Why we chose small business
I recently enjoyed reading SpiceWorks’ recent blog on why they chose to target the small business market. They clearly understand the S in SMBs and their buying behavior, which is crucial if you’re planning on attacking the small business market. I thought I’d follow up with a similar post explaining why Untangle targets small business.
Similar to SpiceWorks, we noticed a “hole” in the market for IT services and technologies for small business. Enterprise space was saturated with vendors. Given their dedicated IT staff and large budgets, they were the first obvious choice to target for technology companies. Consumers also had some good solutions. Given their massive volume and simple IT setups (one machine) made it a lucrative market to attack with software applications. SOHO (single office/home office) only had a few machines, so usually just borrowed consumer solutions and installed them on each machine.
Small business, on the other hand, was far behind on the adoption curves of most solutions. The problem was that most solutions available don’t fit the requirements for SMB. Small business are too big to borrow consumer solutions yet much too small to afford the enterprise solutions. Why weren’t small businesses who suffer the same pain as their larger enterprise counterparts adopting these solutions? In a word – ‘friction.’ There is simply too much friction associated with the adoption of these solutions.
Friction of adoption comes in many forms, usually high cost, high complexitiy, or large time requirements. If you look across the board at IT solutions (Anti-Virus, Spam Filtering, Email Server, Backup, VOIP, Firewall, Web Filtering, etc etc) you’ll notice that small business’s adoption is inversely related to the friction associated with adopting the solution. They simply don’t buy expensive or difficult solutions, and this usually leaves them out in the cold. They don’t have the money that enterprise does so they can’t adopt those solutions. They don’t have IT staffs and they can’t take the time away from their business to learn and deploy complex solutions so they can’t adopt the multitude of open source solution available.
Untangle was born because here was a large segment with acute IT pain that stood to benefit greatly from a IT platform designed to frictionlessly deliver them IT services and solutions. The platform delivers these solutions in an easy and free manner and opens the flood gates such that small businesses can finally adopt all the technologies they need. Untangle stands to benefit from the wide distribution of our platform by leveraging that channel to deliver future IT services and solution, but our first goal is to solve small business’s problems in order to get that massive distribution.
4 Responses on Why we chose small business
Perfect! We believe the same things: SMBs are alone, confused, abused and overwhelmed. There’s a reason they write their passwords on Post-It! notes and want nothing to do with Vista.
The real problem SMBs have with Open Source is awareness. Without a clue that something better is available, OSS solutions are invisible. When found, they’re treated with suspicion…how can something ‘free’ be any good?
And driving OSS solutions through the channel is fraught with all kinds of problems: margins, existing competence, trust, etc. But the most important is that the status quo is highly profitable to current providers. Why should they change?
Our answer is to find alternative paths to the market. If the channel is intransigent, we’ll need to find a way to motivate them to adopt alternatives. Nothing is so motivating as to see your market share disappear to a rival/superior solution. Just ask Microsoft!
Kim Brand
CEO/Founder
http://www.FileEngine.com
I was a one-person tech consulting company for 5 years working in the mid-west. A lot on my customers were small to mid-size manufacturing companies with a network admin in the basement. They usually hired me because they had a business problem that required a solution with a technology component and no one to evaluate their options for them.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that their problem was trust. They had no one on their executive team capable of assessing a technology investment or managing a major technology project. Everyone outside the organization they turned to for advice had an agenda — their CPAs had a consulting arm and sold SAP, service providers were selling their services, and so on.
So I structured my practice as simply as possible. For a flat fee, they got 1, 2 or 3 days a week to get thru a particular project — select a EDI solution, project manage an ERP implementation, evaluate and strengthen their IT department, etc. Basically, I became their CIO. They could turn to me and trust that my decision would be based on their agenda, not mine.
It was a great time and I continued it until my largest client decided they want me to be their CIO. But I miss the practice and frankly wish I had stayed with it.
Abussi seeks to become the ‘trusted advisor’ to all of its clients and where that relationship is established early on the process works. Where clients seek to dictate to their IT provider how things should be done then they miss the fact that they are not the IT professionals and thus how can they determine the best course of action in terms of IT roll-out ?
Why do Abussi choose SMB / SME markets………… becasue we can make a difference
welcome to my world if windoze, this
Market is perfect for untangle. Can untangle
Slay the great dozing giant? Someone
Needs to.
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