What Are The Best Apps For Your Business?

WHAT'S APP? THE SMALL BUSINESS APP ECOSYSTEM For any business, it's vital to find tools that can help them grow. But for small businesses with limited budgets and manpower, it's particularly important to act as a jack-of-all-trades. Not only do they have to manage company finances and client relations, they also have to streamline internal communication and projects. Luckily, developers are coming out with better and quicker apps that help achieve these goals. Which ones do small enterprises prefer and what trends are arising? What Are the Most Popular Apps For.. BestVendor polled companies with 100 employees or less from various industries to discover what tools they're using most. (Percent of Respondents) OFFICE EMAIL CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT(CRM) Google Apps Salesforce Outlook Sugar CRM Go Daddy Highrise Rackspace Zoho 1-and-1 SalesLogix 10 20 30 40 50 60 10 20 30 40 50 60 DATA STORAGE PAYMENT PROCESSING Backblaze PayPal Mozu Authorize.net Carbonite Wells Fargo Amazon Square Dropbox Braintree 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 10 20 30 40 50 60 STORAGE/BACKUP/VIRTUALIZATION SOCIAL MEDIA MANA GEMENT Dropbox Facebook Amazon HootSuite Carbonite TweetDeck Mozu Twitter Backblaze Radian6 10 20 30 40 50 60 10 20 30 40 50 60 ACCOUNTING BILLING Quickbooks Quickbooks Excel Freshbooks Хегo Intuit Freshbooks Excel Great Plains Self-made 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 O 10 20 30 40 50 60 Revealing Trends THE CLOUD AND MOBILE APP EXPLOSION Thanks to cloud technology, mobile business applications are booming in the business landscape, and small businesses are the most enthusiastic adopters. "There's a sea change going on in the -Bill Odell, marketplace... The number of cloud Senior Director of Marketing applications SMBS have adopted with Dell Cloud Business has doubled in the last two years." Applications. IDC estimates that the cloud market-including products and services-will expand 2010 2014 from $16 billion in 2010 $56 Billion $16 Billion to $56 billion by 2014. An additional According 30% 50% *This is up 31% to an of small businesses say they can't survive without mobile apps AT&T Survey: use mobile apps for since last year. their business MAKING THE SWITCH TO GOOGLE APPS Because it offers a suite of free or inexpensive user-friendly online applications, more and more enterprises cite Google Apps as the go-to solution for their business needs. 00: 14 talk There are more than 4 million Every 14 seconds. And the platform has organizations running Google Apps, a business signs up for 90% renewal rate. a with more than 40 million users. its web-based tools. White Stratus analyzed adoption rates of Google Apps in the US business market and found that: i} Out of the companies that have deployed it, more than 80% are either One out of five organizations piloting or actively using the apps. have deployed Google Apps. The education industry is the leading adopter of the apps. Education 58.1% 30.2% 26.9% 24.9% Information Professional/Tech Services Utilities Real Estate 23.7% Mining 20.7% Finance/Insurance 19.1% Transportation/Warehousing Other 18.3% 18% Administrative 17.8% 20 40 60 80 100 What Small Businesses Look for in Their Apps Scalability Efficiency Mobile Access Low Cost SOURCES: BESTVENDOR / WHITE STRATUS / IDC / ATT.COM / DELLCOM / GIGAOM.COM / mavenlink SMALLBUSINESSCOMPUTING.COM