:

1. Personalisation is key for your customers

Research from KPMG’s 2019 New Zealand Customer Experience Excellence Report reveals that personalising services to drive an emotional connection is the key driver of brand advocacy and loyalty for customers.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data analytics are opening up new ways to create improved customer connections. For example, ML technology can help you track and understand customer conversations across different interactions like call centres or chat bots, to help you replicate successful interactions, and uncover crucial feedback.

Kiwi-based deep science and technology company, Soul Machines developed ‘Digital Heroes” using AI-enabled interfaces to drive deeper connections with customers. Soul Machines leverages Amazon Elastic Graphics to support their graphic-intensive workloads, which helps them to deliver seamless experiences for customers interacting with their digital interfaces.

With solutions that are quick and easy to implement, small business owners and startups can now also quickly uncover patterns to make better decisions for customers and move faster to meet their needs as they change. 

2. Thinking global, even if you’re local

Global expansion can be daunting for small businesses when you are also facing time and resource challenges. Operating in the cloud can help global market expansion quicker and cheaper than what was possible in the past. Without the burden of expensive physical IT frameworks, businesses can move their infrastructure wherever needed, and still have access to data and applications from anywhere, and on any device to make collaborating with employees, clients, and customers a much easier task.

For its first nine years of operation, a cloud-based inventory management company housed its local and international data on a New Zealand-based server. In 2018, Unleashed migrated all its IT infrastructure to AWS to help facilitate global expansion and better serve its markets in the UK and North America. By operating in the cloud, Unleashed has eliminated hard-drive issues and outages, helping its customers make more consistent data-driven decisions to improve purchasing, production, stock control, and sales processes.

Removing infrastructure constraints and simplifying data applications can bring a new level of agility to businesses, which makes expanding globally easier.

3. Seize the opportunity to become New Zealand’s next unicorn

The growing demand for cloud services has particularly fuelled new market opportunities for independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop new solutions running on AWS. recently predicted that the worldwide public cloud services market is set to reach $266.4 billion, representing a growth of 17 per cent, up from $227.8 billion in 2019. Software as a service (SaaS) which is hosted in the cloud rather than installing and maintaining the software locally, will remain the largest market segment and forecast to grow to $116 billion next year due to the scalability of subscription-based software.

Xero is an example of a New Zealand born cloud-native unicorn that has been able to accelerate global growth after migrating to AWS Cloud. What began as a small startup in 2006, Xero is now one of the fastest growing Platform as a Service companies globally, with more than two million subscribers. Migrating to AWS has enabled the cloud-based small business platform to leverage ML technology and deliver fast-paced innovation, improved margins, and internet scale.

With widespread availability of cloud technology facilitating new avenues for growth, there are more opportunities to innovate and uncover new business models that reshape industries, which could make you New Zealand’s next unicorn.

4. Managing the unknown

Every business, small or large, must manage exponential data growth at different stages. It can be difficult to prepare for the unknown as you scale up your operations.

Previously, you may have over-provisioned your IT resources to ensure that you had enough capacity to handle your operations at peak times, which is not the most cost-effective strategy. Now you can use technology to automatically provision the amount of resources you actually need, and the dynamic nature of the cloud gives you the comfort of knowing you can move fast to scale as your needs change. This can help you to save on costs without compromising service quality to your customers.

Tauranga-based startup SwipedOn is an iPad visitor management software company that has been operating internationally since day one. Fast forward seven years, SwipedOn’s software now runs in more than 70 countries and 5,000 workplaces worldwide. This global business model requires a huge amount of processing power while remaining fast, reliable, and secure. Since migrating to AWS, SwipedOn has leveraged Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network, to scale at pace, reduce latency, and increase transfer speeds for its global customers without compromising on the user experience.

If you’re looking to grow, innovate, and deliver better customer experiences in 2020, it is clear that embracing the cloud is critical to business success in this saturated market. Whether you’re a software company looking to scale or a startup with a new service, cloud adoption can bring a huge range of benefits to your business, and help you get ahead of the competition this year.

Andrew Boyd (pictured) is head of digital native businesses at Amazon Web Services.