The Age of Small Tech Enterprise

In this blog:

• Small Tech Enterprises Back in the Day
• Small Tech Enterprises Present Evolution
• The Future of Enterprise Cloud

Small Tech Enterprises Back in the Day

Let’s talk about ‘back in the day’. I think this phrase can be applied by anyone – at any time. When you started a business “back then” – you had to really think about your branding, mission statement, and ways to insert yourself into the market, let alone the product or service. The initial introduction to this was newspaper ads and business cards. Over time business cards became the de facto marketing placement. Anyone could use it to instantly insert themselves into the consumer option pool. Business card branding and design jobs were created, print shops were optimized for the small print, and the ink industry worked on making sure you could print those bad boys at home. Business cards are still around, but more of a legacy artifact left by the come up. Today your business can be searched for online and with the right funnel flows in place, you’re getting business. 

This brings us to the next phase. Websites, websites, websites! As HTML hit the ground running, and search engines and the initial web service providers developed their infrastructure, digital marketing became standard nearly overnight. Over time it was impossible to say that you run a business without having a web presence. More jobs were created to supplement the business needs, from web design and site management to ad campaign companies and e-mail en masse distributors. Hosting providers were buying data center cages and network infrastructure was building out data centers everywhere it made sense. Security companies now had a business model as hacking and site defacement became rampant. Even the local lawn care provider now has to have a website and a contact form, it is just the way it is. Word of mouth still exists but has also gained a digital presence with sites like Yelp or reviews you see directly in your search.

Small Tech Enterprises Present Evolution

The Internet exploded with growth and opportunity. Starting your business gained the momentum of cutting down costs with a lot of doing-it-yourself (DIY) strategies and guides. CMS technologies like WordPress and Joomla came out to simplify getting a web presence. Those technologies were further supplemented by visual automation like BoldGrid and Weebly. Once again, a lot of jobs and businesses were created to manage this space. Due to the explosion of Apps on mobile devices backed by API Systems, and immediate Internet access from 3G, 4G, and even 5G speeds, the cloud was born to scale online services to cater to the demand of millions. From information, entertainment, and finance to shopping and transportation, the barrage of users created the demand for more reliable infrastructure.

High-Availability quickly secured itself as a necessity of operations for any tech company and startup, whether service or retail. Public cloud providers were conceptualized and started focusing on the efficiency of cost, uptime and reliability, regional accessibility, and clustered service technology. Docker and Kubernetes were created to reach containerized clustered services and networks within cloud space. Those technologies focused to be cloud-agnostic as high availability started to target independence from any specific cloud provider. More tech products and services became cloud-native and being highly available quickly became part of the business model for success.

The Future of Enterprise Cloud

To dip in history once again, supercomputers used to be inaccessible to the general public. Time was rented by educational and scientific communities in order to run a calculation, simulations, and so on. There were waitlists for this sort of thing. Now we have supercomputers at our fingertips capable of 11 trillion calculations per second. A laptop or computer is connected to the net nearly in every home. Having no internet access in our modern world is considered to be on the brink of poverty. As with all technology over time, it becomes more accessible to the public as costs are brought down. Private Clouds are becoming more and more popular.

OpenMetal has a newly developed OpenMetal Private Cloud Core product. We are working on bringing the supercomputer modern technology of private clouds to the palms of any company or start-up at an accessible cost by leveraging competitive open source solutions like OpenStack. OpenMetal On-Demand Private Clouds can be created in 45 minutes with a very comfortable price tag in comparison to other options. Having your own Private Cloud is like having your own rapid business development module.

With all the other cool cloud-agnostic technology capabilities and support, this keeps the security of your information top of mind. Keeping security top of mind is important with the surfaced information regarding the big data providers today. 

Private Clouds, just like the historical supercomputer example earlier, aren’t new. They are currently used widely by scientific and educational giants and big enterprise companies like IBM. Eventually, as costs go down, it may be common for any start-up to spin up their own little Private Cloud and expand it as they grow.