Today, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) also face some of the problems that large enterprises do. One of them being planning and managing their resources. SMEs face similar complexities but have limited resources to deal with them.

Large enterprises invest millions of dollars in well-known systems. These systems are supposed to handle requirements from these large enterprises to bring their multi-country, multi-company, multi-currency, global businesses into a single platform.

This has helped them achieve consolidation of data/records in the fundamental processes such as accounting, taxation, payroll, reporting, and supply chain to name a few.

In contrast to large enterprises, SMEs have been left out of the 1st wave of digital revolution (1995-2015). The main reason for being left out is because they don't have the financial resources to license, hire programmers and customize such software to match their needs.

Systems by Big data companies have been a no-go for most SMEs. Such systems need a minimum CAPEX or OPEX layout of US$ 500,000 (Five Hundred Thousand Dollars) and upwards. Even with cloud offerings (Software as a Service, SAAS) from such vendors, there is no easy Do It Yourself (DIY) people can feel confident about.

So even today, small businesses continue to struggle to keep things organized. They often use a mix of applications and tools such as spreadsheets, accounting software, web-based CRMs to manage their day to day record keeping. As a consequence, they have to access different systems to understand customers' master data, sales, cash flows, or profitability. The information exists in different silos. It becomes hard to combine the data in order to get useful insights or alerts. This leads to SMEs being reactive instead of being proactive in their day to day operations. With such a constrained way of working, there's limited scope for growth.