Working in the ERP, CRM and e-commerce space with SMEs over the past several years has given us a pretty good understanding of where small and medium enterprises are headed, and we like what we have seen. The basics of the new small and medium enterprise is a company often with geographically dispersed employees. They do business globally, with multiple currencies. Products and services are sourced and delivered across the globe. Their neural backbone is the Internet. Many of these firms have now embarked on technology which matches their breadth and depth. They have an integrated, I hope, ERP and CRM platform. So the question is what's next? Our fellow enterprise irregular, Vinnie Mirchandani, writes a good deal about a lot of these technologies on his two blogs: The Deal Architect and The New Florence. Their are numerous technologies out there that either linked to the ERP/CRM platform or as standalone technologies, can be world beaters for the firms adopting them. Right now of course the larger firms are adopting much of this technology. But soon it will be on its way to the SME. Here are some to keep your eye on: RFID - This allows users to tag things, any thing really. From human beings going to fight a fire to pallets of staplers moving through a warehouse. Radio Frequency ID will continue to make itself felt in the business worlds and in many other settings. Even moving patients through a hospital. GPS - Monitoring movement over longer distances is an even more exciting technology. Right now I am sitting in Chartlottesville, VA and having travelled here by car the past two days I had a chance to think a bit about my fellow travellers, the big rigs. It really is amazing how our nation's goods move through the marketplace. But if you are the owner of a small regional fleet GPS would be a boon. To know at all times where a truck is and when goods will be delivered a fleet operator could optimize operations far beyond what he can do today. Cell Technology - This will continue to cover the landscape and will eventually provide the bulk of communication networks. It will lend itself to vending machine management - yes I have personally seen this - to many other implementations not yet known. Open Source - A lot of business people associate the open source phenom with people who generally spend too much of their life at coffee houses. This may have once had a grain of truth, but not any more. Oracle has committed to build its new data center on Linux, the open source operating system. NetSuite runs its apps on an Oracle db on a Linux platform. Someday they might run an open source db as well, who knows. SaaS - Software as a service will continue to disrupt the marketplace, knocking a lot of desktop vendors off their high horse (Microsoft comes to mind). Companies as diverse as Google and
Zoho now offer desktop applications for the person productivity with the additional benefit of storing your work on a redundant system. Cloud or Utility Computing - Speaking of SaaS, we must also mention that cloud computing is here to stay. Building applications on the Internet Cloud with companies that are well known, like Amazon and Adobe, or less known, like Joyent or BungeeLabs, is the wave of the future. NetSuite's NetBios and Salesforce.com's AppExchange are two more platforms for building application that can be used with their respective namesakes. Why is this so popular? Because building on the cloud makes sense economically and technologically. It's less expensive by far, and gives developers and their business instant acces, not only to great technology infrastructure but to other applications via the internet. The mesh of these applications, though just becoming visible today, will soon become enough to support entire large enterprises. Alternate Energy - There is a ton happening here. Don't believe what you hear in the main stream media about a lack of innovation and research into alternative energy. It's coming, and sooner than many believe. How will it transform your enterprise?
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