Democratizing Enterprise Solution

As a company, QBS group is a small business, with 45 employees working across Europe. Yet we are benefiting from Business Intelligence that 20 years back, only large enterprises could afford, if at all. As result, I can take decision faster, deciding where we need to invest, I can learn better, comparing results of subsidiaries and analyzing details of our performance.

One critical element to provide enterprise solution to SMB, are partners like the ones in our QBS group network. As the name ERP implies, many business solutions were invented with enterprises in mind, yet with the relentless work you have done over the past years, more and more small and medium business are now enjoying the benefits of IT based resource planning, financials or customer relationship management. Of course, Microsoft has kick started that phenomenon by providing scalable platforms like NAV or SQL server and dropping prices to an affordable level. But you as partner should take pride in being the one that actually made it happen, with each customer you were activating for NAV or CRM. Not only did companies benefit, all people working in the NAV or CRM environment became more productive and enjoyed less cumbersome, routine work. In these time of fast changing technology and business objectives, it is easy to forget what has been accomplished. I suggest, you should take a moment and celebrate your achievement.

But arguably, we just getting started. The penetration of modern business application in SMB is still low, especially if we look at the S, the small businesses in SMB. While Office 365 is getting predominant productivity tool in SMB for new deployments, still the majority of SMB’s installed base is using an onprem, legacy version of Office. But market prediction show, that vast majority of SMB’s will go to the Office SaaS offering in next 3-5 years and if they do, the next logical step is to also deploy a modern business application as a SaaS offering. Research company AMI partners sees the SaaS market for ERP and SMB in SMB to be 1.7 Billion $ in Western Europe alone.

I might be simplifying, but to accelerate the adoption of enterprise type business application in SMB, and therefore take a share in that 1.7 Billion business,  it takes 3 main steps

1. An affordable, simple to activate platform that can integrate business productivity as well as business processes – Microsoft is providing that with Dynamics 365 Business Edition
2. A process that connects customer prospects for business solution with sellers. We are heavily investing in that process with our Take-the-Lead program. As QBS we generate interest for SMB’s in modern business applications and then qualify these prospect and hand them over to our partners.
3. Making configuration for business application still requires services that can hardly be done in a self service model. Also making sure that business processes are correctly reflected in the business application and that these processes are being optimized is something you can hardly automate. That is why at the end of the day, you as Dynamcis partners are still the “last mile” to customer success and to further democratize business application.

So, there is a lot to be proud of and even more to be excited about for the next years when it comes to SMB’s and business application. At QBS group, we want support you in the best possible way to become part of that future. Our upcoming QBShares are an ideal platform to have that dialogue. I will do my best to participate in all of them, in Birmingham UK, Leusden Netherlands, in Germany, Denmark and Spain. I  am looking forward to see you there.

Michael Hartmann