A report released yesterday finds that nearly half of all small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) use cloud services.  Many large corporations had already adopted both private and public cloud services early on, as it was often easier to store large amounts of data in the cloud, as opposed to onsite servers.  It was also cost-effective in that many applications available through the cloud offered greater employee accessibility at a lower price point.

It is understandable why large corporations were willing to at least make preliminary moves towards a cloud-based software model early on.  They have huge IT budgets that allow for some experimentation, especially if it will lead to lower price points in the future.  SMBs typically don’t have the budget flexibility to experiment with various IT solutions, so it was when the cloud became more popular, prominent and reliably dependable that the SMBs ultimately made the move en masse.

Now more than half of all SMBs have adopted some type of cloud technology for use in day-to-day business operations, along with a slew of other emerging technologies like the tablet.  In addition to that, in spite of the fluctuating and often uncertain economy, technology budgets for SMBs have grown in 2011, which could also further account for widespread cloud adoption.

Here at Plum Voice we operate both hosted and onsite interactive voice response (IVR) systems.  There are advantages to employing each type of system.  Onsite systems are built primarily for those who prefer to manage their own equipment.  Plum IVR systems are built in-house by Plum’s team of engineers and equipped with features like carrier-grade servers and limitless scalability so that customers receive the best systems on the market with the option to upgrade their port capacity infinitely.

Our hosted solutions are built on the Plum VoiceXML platform and managed by Plum’s experienced team of engineers.  Systems are hosted in world-class data centers in the U.S. and Europe with features like fault tolerance, disaster recovery, unlimited port capacity and 24X7 operations.

Here at Plum, we have also noticed a significant customer migration to hosted IVR applications.  Hosted applications are our version of the cloud, because they are built and managed remotely.  Customers as of late are seeing the benefits of having a system that is managed off-site by industry professionals.  Hosted systems do not take up space onsite or require that anyone have the specific expertise to manage them.

They include all the features of onsite systems and come complete with 99.999% uptime guarantees and the assistance of Plum’s support team 24X7.  The trend of SMBs (and large corporations) transferring their technology over to cloud software and systems is also a trend we are noticing here at Plum too, with many new customers signing up for hosted systems and others trading their onsite systems for hosted applications.