The Cloud and Automation

We’ve come a long way from the days where you could pat yourself on the back for having a business website. If your business still isn’t online in 2017, you’re about to either pack up your stuff into cardboard boxes or you’re extremely lucky. And if you’re the latter, who’s winning the World Series this season (please say the Marlins)?

The point is, EVERY business is online.  You have to find ways to outsmart and become more efficient to overtake your competition.

Get used to these two words: The Cloud

You’ve heard the buzzword. You’ve also probably heard that your business should be on the cloud (it should). What you might not know is… what the heck is “the cloud”?

Simply stated, the cloud is a bunch of servers that can host large amounts of data or specific services. Here’s an example that you can relate to:

You snapped a photo of your family at the beach. That photo now lives on your phone (not the cloud). As soon as you sync that photo with Google Photos or upload it on Facebook, it’s now on a cloud. 

Eureka! You use the cloud every day and didn’t realize it.

Social media platforms function on a cloud. Google Drive, Google Docs, Dropbox, OneDrive… cloud, cloud, and cloud. The popular editing application, Adobe Photoshop used to be a software that lived on your computer hard drive (not the cloud). Now Photoshop lives on the cloud with the rest of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

If you’re a business owner, you should consider moving your company to the cloud. As Exults latest business solution, UNIM, puts it, sometimes the solution isn’t to hire more employees, but work more efficiently. UNIM is a cloud-based software that is custom built to fit every business need. Manage customer relationships, check business insights, whatever you need to see, UNIM will automate it for you.

Why should your business be on the cloud?

In order to outsmart and outproduce your competition, you need to focus on what your business does (I’m going go on a limb, and take a wild guess that your company doesn’t produce cloud technology).

The head of Google’s Cloud division, Diane Greene, sums this point up nicely with this quote from a recent Wall Street Journal article…

“[Businesses that move to the cloud] can take advantage of more agile, quick ways to build things that depend on someone else’s technology that they don’t have to maintain and keep up-to-date.”

– Diane Greene, Google Cloud

Key point: You focus on what you do. Let the pros like Google or UNIM (nudge, nudge) take care of your business management solutions on the cloud.

Automation isn’t bad or lazy… its essential for efficiency

The cloud can take many forms for many different types of businesses. A company that sells battery-powered chainsaws has very different needs than an insurance company that insures people for chainsaw accidents (ouch!)

A company that sells a product (like chainsaws) might need a cloud app to manage their complex distribution in retail stores. Maybe they’ll need a cloud solution that can predict inventory shortages based on the a store’s regional seasonality. Perhaps they’ll need a solution that automatically sends emails to store owners that haven’t re-upped their orders after a certain amount of time since their last phone call.

An insurance company (that helps you with your chainsaw accident) will focus more on sales-related cloud solutions. They’ll need automated solutions that can understand sales leads based on their interactions through email, the website, and phone calls. This cloud solution could immediately send the lead to the proper sales agent with summarized background information about the prospect, as well as a custom score based on their predicted level of interest.

If all this sounds complicated to you, it totally is. Lucky for you, you don’t have to worry about developing these custom apps. We do it for you.

In short, ANYTHING is possible on the cloud. Anything. A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

We can build custom cloud-based solutions for you

Most businesses are still NOT on the cloud, but that’s going to change in the near future. Don’t wait to join the cloud AFTER your biggest competitor does. Let us build you a custom solution to help you outsmart and outproduce the rest of your industry.