SMB Customer Needs Are A Matter Of Scale
By Dave Hunt, founder and CEO of C2C Systems
To you or me, climbing Mount Everest is about the same as an ant climbing over an elephant: it's a matter of scale. Technology vendors have come to recognize that there is profit potential in the small to midsized business (SMB) market, but often believe that the SMB customer requires fewer features and less maturity, when what they need is almost the same level of features, just easier to use, with fewer and simpler configuration options.
Yet some vendors seem to go out of their way to make sure their products and programs are as unwieldy as possible for this market. Vendors that also sell products to the enterprise market tend to cut out features because they don't want to "devalue" the product that they sell at a premium price. Vendors that patronizingly assume SMBs don't have "real" requirements provide insufficient capacity, compatibility, or performance. At the other end of the scale are those that push bigger iron instead of smarter products.
Providing weak (or no) support for SMB users is another unfortunate — and unacceptable — nonbenefit. Vendors that are volume players tend to produce products that can tick all the boxes of a feature list, but the quality of those features are low and the products don't really do the job the SMB customer requires. The bottom-end players don't understand the real complexities of this market, and are not prepared to spend the development dollars to produce an appropriately featured product. All of this puts VARs and MSPs in the unenviable position of trying to find a performance product that meets the needs of the SMB clients from a vendor that provides solid support and delivers all of the above at a good price point.
Because, naturally, price is a key factor in a buying decision. Unfortunately, the complexity of the pricing scheme can be more off-putting than the actual cost. Neither the customer nor the channel partner is served by pricing that can't be reasonably estimated in advance based on capacity or number of users. Making products complicated to evaluate and buy is a fatal mistake, and this includes charging more for included (but unnecessary) features or for omitted (but required) features. SMBs tend to feel that simpler technology is better, although there are exceptions when a proven workaround saves money. Similarly, reliability is not priceless, with many customers willing to tolerate occasional failures rather than spend extra hundreds or thousands.
Because buying behavior in SMBs tends to be reactive, based on a recent problem, a crisis must often be resolved before any future-proofing is possible. Of course, this sometimes is more costly than avoiding the problem. Under the theory "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," SMB hardware and software is rarely the latest and greatest, with various versions of the same product in one shop. Foreseeing trouble up the road provides your customers with the value they expect from doing business with you.
For example, SMBs are increasingly affected by regulatory compliance issues, though they may not know it yet. Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and others dictate what data must be kept, for how long, and how it must be produced if requested. Neither an SMB user nor their VAR is expected to understand all these requirements, of course; many attorneys don't either, although they will charge an hourly fee to tell you all about them. Suffice it to say a product intended to aid regulatory compliance or e-discovery for SMBs should have preset templates to guide administrators on what to archive, when to archive and how long to retain data, which reduces overall installation time and makes maintaining the system far simpler.
Another requirement a solution provider can anticipate is email archiving. Email management is as essential an SMB as it is for enterprises, yet SMBs too often rely on manual processes or homegrown approaches. Research indicates that SMBs understand the benefits of email archiving, but are averse to feature-poor, entry-level products; top-tier products with pricing too high or too complicated; and appliance-based products that don't scale. Whether it's to meet record retention regulations, improve resource management, or as way to reduce time and costs in recovering old files and emails, any organization using email extensively benefits from email storage management.
Depending on your perspective, scaling Mount Everest or climbing over an elephant are both problems so big they cannot be solved easily. So it is with managing mountains of email. 500 GB of email is a mountain to a 100-user company. 500 TB is just as daunting to a company with 100,000 users. Both customers need the same essential features and tools, just different degrees of complexity.
Being able to prevent costly headaches for your customers is worth its weight in terabytes in this economy. Odds are good that data management, protection, and archiving are areas your customers will need your advice sooner versus later.
Dave Hunt, founder and CEO of C2C Systems, has more than 20 years of email management expertise. Hunt established C2C in 1992 with a vision to help IT managers and businesses solve message system problems, from evangelizing the concept of practicing email management in the first place to meeting performance and security goals. He was involved with the European Electronic Messaging Association during the 80s and 90s and his work consulting and helping IT managers solve their email issues. His career has lead him to work throughout the world, including Europe, the U.S., South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.