Start-ups stand in a good position to benefit from new technology developments such as the cloud, small-business directors said at a roundtable on Wednesday.
The roundtable, which was held in London on Wednesday, brought together representatives from eight IT companies to discuss the position of start-ups in the current economic climate. In the discussion, participants said a chief advantage of the cloud was that it gave companies easier access to resources for their business.
"I could find a company that had a product I could use, and I could get it and try it for very little outlay," said Lee McReady, alliances director of managed-services company NTT Europe. "It puts us on an equal footing with big companies."
The roundtable featured representatives from eight start-ups covering a range of areas including web-learning tools, contact and sales management, managed hosting, social networking and tools to help companies manage data in data-rich environments. Most of the people at the roundtable agreed with McReady's assessment.
"Say you are using software-as-a-service and, for example, you have some workflow problem. You don't need to know the details about how to fix it — there are resources to find the answer," said Duncan Malcolm, commercial director at hosting company EveryCity.
"If you are using open source, it is even better, because you have this whole massive group of resources to back it up", Malcolm said. "That is the massive advantage for any start-up using software-as-a-service, especially using open source."
While the start-ups could see "enormous benefits" from the cloud, one issue they raised was over the role of Microsoft, which recently made a push into the area with the launch of its Azure set of cloud services. On a show of hands, four of the eight were frequent users of open-source software, while almost all said they used some open source.
The question of open source and the cloud in Microsoft's world was put by Ricky Doyle, director and co-founder of Practice-IT: "As cloud computing becomes more prevalent, you fundamentally do not care where the resources come from. What will happen is that Microsoft will stop charging for localised licences."
Doyle and others said they believed Microsoft may once have been worried about the cloud, but have now come to terms with it very quickly. "For the cloud to work, you have to hand over control, and you have to hand over control to guess who? Microsoft," one attendee said.
The broad opinion of the roundtable was that cloud computing was good all round: good for open source and good for Microsoft. Most of all, it was agreed, it was good for start-ups.
The start-ups at the meeting were, BeLocal, EverCity, Favorit, NTT Europe, OneIS, Practice-IT, Tactile CRM and Yuuguu.
