As I’ve been consulting companies of all sizes and talking to folks within many age groups I’ve started to see a trend in regards to pricing model and ages. Older folks seem to have an aversion against open source technologies, younger folks have the exact opposite aversion against commercial technologies. All the while, SaaS seems to have no age preference but one of corporate size.

Older folks tend to have in their minds the adage “you get what you pay for”. They’ve seen price correlation between product development stage and cost. Some folks even think that the most expensive product must be the best product and instantly want to purchase that product. When open source technology is brought up there is an instant confusion and disregard.

Younger folks seem to have in their mind a vision of an evil corporation. No matter what it is, if it has a price tag, some younger folks will balk at it and think to themselves, “there’s got to be an open source project that does the same thing”. When commercial technologies are brought up, even if fairly priced, some young folks will not hear another word.

When it comes to the SaaS pricing model, there seems to me to be less of an age based correlation but rather a corporate size correlation. Larger companies tend to avoid SaaS products, even great ones like Salesforce.com, small companies tend to jump on top of any SaaS product that they think can help them progress. Large companies tend to be averse to any information that resides outside of their firewall, despite great studies about the security of the cloud like this one.

So what is driving the decisions at your company? Is it your age and your company size or are you realistically looking at all of the options that your company has?

Image by Peejay via Sxc.hu

The old days of sorting through scads of paper files are fading fast!

Medical, legal, manufacturing and government all have one thing in common. Each day they produce or generate large volumes of paper files. If you add this to the already existing load of paper in the office, you can see it fast becomes unmanageable. This is a golden opportunity for scanning solutions!

The amount of ‘unstructured data’ in the form of scanned paper files is increasing at break-neck speeds! Also, this data has increased substantially in just the last few years. Moreover, this is true for any type of business. In the age of electronic communication, information overload is endemic across the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

Organizations are confronting the fact that capturing, archiving and storing data is a major undertaking. Massive amounts of important information must somehow be captured and converted into a useful form so that it is readily accessible.