I read an interesting article the other day by a German employee of Fujitsu, in which he noted that 99% of German companies fit the definition of small to medium businesses, and are therefore prime candidates to benefit from cloud computing.
He was describing the legendary German “mittelstand,” legions of primarily family-owned businesses that have often been around for centuries. Traditional, yet flexible enough to adapt continually to consequential trends and remain in business.
The US offers similar numbers of SMBs and a reasonable facsimile of the German family-owned tradition. I was struck by this especially last week, when I visited a few such businesses in the region of rural Illinois where I’ve been based the past few months. One was a construction materials company, another a landscaping company, another a small publisher.
Each have adopted in recent years, moving from paper forms and shoeboxes to laptops, wireless networks, thumb drives, and all the rest. Now they are moving toward, or at least considering, cloud computing.
The construction materials company produces, among other things, as many as 100 heavy, custom-designed concrete blocks for residential and commercial fences. It contracts with local concrete producers to get its raw materials, and get them where they need to be. In another part of its business, precision, radio-controlled elevators and chutes have replaced labor-intensive wheelbarrows. RFID provides inventory control that was unthought of in the past.
The landscaping company now tracks the amount of times spent on every aspect of all of its jobs through custom USB devices, uses the real-time data to ameliorate bottlenecks, and the archived data to show compliance with state and federal regulations. The owners now want to license their software and delivery system to the thousands of similar small landscaping firms throughout the US.
The publisher has been designing on Macs for a generation, but still relies on its own servers. A spring thunderstorm recently gorked the system, seriously threatening the deliver of two core newspapers. High-quality color photography is a recent addition to the newspaper industry; its reporters would like to transmit stories and pictures from the field. But the owner doesn’t want to add complexity to what already appears to him as a baffling IT infrastructure.
These anecdotes are real. There are thousands upon thousands more like them in the US, Germany, and no doubt most countries of the world. None of these people is looking to save money on their technology spend per se; all are looking to keep pace with the world while avoiding the creation of full-fledged IT departments.
They’re looking to cloud solutions to meet their need. They understand they need at least one person who truly understands this stuff, but they’d prefer to focus themselves and the rest of their employees on the core business.
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