There are a lot of prepackaged software solutions on the market today, but no company is exactly like your business.  Oftentimes, conforming to prepackaged software means not being as innovative as you’d like to be with your information.   Here are 3 software solution ideas that you can have customized precisely to fit your business that are designed to improve ROI, streamline processes, and drive your business ahead. 

Performance Management Tools

How do you evaluate your employees?  It’s likely that your measurements are unique to your company.  The way a business decides to set its goals and metrics, and their ability to track these goals and metrics, ultimately determines success.  A custom software program that allows you set and track the progress of employee goals effectively can help individuals work at their peak performance, which in turn helps your company succeed in its big-picture goals. 

Training Assessment and Tracking

How much better could your team perform as a whole if all of your employees consistently received advanced-level training?  Leadership skills, organizational skills, goal setting skills can all move your business light years ahead.  With so much training and so many employees, companies need a way to assess and track progress on an individual level and as a whole.  Using customizes software, you can create computer-based assessments and store results in a single database.

Customer Relations Software

A CRM does much more than just managing customer information – it allows you to understand how various pieces of your business are affecting each other.  Instead of building a CRM from scratch, we recommend using SalesForce.com’s platform.  This highly advanced platform requires some technical setup, but allows for so much customization that it’s like building your own personalized CRM from scratch. 

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Take a look at Complete.com’s graph of the top 20 US websites.  Do you notice a common element between them all?

Every single one of these websites offers a way for users to be interactive with the site.  Interactivity allows visitors to become engaged in the website, not just passive bystanders. 

It’s not just the US that’s producing popular interactive websites.  Holding the #1 spot on the Alexa Mover’s and Shakers list is a Spanish language photo sharing site called flodeo, up 1496 spots on Alexa from 1781 to 285.

The take-away?  Add some interactivity to your website and start engaging visitors rather than just talking at them. 

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It’s confirmed that Google is doing much more than just dabbling in online apps, they are now entering into the web based apps space with full Google force.  The new tagline says it all:

Search, Ads and Apps

Over the last year, Google has consumed the company’s Writely (creators of a web based word processor app), iRows (web based spreadsheet app), and most recently Tonic (web base slide show app).

Just the other week, a representative from Google said their goal wasn’t to go head to head with Microsoft in the office application world, but based on its new tagline, it appears that this is exactly what Google is doing.

Google will offer the web based office-type apps for free to the regular user and will license use for a fee to companies.  Yay!  That’s one way to cut down on pirated software.  Let’s face it - it’s difficult for the average user to pay the steep price for Microsoft Office. 

Will Google overtake Microsoft?  That remains to be seen.  The downside to web apps is that they are currently much slower than desktop apps – however much more convenient, useful, and now free. 

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Eastern Europe has become a place of key interest for those looking to outsource software development. Not only is there a large population of tech-savvy developers, but the price is right and the culture of US and Eastern Europe is a good fit.

The New York Times writes:

What is unusual about Eastern and Central Europe is that their most advanced cities offer a potent mix of attributes that even Bangalore cannot rival: a highly educated, multilingual pool of talent in an increasingly affluent consumer market — all barely a stone’s throw from its prime clients.

Currently, Eastern Europe accounts for approximately 2% of the total $75 billion US outsourcing industry, but Robert Brown, an outsourcing analyst at Gartner Dataquest, says that he expect that Eastern Europe’s share will grow to 30% by 2010.

Currently, India believes it can take 50% of the outsourcing this year with China following close behind. Experts see outsourcing continuing to grow while the countries that provide outsourcing shift in percentage of work handled.

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Apple’s new iPhone is still a month or more from release, and already Microsoft is making public statements that the iPhone “lacks business savvy.”   

Why?  According to an article published on ZD Net, a Microsoft exec is quoted as saying:

“Apple’s soon-to-be-launched iPhone will be irrelevant to business users because it is a ‘closed device’ and does not support Microsoft Office.”

According Apple enthusiast AJ at Marketcircle, the iPhone is “the best small business phone out there. The reason: It’s flipping easy to use!”

It’s understandable that Microsoft is a little defensive.  After all the software giant’s new Zune music player has bombed in comparison to the iPod, and replicas of it’s Office applications are being distributed for free by Google, the company that destroyed them in the search arena. 

Regardless of what Microsoft has to say, there are hordes of people early anticipating the release of the iPhone.  The fact that you can’t open all Microsoft Office documents might limit some sales to Microsoft driven companies, or it may just convince them to switch to Mac!

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