Software as a Service or SaaS has been around for a long time. Some of the more famous and successful companies in the SaaS business are
SalesForce.com and
NetSuite.com and there is no doubt their success comes from having a quality product. Like all SaaS there is nothing to install, no computer to host it, nothing you need to start using the service except access to the Internet via smart phone, table or laptop.
Up until now though the price of these services has been a limiting factor for most Small Businesses. Starting at $25.00 (P1,106) per month to well over $100 (P4,400) per month, for either of these SaaS solutions, you can see that the small business man will hesitate to spend that much without a clear need.
Now enter the world of Open Source. The number and quality of the Open Source solutions you can get make it a very attractive bargain even the small business man can afford. Some are "Freeware" that you never need purchase, and some have small support fees or premium versions that are licensed but in general they are all VERY affordable.
There is one catch however, up until now most of these Open Source solutions require you to download the software, install on your computer and access your computer to run the software.
I know many CEO/CTO level officers of these Open Source solution companies and their best guess is that less than 10-15% of all the downloads of their software ever goes into production. Why? Well it requires some computer expertise and in some cases requires a significant amount of hardware and software expertise to make it work. That translates into "Free" not so much.
O4BO.COM has a division called O4SaaS.com that specializes in bringing Open Source Software to the small business man in packages they can afford. See the chart below for the FULL range of packages.
You should note that at the same starting price of SalesForce.com or NetSuite.com (~P1,000/mo) our package for P999/mo has CRM like SalesForce.com, Web Based Accounting like NetSuite.com PLUS Web Content Management, a Portal, Web Based Project management and support. We can do that because we have Open Source Software installed on our Cloud and we can pass the savings on to you, the small business owner. We offer it just like the others as Software as a Service with nothing to install, just a web browser on a Smart Phone, tablet or laptop.
For a little bit more our pakcages include some 320+ applications that cover the following categories:
- Enterprise Applications like ERP, Portal, Business Intelligence
- Blogs like WordPress
- Portals/Content Management Systems like Joomla and Drupal
- Forums for collaborating in your company or with and between your cusotmers
- Image Galleries for your web site so you can show as many photos as you like
- Wikis for creating living editable online documents
- Social Networking for building communities around your web site
- Ad Management for your advertising needs
- Calendars for keeping track of appointments or events
- Games for entertainment for you or your customers*
- EMail tools and services
- Polls and Surveys you can use to do market research or get customer feedback
- Project Management to help you keep your projects on time and on budget
- E+Commerce Web Stores for your web site to sell products or services to the WWW
- Web Accounting and ERP from simple book keeping to full ERP with Inventory
- Guest Books for capturing who visits your site and use their email address for marketing
- Customer Support so your customers can enter help tickets and track the progress for support
- Development Frameworks so you (or we) can customize your software to meet your needs
- Educational software for doing training or selling training
- Databases and Database tools for getting control of and getting better use of your data
- Music and Audio tools for your web site
- Video tools and services so you can have your own mini YouTube on your site.
- RSS tools so your web site can be a source of information for your customers
- File Management, store, collate, organize and retrieve documents and files of any type.
- Other tools aimed at making your tasks easier like Search Engine Optimization
These are all aimed at and selected for the small business person. They are all easy to use and they are all complete solutions. All with nothing to install and delivered from out IBM Cloud as a service, you simply login and start using.
Since our packages all include some level of support and the upper packages include HOURs of Professional Services like web design and application integration you can safely and accurately see the software itself as free and you are just paying for our support and professional services.
