Let's talk business

What big companies think smaller companies want

I recently went to a seminar, presented by Alex Neihaus of Ipswitch Inc, where, during the process of presenting Ipswitch's latest product releases, he hit the nail on the head with his comment about Microsoft making inroads into the SMB marketplace. He quite rightly pointed out that Exchange is an enterprise product, designed with corporate companies in mind and that their solution for the smaller business is nothing but an artificially limited version of their enterprise product. Consequently, smaller companies considering deploying Exchange in their organization need all the expertise (whether inhouse or bought in) of a large corporate company.

In my experience, smaller companies want easy to understand products, which work out of the box and don't require a degree to fix, should something go wrong. They don't need or want all the features and capabilities of enterprise level products. But it seems Microsoft are not the only ones who think like this. In one of his recent blogs, Alex points at Cisco, who seems to be making exactly the same mistake. Tell me, do all big companies think like this?

Welcome to the Softalk blog

Professional writers always say the hardest part is starting with a blank page. They are right!

At Softalk we've decided to start blogging because we think it's a way to get closer to our customers and users of our software. We really want this blog to be about a two-way conversation where we listen and try to react to what you say, rather than simply using it as a place we can talk to you. But for that to work we need you to comment on issues that we raise and also anything else that might be of interest to people in our community.

From our point of view this blog is going to be about sharing news, ideas and tips of interest to small and medium size businesses and organizations. It's also going to be a place where we can keep you up to date on what we're doing and find out what you think about it.

And finally, in the interests of open and transparent blogging, I need to let you know that we've started this blog with the help and advice of Stuart Bruce of Bruce Marshall Associates PR. Stuart has been blogging at A PR Guru's Musings since early 2003.

Very first post

This is the very first post on the new Softalk blog. It's only here because you need to have at least one post before you can view the site properly.