SMEs feel the squeeze

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 15 May 2009

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are being squeezed from all sides as larger rivals try to edge them out and customers gradually exert increased power in pricing and the setting of contract terms.

This is according to Nicky Sheridan, Oracle VP CMUT MEA and country leader for SA, who explains what SMEs should focus on to reach their business goals faster and achieve flexibility.

“To respond effectively to these challenges, smaller enterprises must make intelligent use of ICT to gain a competitive edge within their industries, grow faster, and become more profitable amid the global economic crisis,” says Sheridan.

“Smaller enterprises today have fewer resources and less market power than giant corporations and are forced to do more with less. In industries such as financial services and healthcare, they face regulatory burdens that even big companies find challenging.”

Strict regulations

Sheridan says regulations now require institutions to take action to mitigate the risk of suspicious activity related to a covered account. He says in order to combat the myriad sophisticated security threats, companies can leverage technologies that evaluate risk in real-time and take proactive measures to prevent fraud.

“Importantly, enterprises are now also responsible for their customer data in document and spreadsheet form, as well as the consequences if these leave the company perimeter via e-mail, storage devices or laptops.

“After reporting a data breach, losses in company valuation can be as high as 4%. These costs can range from regulatory fines to litigation settlements to providing credit monitoring and identity theft protection services,” he says.

Protecting information

According to Sheridan, one approach to protecting document information involves encrypting documents and providing permission to authorised users to view those documents. This ensures that even if a document is shared outside an organisation, it is still protected from viewing by unauthorised users.

“If the document is accidentally lost, as is the case when it is on a lost laptop, the document is not viewable to users who cannot log in as a legitimate user. This approach is known as information rights management, where the usage of a document can be fully controlled,” he explains.

Retaining customers

Sheridan says better customer relationships can be attained through the business intelligence analysis of customer information, documentation and interaction, such as e-mails. In addition, contact centres equipped with an intelligent dashboard provide a critical link between the business and the customer.

He adds that the service-oriented architecture (SOA) grid is a new approach to thinking about SOA infrastructure: “It's based on architecture that combines horizontally scalable, database-independent, middle-tier data caching with intelligent parallelisation and an affinity of business logic with cache data.

“This enables newer, simpler, and more-efficient models for highly scalable service-oriented applications that can take full advantage of service virtualisation and event-driven architectures and give organisations the agility they need in today's economic environment.”