zara technology: go to market strategy - University at Buffalo School ...

packages for small businesses solve limited issues and leave you with multiple islands of
data and expensive integration projects that never work. Information has to be manually
re-entered or batched into other applications—wasting time and money.”
There is also concern about lack of software ownership and future inflexibility
to move to different software. Typically, SMEs raise concerns such as: “If I buy a
software package, and the vendor refuses to give me the source code or easy access to my
data at any time, then migration to a different package is difficult”, “With companies
such as NetSuite and Microsoft, customers can't switch to another vendor because the
current vendor makes it difficult to do so (thus removing the customer's Perfect Liberty,
and disobeying the laws of the free market)”, “You’re locked into Netsuite with no
portability out of NetSuite once you moved your business on to their platform. They
control you’re operational costs, when you upgrade and what you can do with every
aspect of your business accounting, inventory and ecommerce. Most businesses cannot
afford to give up that much control”, “a little nervous to base our company functions on
a package that is largely developed and is supported out of India.”
Despite their promotional campaigns, many small businesses users believe that
major software vendors do not adequately address their needs. SMEs frequently
lament: “Microsoft talks about SMB [SME] having fewer than 50 PCs. IBM pegs it at
100 to 1,000 employees, Oracle at $500 million or less. But what about the one-personpart-time
companies, and those with up to 10 or 15 employees?”, “NetSuite and Everest
are totally inappropriate for companies like [these]. They need tools that are designed
for the way they do business, and priced within their budgets”, “Anyone who serves the
tech needs of "small business" needs to be able to help that small business owner define
his or her tech needs in terms of industry and size -- and do so in business terms, not tech
jargon”, “I suspect that there are very few companies with 1-25 employees for which
NetSuite, Oracle, SAP and the like are appropriate or economical”, “NetSuite .. [is] not
a solution you are going to get many 10 person, two year old companies to bite on.”
Above all, there is persistent fear among SMEs of losing control of proprietary
information, particularly financial data, should the information be placed off the
premises. There is also concern regarding virus/worm attacks and
hacking/information theft. Most small businesses lack IT personnel and computer
skills (and time to attend to IT functions). Owners fear that a virus attacks will force
them to shut down their business resulting in loss of business. Hacking could result in
loss of customer financial data (e.g., credit card numbers, bank account numbers) causing
serious problems with their customers. Keeping information on computer data base also
opens the possibility of rogue employees stealing information to sell to competitors
and/or establishing a competing business of their own. Concern is also expressed
regarding potential for disconnection (denial) of service due to high traffic in the
system. This happens when simultaneously lot of high end activities happen on the
network. In such situations, local routers put on the premises of SMEs are unable to
handle the traffic resulting in a jam and hence requiring frequent restart of the system, a
pain for unsophisticated SMEs. However, it is well understood by SMEs that these issues
are not directly related to any specific software, they are part and parcel of going digital.
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