Cloud computing

Yesterday the big news was the UK economy grew a WHOLE 0.1% last quarter! This means the official end of the worst recession in peace time history, although there are many warnings that we're not completely out of the woods yet.

So does that mean we'll be returning to business as usual? Of course not! Recessions bring change, and while businesses will hopefully start to grow again, some long term trends have been accelerated by the recession and will start to become very obvious from 2010 onwards:

• Remote working - Offices have become increasingly mobile over the past decade, but with businesses looking to save operating costs on office space during the recession, even more businesses are starting to encourage home working for their staff. Forrester predicts that in the next 5 years, 43% of staff will be telecommuting regularly.
• Knowledge Management - With the number of layoffs we've had during this recession, a lot of businesses are starting to really appreciate the impact of lost knowledge after the staff walks out the door. You may be missing documents they created during their work, lost forever in their email inboxes or private folders/computers, or actual procedures and instructions that could have easily been captured in a wiki. Businesses will increasingly appreciate the value of the information and knowledge their staff have and look for tools and procedures to ensure they manage and retain this knowledge in the organisation.
• Doing more with less - Some companies have been hit hard by redundancies, and the remaining staff have found they have more work on their plate, which will only grow again as the economy recovers. Companies have needed to drive through productivity tools to enable a smaller workforce to do more. As the workload increases again, companies will look first to productivity improvements before hiring a large workforce again.
• Cutting back operating costs - One of the biggest winners during the recession was cloud computing. For those of you unfamiliar with cloud computing, essentially the software vendor provides the software over the internet for a monthly subscription. No more upfront capital costs to buy licenses and servers to run it, no need to hire specialist IT guys to keep the system running and backed up. The huge cost savings this allows have allowed some businesses to cut down their IT costs dramatically over the past year, and this is one of those trends where once you start, you don't go back! Expect more and more businesses to take advantage of cloud computing from now on.

We're entering a brave new world. Businesses will tread carefully towards recovery, but with a new appreciation of some of the trends that have appeared this decade. They will increasingly start to see how these trends can really help them save operating costs and help their workforce become more flexible and agile to respond to future opportunities and threats. Expect to see cloud computing vendors like SambaStream become more pervasive in the enterprise and enterprise collaboration tools like SambaJAM become a standard way of working and helping businesses manage their core asset - knowledge. We feel very confident as we enter the new economy, I hope you do too!

If you'd like to learn more about how SambaJAM can address the trends discussed in this blog for your business, please contact us here.

It is with great pleasure today we finally get our site up online! Small steps towards something much bigger! For my first blog, I'd simply like to introduce you to our team and what we do. We hope to use this blog to keep everyone updated on our progress but also to tell our story of how we all left a global IT consultancy and started SambaStream. Hopefully along the way we'll learn some good lessons that we can share with you as we come across them!

Our story so far:

The three of us have all worked for one of the world's largest IT consultancies, helping large enterprises, NGOs, and governments around the world develop portals and content management systems. Through this experience we've had in-depth exposure to a lot of the issues that people come across when trying to use content management systems (which most people understand as online document management and collaboration) and most importantly, noticed that the backbone of the economy, small and medium size businesses, can't afford access to these critical technologies to help them collaborate and share knowledge effectively themselves!

Out of this need, and also from our desire to start our own business and have a positive impact on our field of expertise, we have left (or are in the process of leaving) the large IT consultancy to get started developing online applications for small and medium enterprises that are affordable, intuitive to use, and address the core needs of these businesses.