Last time we talked about Google Apps and how you can get a decent office productivity suite delivered to your browser for $50 per person per year. That’s less than what small businesses pay for Microsoft Office, but certainly more than you pay for OpenOffice 2.0 (you pay nothing). But this disturbing report from the Society for Information Management points out another reason to investigate hosted applications for your business: you may have a hard time hiring enough technical people in the next few year to manage your own applications. Realistically, small businesses will have an easier time, because you will hire technical people who are at the beginning of their careers and are therefore unable to get jobs with the big companies. But after a couple of years working for you, these techs will have the experience and training they need to jump to bigger companies and bigger paychecks. This is a fact of life for small and medium businesses with every kind of employee, not just technology. That said, growing businesses that plan ahead can consider the number of technical employees needed to support technical products before buying said products. For instance, growing businesses reach a point where they feel the need for Microsoft Exchange to run their e-mail, group calendar, and shared task lists. You can buy a Microsoft Exchange Server yourself and hire people to run it, or contract a hosted Exchange service (or equivalent) for a few dollars per month per user. You have less initial investment and no hiring worries.
Hosted applications in the new SaaS (Software as a Service) category efficiently employ technical workers, because they spread a tech’s time over multiple companies and many users. Small businesses can take advantage of these hiring efficiencies by choosing to use hosted applications rather than hosting their own. Hosted applications may not be the best choice for every project, but you owe it to yourself to check them out before buying the same software to run in house.
