It’s an interesting period for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). While emergence of Internet as a premier medium of collaboration and commerce has presented small and medium businesses an unparalleled opportunity to compete on an even keel with their large counterparts – the same medium has also brought forward a host of new challenges. An explosion of content, and arrival of new Internet-based social computing technologies and concepts such as Wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and Web 2.0, has left SMBs scrambling and struggling to ensure an interactive customer experience.

The Website is the face of the SMB, and one of the most visible and influential customer touch points – especially when the SMB is trying to reach global customers who are not aware of its brand. A Website with inappropriately tagged content or a few missing links can turn away a prospective customer into the hands of the competition in a matter of few seconds.

To address this, many SMBs have considered traditional installed content management systems, only to realize later that these applications are far more expensive to implement and maintain than they are worth. This problem is compounded by the fact that most SMBs have skeletal IT staff and, at best, limited IT budgets. Even Open Source CMS options suffer from these same limitations because while the software code may be "free" everything else comes with a price tag. Much like installed software there are substantial costs with implementing it to your requirements, managing, upgrading and maintaining the software and hardware, support, and all the things that go along with the lifecycle of your site like template changes, site redesigns, workflow tweaks and navigation updates.

As a result, the CIO can seldom justify the high cost and long implementation time required to install a content management system. Additionally, as content management involves a host of tasks including usability, design, and information architecture – SMBs face an uphill task in ensuring that the Website reflects the dynamic needs of the business.

Using SaaS to level the playing field

To compete effectively, SMB’s need content management solutions that are easily configurable, are economical to purchase and maintain, and quick to implement. This is difficult to achieve in a traditional CMS, which are expensive to procure, complex to implement and configure, and even more difficult to maintain.

It is in answer to these problems, that specialist players like CrownPeak have emerged and grown rapidly. CrownPeak is one of the leading torchbearers of the ‘Software as a Service’ SaaS model, and has turned the disadvantages of the traditional model to its advantage. By letting customers access ‘software’ as a service, CrownPeak ensures that organizations are spared the high cost of purchasing software. Moreover, as the software is hosted, there is no hardware to buy and no software to purchase and install and you get the same CMS functionality as you do with traditional installed vendors or open source solutions. As a customer, you just pay on a fixed monthly or quarterly basis and leave the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor. You don’t pay till an application is fully running and completely configured to your environment. Try telling this to a traditional CMS vendor!

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