SMB Tech Roll-up: Mobile and Social Media Loom Large in 2011

By David Roe (@druadh20) Dec 16, 2010

Winding down the year, this week we have predictions for 2011 from the SMB Group that prominently feature mobile and social computing, Zoho upgrades its CRM is offering again, MS’s Small Business Server goes to RTM and AVG shows companies how to protect themselves.

SMB Computing in 2011

It’s getting to the end of the year and just about everyone is getting into the “what-will-happen-in-2011” mode. The SMB Group is no different, publishing its predictions for SMB software next year.

Needless to say, mobile computing and social media loom large for small businesses in the coming year — as they do for just about any other enterprise on the planet — but mobile commerce appears to be where the SMB Group thinks all this is heading.

In short its predictions are as follows:

Mobile commerce lifts off.
SMBs demand that vendors bring order to social media chaos.
App stores become a key information source and channel for SMBs.
The shift to cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) becomes irreversible.
A new cloud channel model forms.
The transition to the insight economy gets a bit easier.
Tablets add fuel to the mobile applications explosion.
Better, faster integration becomes a key business solution differentiator.
Hybrid computing requirements accelerate virtualization adoption.
Unified communication and collaboration suites continue to converge.

Leaving aside the demand to bring order to social media chaos, they all look quite reasonable. If you want more detailed explanations you can download the full report here.

Zoho Upgrades CRM

Zoho (news, site) continues to upgrade its CRM offering, this time around it will integrate with QuickBooks and telephony systems.

Zoho CRM for QuickBooks gives SMBs and other users a convenient, automated way to synchronize customer data between the two applications.

By transferring customer data between the two systems, organizations maintain complete and up-to-date customer information, reduce duplicate data entry and maintain consistency. Zoho CRM for QuickBooks lets users import, export or synchronize data either manually or automatically.

Zoho PhoneBridge lets telemarketers, sales reps and customer support agents leverage contact data into Zoho CRM to more effectively engage customers and prospects in all the outbound — and inbound — call activities.

Pricing for Zoho CRM for QuickBooks is US$ 25 per organization per month. Zoho PhoneBridge is priced at US$ 6 per user per month.

KnowledgeTree Integrates with MS Office

KnowledgeTree (news, site) continues to build its cloud offering for the SMB sector with this week’s new release offering Office integration and new pricing levels that drop as low as US$ 35/month.

The new features collectively aim to address what is increasingly seen as a need to improve the abilities of workers across entire enterprises to share and collaborate on information.

Citing a recent report from AIIM, Knowledge Tree says that even in small enterprises, the growth of information passing through companies is so great that only a well thought-out enterprise content management deployment will impose order.