Here are some of the apps that businesses run today: office suite, e-mail, newsletter, hosted VoIP, CRM, ticketing system, shared drive, Dropbox (News - Alert), and conferencing.  So let’s go low end and use Google Apps for e-mail, office suite and file storage for $50 per year per user or $5 per month. Dropbox is $10 per month for 50GB of storage.  Website hosting is about $10 per month.  Mailchimp is $10 per month to send newsletters to your prospects, customers and partners. Surveymonkey is free for basic usage. Hosted VoIP averages $30 per phone per month. Conferencing has free versions. Zoho (News - Alert) CRM has a free version, but the next level is $12 per month per user.  Zendesk for ticketing, support and chat has a $2 per month, but with domain mapping, support, etc., it is $29 per month.

That comes to $76 ($5+30+12+29) per month per employee plus $30 in other “team” charges. In a 10-person small business the cost for this software is $790 per month. As an agent, if you offered cloud services, that’s more MRC than a SIP trunk.

For the small business though, it might be cheaper to buy software and run it themselves. Dedicated hosted servers are as low as $99 per month. I’m not anti-cloud, but if the business is a single location organization without mobility or remote worker needs, then it will not be leveraging the benefits of cloud at all. A year of rented software is $9,000 – that will buy you a lot of licenses, servers and hosting.

Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. Normally I am talking about interconnects. But in this case, I am talking about all cloud providers. Not everyone will benefit from moving to cloud. Multi-location businesses and virtual or mobile workers are the primary beneficiaries of cloud.