Why I Joined ViVO Concepts as ViVOpartner !!

I've spent several months investigating a company who is a foremost innovator in the SaaS space (Software As A Service). Their approach to a feature rich solution is both inventive and powerful. They are at the forefront of Web 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and incubation of customer lead generation activity!

As a result, I decided to join ViVO Concepts (http://www.vivoconcepts.com/) as a ViVOpartner because I believe this company is actually delivering products and services that go far beyond what other companies have developed to date! They are positioned to replace or augment web and traditional marketing campaigns with incredible innovation in building campaigns and measuring campaign results, tracking performance and collecting the attributes of the respondees. Their products easily cohabitate with existing systems and processes. Their highly advanced feature that builds powerful prospecting and sales tools rivals no other product on the market.

It is for this reason that I decided to promote this product to SMB's who cannot easily acquire or build these services internally. Time is of the essence. By the time a SMB discovers what to do and how to do it in the Web 2.0 or Marketing 2.o space, their competition will be months ahead of them.

ViVO Concepts (http://www.vivoconcepts.com/) is a Florida based company that provides both enterprise and module based solutions for entire or partial websites. Features are focused on eMarketing, eTraining, eSales, and building eProduct and eResource Libraries that incubate and track user participation and user activities. These actions by visitors can be tracked, ranked and scored by a powerful business intelligence and analytics service, thus empowering organizations to learn customer and prospect preferences and respond to them with individualized highly relevant actions.

A Little Background on Me...and Why SaaS Is Important
Now that you know a little about ViVO Concepts, I provide you with a little background on my endorsement of SaaS solutions as a viable approach to IT management and IT strategy development. Sometimes certain services simply can be provided more effectively by hosted applications. As services become more complex and the challenges of generating revenue rely on highly competitive products and services, companies that can integrate next generation tools more quickly will gain the advantage. I've spent an entire career focused on that premise. I believe SaaS to be the next generation of tools that needs to be considered by organizations that wish to facilitate stronger relationships with customers and realize long term sustainability.

A Little History...
To those of you who have followed my 17 year career as CIO and the many high octane challenges I faced in this position within small and medium size businesses (SMB's), you will already know of my underlying passion to simplify, consolidate, improve, reduce costs and find new ways to provide MORE for LESS.... I am the change agent, the master of transformation, restructure and reinvention, the evangelist who incubates, teaches and inspires others to repel complacency and get on the road to innovation.

While not being reckless in this persuit, it is the passion for re-engineering the broken, eliminating the ineffective, the outdated, or the inefficient within organizations or processes that steers my ship. In this lifelong persuit of improvement, transformation, innovation, business expansion, downsizing, restructure or other goals, I have successfully built sustainable technology strategies, inspired management to invest in innovation or transfomation, lead technology teams to optimum performance and have married technology solutions to business goals for the better part of 25 years!

To that end, I recently - and happily - became a Vivopartner. That's a partner of http://www.vivoconcepts.com/. More about that later.... Back to what led up to this choice.

Just before the turn of the century (whoa....that sounds ominous..) I was in hot persuit of an "outsourced solution" that was really a hosted version of what we now call SaaS solutions. Someone else to worry about the "how"; someone else to worry about response time, software bugs, backups, disaster recovery, hardware redundancies, etc. Someone else to hire that DBA, network administrator or web developer who may or may not be able to do the job.... In the SMB profile and funding model there is absolutely no budget for all the skills needed to provide 24/7 reliability, while keeping pace with technology change and defending against the growing sophistocation of pirates and theives - both internal and external. YIKES! How does one gain the knowledge and expertise on ALL of this???

Well, it simply cannot be done. A typical IT budget for SMB's runs at minimum levels and responds to crisis. It is a calculated risk of doing business. SMB's cannot afford all the DBA's, programmers, network administrators and web developers needed to support a 24/7/365 operation. There are too many skills needed in too many areas. So, what to do?

SMB's - Wy SaaS?
I recommend looking for powerful hosted solutions (SaaS solutions) that facilitate and allow SMB's control over many of the unique processes that differentiate them. If the solutions are worth adopting, they will give you powerful features with none of the headaches and issues of installing and maintaining these features internally. SMB's can get back to the business of creating and managing business issues, not technology budgets, mandatory investments, etc.

Many of the services provided by IT - both applications and services, can be provided more effectively and/or more economically and/or more reliably elsewhere. Remember, when calculating the cost of internal IT services, you must factor in the cost of attrition, hiring and training new IT resources. Then there are the technical trainings, conferences and certifications, not to mention the new issues that involve research and investigation. All of this time is spent learning how to acquire, manage and repair existing or new services. It is not at all involved in generating sales or adding more customer service features. Now what if someone quits? Loss of a 3-5 year technical employee can take up to 2 years to acquire full replacement skillsets in the new employee. Add placement fees and other incidentals and a single replacement involves significant "hidden costs". Non-productive time. Non-productive costs.

Having lived this scenario over and over again, I believe that certain hosted applications and tools can provide far more value to the organization than internal IT services can deliver- at any cost. Even if cost were not the issue, time then becomes the issue. How long will it take for internal IT to deliver what I can buy today?

As an ex-CIO, I have first hand experience on what makes sense and what does not. Some processes and services are better provided internally. That's certainly a fact. However, not all services need to be delivered in that manner and in fact, it may be detrimental to keep certain services internally. Does your CIO support external services? If not, why?

I Like ViVO Concepts!
ViVO Concepts has successfully actualized the goal of removing the technology barriers for business people and has provided a flexible, configurable, expandable toolkit of hosted features and resources so that companies can focus on customers to produce added value in the market. This translates to better information (analytics), more sales, better service, and stronger customer loyalties.

How refreshing. I’m so happy it is finally 2009 and we now are beginning to see so many more options for SMB's!! And, I'm particularly happy to be a partner with ViVO Concepts! You can find them at http://www.vivoconcepts.com/