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Imagine you have just discovered a gap in the market, and you have an exciting opportunity to release software to service this market's needs. The only catch? Time is not on your side and you need to jump at it quickly.  

Or, you've just had an amazing idea of how your business could create software that would save you 100 man hours per month, naturally you want to launch it ASAP.  

In both these situations time is not on your side, and neither is technical debt.  

Wait, technical debt? What debt!?

After the industrial revolution, the business world stayed consistent for just over a century. However, with the dawn of the internet it is safe to say that will never happen again! The accelerating rate of technological development in the last 40 years has changed society – and it has also had a rippling effect in the business world, creating new business challenges for owners.

We’ve outlined what we see as the 4 biggest challenges for the modern business owner and provided insights on how to overcome them.

In 2017, businesses of all sizes and sectors are leveraging cloud computing to run and develop their operations. The benefits seen from shifting to this ‘IT on demand’ model go beyond financial gains, as highlighted by some of our previous blog posts.

If your organisation is only just getting started with cloud computing, or even if you have gone past the point of accepting that cloud should be your “go to” model, sometimes understanding which areas to tap into first starts with a simple exercise: observing what your competitors are doing.

We have done the work so you don’t have to! In this post, we have summarised the top 4 ways businesses are leveraging cloud computing, and how you can take advantage of these initiatives to outsmart your rivals.

We all have our favourite apps we can’t live without, and most of us also have an A+ idea for a business app we know would give our business leverage.

And if you don’t? It might be time to put your thinking cap on! The right business app can help you get and retain customers, increase your revenue and give your business the upper hand in the industry you play in.

But like everything amazing, it comes at a cost. That’s the big question a lot of business have before committing to developing an idea further. So, we thought we’d answer the sticky question!

How can you figure out the expected cost of your business app idea?

“54% of customers will consider ending their relationship with a provider if they are not given tailor-made, relevant content and offers” (Microsoft 2016).

I am guessing that, in 2017, the above quote from Microsoft isn’t any news to you. But what may still be a struggle is:

How, as a small business owner or manager, can you keep up with your existing clients, and understand how to grow your business online?

Well, you are in for a treat! That is exactly what I hope to answer over the next paragraphs.

You would see it almost every day: those endless reports, those endless astoundingly complex worksheets shared around the office by the local ‘Excel Power User’, a person that usually gets paid to keep spreadsheets alive. The bigger the company, the more spreadsheets, and the more Excel gets used.

Before you stop reading OR pick up the phone to ring me, let me just make things clear: We are not here to propose that you stop using your loved spreadsheets!

We’d never advocate the banning of one of the most useful tools ever to enter the workplace, and doing so would in any event result in a massive surge of shadow IT. But… Excel Hell is real!

In most offices today, there are several different options for where you can save your work. The standard place might still be ‘My Documents’, but depending on what you are working on, the other popular options are Microsoft’s OneDrive and SharePoint cloud services. Knowing which one is best for any given type of work is important, as it can facilitate improved collaboration and better working.

This post deals with OneDrive and SharePoint and helps you decide which one to use in any given situation.

But first, let’s find out more out each application.

It has long been established that great software, applications or simply “apps” can help businesses to improve customer engagement, reinvent productivity, modernize operations and transform processes and innovate products and business models.

But how do you actually go about developing an app?

Just like many things in in life, developing an app implies preparation. Planning your app will make things go smoother, faster, and with less stress.

You’re about to learn that the actual app creation process is relatively straightforward. And we’ll guide you through the entire process. 

To make this guide as easy to follow as possible, we’ve broken it up into four stages:      

What’s the ‘power to know’ worth? (Yes, we know that’s the slogan of a business intelligence vendor…SAS, to be specific). Ask most people and they will easily agree that accurate information, as detailed as the situation demands, is invaluable.

That’s why data analytics is tipped for big things by the likes of Gartner. The growth in spend, to over US$18-billion this year, is matched by the positive attitude which business leaders have towards concepts like big data (which is a branch of analytics). 85 percent of them believe it will dramatically change the way they do business. 

There’s good reason for all that positivity. Analytic tools take raw data and turn it into valuable information to support decisions made by people. Combine gut feel with data insights and amazing things can happen: customers can be better served, problems anticipated and prevented, performance tracked and managed ‘at the minute’, products developed more effectively and at lower cost – and much, much more.

If software is eating the world (thanks for the prediction Marc Andreessen!), it’s a good idea to know what’s on the menu. With 2017 well underway, let’s look at the top four  trends which are driving software development this year.