SMB Tech Roll-up: Intel Pursues SMB, Social Media Use Rises Again

By David Roe (@druadh20) May 26, 2011

This week Intel is chasing SMBs with new targeted, cloud services, social media use continues to rise in the SMB space with Facebook still the most popular application, Citrix bought desktop virtualization startup Kaviza and KnowledgeTree offers mobile document management.

Intel Offers SMB Cloud Services

Intel (news, site) joined the cloud market for SMBs this week with the launch of its AppUpSM Small Business Service, a service running on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform that enables server manufacturers, software vendors and service providers offer SMBs all the major advantages of cloud computing.

Intel's AppUp Small Business Service, enabled by the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform consists of a server, a catalog of prepackaged small business applications from a broad range of software providers, and Intel-developed software to manage and track use of the application software.

New services include use of a subscription-based delivery model for software applications. Intel-developed software activates, deactivates and then tracks the customer's usage of those applications on a secure platform.

In addition, service providers can remotely manage their customers' servers that employ this Intel Hybrid Cloud reference design by using a Web portal hosted by Intel and secured by a Web application firewall and HTTPS encrypted communication.

While the Intel AppUp Small Business Service is available in North America and India, Intel said it expects to expand the program to other countries.

Social media use on the rise

Back to social media again and how SMBs are using it. A new survey from Constant has found that that social media is now the top tool in SMBs marketing arsenal.

According to their research 73% of SMBs report using social media to market their business, while of those that are not using it, 62% expect to begin using social media marketing in the coming year. Further, 81% of those currently using social media marketing expect to increase their efforts this year.

It also reports that small businesses still rely heavily on email, website and event marketing, as well as advertising, to drive business.

Among social media tools, Facebook appears to be the tool of choice: 95% of those using social media marketing reported using the tool and 82% of those found it to be effective.

SMBs also found varying degrees of success with other social media marketing tools: 47% using Twitter found it effective, 47% of those using LinkedIn found that effective and 73% of those using video sharing tools, like YouTube or Vimeo, found them effective. If you’re interested you can find out more about this here.

Citrix acquires Kaviza

In the acquisition space Citirx (news, site) announced this week that it has bought Kaviz, who’s VDI-in-a-box — a virtual desktop appliance that runs on commodity server hardware with local storage — has been making considerable in-roads into the SMB space.

Citrix doesn’t have a purpose built VDIO for this space, and aims to fill that gap with Kaviza’s offering. "We think desktop virtualization and VDI specifically, have a lot of benefits to customers in that space who want to take advantage of the technology but don’t have the resources to deploy it," Flink said in a press conference Monday.