Winning Against Digital David and Global Goliath: Cloud Services Make SMBs Fleet and Savvy Competitors

Executive SummaryIt’s never been easier to take on the Digital Davids and Global Goliaths of industry—and win. Today’s established small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are realizing the advantages of digitizing systems and processes to avoid heavy capital expenditures, aging infrastructures, and siloed data. In the process, they increase their agility and flexibility and use data insights to fuel product innovation and business growth.

In today’s world, speed and simplicity rule. Adopting cloud services early in a company’s development can help an SMB accelerate past competitors, whether they are fast-growing startups or global enterprises.

SMBs that use cloud services aggressively to overcome growth

challenges often grow 26% faster and deliver 21% higher gross profits, finds a study by Deloitte and Google.1

Get started with the SherWeb Performance Cloud today.

In this ebook, you’ll learn:• How to use cloud services to compete more effectively with everyone

• Why you can’t afford to wait any longer to digitize

• How Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings can help you simplify IT and give you time back to grow your business

• How cloud services help SMBs meet their strategic goals

• 14 reasons to adopt SherWeb Performance Cloud

• Why you should choose Microsoft and SherWeb cloud services for your business

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 3

The best entrepreneurs will

always be able to compete.

Every David is more nimble,

flexible, and energetic than

a Goliath, but the best ones

never tire and always leverage

that agility.

David Kilt Founder of Reverb

former CEO of optionsXpress

in a Wall Street Journal interview2

To Go Fast, Simplify—and Scale

The past two decades have swept

away everything we know about

business success.

No longer do small and midsize businesses (SMBs) need to toil for decades in semi-obscurity, slowly expanding their geographic footprint and customer bases.

Now, software as a service (SaaS) startups that are “born in the cloud” can rise and rule in just a few years.

To compete effectively with both startups and global enterprises, established SMBs should pivot and decide to be “raised on the cloud.” By doing so, they forsake proprietary technologies for simple, interoperable cloud-based systems and processes that scale easily and quickly.

SMBs that become “Digitizing Davids” by aggressively adopting infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings aggressively will be better positioned to run, sprint, and soar faster than competitors than those SMBs that play the waiting game with cloud services. In addition, they can innovate and execute business pivots faster

than global competitors who may be hobbled by slow

processes and legacy infrastructures.

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SMBs Need to Think Strategically About the Cloud

But today’s SMB Davids need to be

strategic, rather than tactical or reactive,

about their use of cloud services.

Nine in 10 SMBs are using at least one

cloud infrastructure solution,3 such as

online hosting.

SMBs are currently using cloud services predominantly for online business applications, using 2.5 on average.4 While these tools fuel gains—increasing transparency, productivity, and decision making—they keep success small, not strategic.

Streamlining invoicing and payment, while important, is not on the same level as identifying and exploiting new market opportunities.

The SMB sector continues to look

for simplification opportunities

when buying technology and

telecom services, and cloud-

based services provide just that.

Stephanie Atkinson, Compass Intelligence5

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 5

IaaS offerings are the workhorse

of industry.

They provide SMBs with the

same performance advantages

as global enterprise:

• Fuel and Speed Business Processes

• Power Enterprise Applications

• Handle Large Workloads

• Ensure Business Continuity

SMBs that really want to grow should

begin at the ground level—laying a solid

foundation for their technology with IaaS

offerings such as compute (public and

private cloud servers), cloud databases,

virtual networks, and virtual machine

backup and disaster recovery services.

In the fight between Digitizing David, Digital David, and Global Goliath, cloud services level the playing field and provide SMBs with effective weapons for both daily combat and strategic warfare.

Meanwhile, SMBs that digitize processes find competing with startups a fairer fight. It’s far easier to take on companies that are “born in the cloud” when your own enterprise is “raised on the cloud” and you possess the same business advantages of

transparency, speed, and scale.

Small Businesses Uses a Hybrid Cloud Platform

SMBs Are Exploring Cloud Services

There Are

Million U.S. SMBs

Million Global SMBs

29600

SMBs Spend

a Month on Server Maintenance and Backup Data Storage

$90 to $150

1 in 5

in 2015

Cloud Adoption by SMBs Will Reach

96% Online Business Applications on Average

SMBs Use

2.587%of SMBs Are Using at Least One Cloud

Infrastructure Solution

Small Businesses has a Full-Time IT Staffer JU

ST1 in 5 4 in 5 Midsize

Businesses Do

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 6

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Make Your Online Time Count The average SMB owner works extended

work hours. Yet how many of those

activities are “run the business” versus

“grow the business” ?

Small business CEOs spend a third of their time on execution— providing services to their customer base—and just 13.2% on sales.6

In addition, four in five business owners also do their own IT for themselves and their staff: • troubleshoot• maintain systems

The SMB sector continues to look

for simplification opportunities

when buying technology and

telecom services, and cloud-

based services provide just that.

Stephanie Atkinson Compass Intelligence5

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 8

24/7 Support 365 days Midsize business CEOs shift their priorities,

but keep an internal focus: While they

gain IT staff, they spend up to nearly half

their time on hiring, managing, and

developing employees.7

Spark Analytics offers a SaaS solution that provides cloud-based analytics for retailers and food service providers. The company needed a strong, high-performance infrastructure with redundancy and massive amounts of storage.

Moving our hosting to SherWeb

is one of the best business

decisions I could have made.

With the quality of service,

24/7–365 administrative support

that monitors our system and

takes preventive measures,

SherWeb has taken away the

worries of dealing with our

hosting environment. SherWeb

is my IT department.

Andy Grimes CTO, Spark Analytics

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 9

As SMB owners look at their schedules

and sales pipeline, many realize that the

Pareto principle is as true today as when

it was first introduced in 1896.8

This principle, as expounded by author Richard Koch, marketing strategist Perry Marshall, and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, among others, urges business leaders and employees in all industries to hone in on the top areas that are producing desired results and outsource or divest the rest.

For SMB owners, interoperable SaaS and IaaS solutions can streamline business operations and marketing, enable mobile working and collaboration, and fuel an innovation culture.

SMB owners no longer have to spend 10 to 20 hours a week on non-revenue-generating internal processes. Instead, they can focus on the important strategic work of growing the business, knowing that their cloud partner will help maintain and evolve an agile, flexible IT infrastructure that meets the needs of their company and customers alike.

SMB owners know that 80%

of their success—yearly sales,

customer loyalty, exceptional

employees, strategic growth—

comes from 20% of their

efforts or causes.

Pareto principle

10 ways Cloud Services Address SMB Imperatives

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 10

Each year, the SMB Group does an annual study of SMB business issues, IT priorities,

and IT challenges.9 Here’s how cloud services, such as virtual servers, storage,

and online backup, met SMBs’ leading business issues for 2015:

1 2

534

Increasing profitability:Cloud services significantly reduce the expenses of powering key business processes and running enterprise applications, including delivering services to a diverse customer base.

Companies that offer purely digital services can see astronomical profits after their development and marketing and sales costs are recouped.

Increasing business growth:IaaS offerings can be scaled on a moment’s notice to meet emerging business demand or address market and seasonal fluctuations. Cloud databases undergird mission-critical enterprise applications, providing instant responsiveness and high performance to keep the business running.

Addressing government policies and regulations: Leading cloud service providers help their SMB partners ensure compliance with leading regulations, such as PCI-DSS and SOX, as well as other local requirements around the world.

Reducing operational costs:Cloud services are pay-as-you-go and can be turned on or off or ramped up and down as needed. SMBs can reduce operating costs for IT staff, while boosting productivity for all other business functions with easy access to online data and resources.

Attracting and retaining new customers:Simplicity is the new black. Companies that make it easy to do business with them, from Amazon’s one-click ordering to Uber’s user-friendly app, turn a transaction into an experience and fast-track relationship building. SMBs can follow suit by using IaaS to redesign internal processes to remove unnecessary steps, personalize marketing and sales throughout the customer journey, and offer superior service.

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 11

6 78

9

Improving workforce productivity: Online business applications provide employees with anywhere, anytime access to productivity resources. Meanwhile, cloud servers and databases simplify development and testing processes, as well as provide SMBs with better application performance and more robust disaster recovery options.

Improving quality of products and processes:Companies can integrate various data sources, including web searches, demographic data, unstructured data, and customer and product information, to develop rich insights into customer needs. Data visualization can help SMB owners rapidly identify the best opportunities and gain consensus with their teams about the best path forward.

Focusing on new markets: With their solid IaaS cloud foundations, SMBs are well-positioned to capitalize on the potential of digitization and explore new business opportunities.

Many companies are bundling physical products with digital wrappers to increase revenues and create sticky, data-based services customers covet.

Managing uncertainty:With cloud services, integrated applications, and instant access to real-time data, SMBs know what their performance is at all times and can identify and respond to market changes rapidly.

Keeping pace with competition:The more SMBs virtualize, the easier they find it to compete. SMBs can use the same playbook as startups and global enterprise:

• leverage external talent pools

• relentless innovation

• iterative product releases

• digital profiles

• next-best-action marketing to operate efficiently and grow closer to customers

The SherWeb Performance Cloud is an IaaS offering based on Microsoft technology. Windows virtual servers provide you with

instant access to public cloud compute power, while Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2, the fastest hypervisor today, helps power your private clouds. Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition cloud databases keep your enterprise applications performing at peak levels. And virtual machine backup and disaster recovery services keep you always in business with ready access to critical data.

You maintain full control over your virtual machines, provisioning services as you need them and using a full-featured control panel that’s

intuitive enough for non-technical users, but powerful enough to set up your complete enterprise infrastructure.

Want performance and low costs? You get both with the SherWeb Performance Cloud, so there’s no need to settle for second-best public clouds that

drag down production processes and application speeds with slow response times. Read how SherWeb beat Amazon EC2 in Cloud Spectator’s latest analysis of 20-plus IaaS providers.

SherWeb also offers all the business productivity tools you need, including hosted Exchange, Office 365, and collaboration tools, to make your employees and organization incredibly effective.

Say goodbye to high capital expenditures for servers and drives. Say hello to pay-as-you-go pricing and ongoing hardware and staff time savings.

Top Reasons to Adopt SherWeb Performance Cloud

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With the Performance Cloud, you can add more compute resources as you need them. Rest assured everything is interoperable.

With easy access and real-time data, it’s easier to execute the business pivots that are increasingly the norm in today’s marketplace.

SherWeb provides free migration support to help make the transition to the Performance Cloud fast and seamless.

We offer enterprise-grade security, market-leading SLAs, and 24/7 365 customer service to help our customers protect, run, and grow their businesses.

You can integrate Performance Cloud with all your other applications via APIs. The more you move online, the more agile and flexible your business will become.

SherWeb is here to stay, with more than 15 years of experience, a global customer base, and rapid and stable growth that’s been acknowledged by Deloitte and others.

Our solutions allow industry companies to leverage cloud services and comply with PCI-DSS and SOX and other legal requirements.

Our team is made up of experienced engineers, programmers, and system administrators, many of whom hold certifications from Microsoft and other companies.

APIs

As a strategic partner to Microsoft, we both sell their market-leading products and test new innovations to provide

feedback on how they’ll meet the needs of our global customer base.

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 13

We invest extensively in R&D to develop proprietary tools and APIs to extend our services and give our customers a competitive edge.

SHERWEB CLOUD SERVICES COMPETE 14

Microsoft Cloud OS and the SherWeb Performance Cloud

SherWeb is proud to be one of the

100 elite cloud services partners who

are part of the Microsoft Cloud Network

and offer value-added services based

on the Cloud OS vision.

We offer the SherWeb Performance Cloud technically validated, cloud-based infrastructures and application solutions for small and midsize businesses that want greater choice, flexibility, and consistency than they are typically able to achieve on their own.

The SherWeb Performance Cloud encompasses cloud servers, private cloud, cloud databases, and virtual backup services.

Are you ready to standardize and

scale your processes for 10X or greater results?

Contact SherWeb today to get

started with the Performance

Cloud—and fast-track your path

to success.

1-855-743-7932

sales@sherweb.com

www.sherweb.com

About SherWeb SherWeb is one of the world’s largest providers of cloud services. With more than 15 years of hosting experience, we are considered a true pioneer in our field: operating in 100 countries, serving more than 25,000 customers, and working with 4,000 exceptional partners. We are a strategic partner of Microsoft, winning the Microsoft Globe Hosting Partner of the Year in 2013 and a finalist in 2014.

As a long-time hosting provider, we know that data security and availability are key concerns.

Here’s how we keep your data safe and available in the cloud:

• Our state-of-the art datacenters are manned round-the-clock by certified professionals with strict access policies and escalation procedures in place.

• Our 100% redundant, Fortune-500 infrastructure has received SOC2 certification, the industry’s highest security standard.

• Our financially backed 99.999% SLA guarantees system performance at all times.

For more information, contact:

1-855-743-7932

sales@sherweb.com

www.sherweb.com

Metrics for the “SMBs Are Exploring Cloud Services” infographic on page 6,

are drawn from the following sources: Number of SMBs: The Appification of Small Business, Intuit, eBook/SlideShare, April 15, 2015, http://www.slideshare.net/IntuitDeveloper/ebook-the-appification-of-small-business.

Cloud adoption: “SMB Cloud Is an IT Priority and an IT Reality Reaching 96% in the U.S.,” TechAisle, February 8, 2015, http://techaisle.com/blog/184-smb-cloud-is-an-it-priority-and-an-it-reality-reaching-96-percent-adoption-in-the-us.

Business applications: Small Business, Big Technology: How the Cloud Enables Rapid Growth in SMBs, Research Report, Deloitte, Google, September 2014, https://apps.google.com/learn-more/small_business_big_technology.html.

IT spending: “Parks: SMB IT Spending is Just $90-$150 a Month,” Telecompetitor, August 24, 2015, http://www.telecompetitor.com/parks-smb-it-spending-is-just-90-150-a-month/.

IaaS use: SMB Group Top 10 SMB Technology Trends for 2015, SMB Group, December 2014, http://www.smb-gr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/SMB_Group_TOP_TEN_SMB_TRENDS.pdf.

Hybrid cloud use: Louis Columbus, “Roundup of Small and Medium Business Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market Estimates,” 2015, Forbes, May 4, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2015/05/04/roundup-of-small-medium-business-cloud-computing-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2015/.

IT staffing: SMB Group Top 10 SMB Technology Trends for 2015, ibid.

1 Small Business, Big Technology: How the Cloud Enables Rapid Growth in SMBs, Research Report, Deloitte, Google, September 2014, https://apps.google.com/learn-more/small_business_big_technology.html.

2 “How Can Small Businesses Compete with Big Competitors?” Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303562904579228501899410702.

3 SMB Group Top 10 SMB Technology Trends for 2015, SMB Group, December 2014, http://www.smb-gr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/SMB_Group_TOP_TEN_SMB_TRENDS.pdf.

4 “Small Business, Big Technology,” ibid.

5 Parks: SMB IT Spending is Just $90-$150 a Month,” Telecompetitor, August 24, 2015, http://www.telecompetitor.com/parks-smb-it-spending-is-just-90-150-a-month/.

6 “SMB Group Top 10 SMB Technology Trends for 2015,” ibid.

7 “Report Finds CEOs of U.S. Small and Mid-size Businesses Can Spend Up to 46% of Time on HR Issues,” TriNet press release, December 9, 2014, http://investor.trinet.com/company/investors-relations/news/news-details/2014/Report-Finds-CEOs-of-US- Small-and-Mid-size-Businesses-can-Spend-up-to-46-of-Time-on-HR-Issues/default.aspx.

8 Pareto Principle, Wikipedia, undated, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle.

9 “SMB Group Top 10 SMB Technology Trends for 2015,” ibid.