SANTA BARBARA, USA: In a challenging business environment where a lot of the attention goes to mega-corporations, Citrix Online proved again this week that online collaboration technologies and remote-support services provide critical cost savings to a key driver of the economy: small and mid-sized businesses.

"Impact of the ongoing economic crisis on conferencing markets," a new report from leading research firm Frost & Sullivan, confirms that collaboration tools and services have become fundamentally critical to business, offering significant travel-cost savings and other advantages. In particular, the report notes that SMBs—which employ half the entire U.S. workforce—are increasingly conducting business across different geographies, both domestically and internationally, and can benefit significantly from online collaboration technologies.

"Online collaboration technology is becoming fundamentally critical to SMBs," said Roopam Jain, principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan North America Information & Communications Technologies Practice. "It offers a huge upfront advantage that organizations seek in harsh economic times. Travel-cost saving is the biggest value proposition offered by Web conferencing and usage is expected to go up as a result of strict mandates on travel. SMBs are increasingly conducting their businesses globally and will need to use conferencing to carry on their normal business operations."

"This economic climate is hard for everyone, but significant focus has been limited to multinationals and their issues: huge layoffs, massive government bailouts and so on," said Brett Caine, general manager, Citrix Online. "SMBs are the real engine of this economy, and we want to do our part to help them survive and thrive with easy-to-use technologies that make it easier to manage staff, optimize daily operations, cut travel costs, enhance client relationships and increase sales. We believe that by having the freedom to hire employees and pursue new clients regardless of location, SMBs can change their basic economics in a very positive way."

Building on this promise, Citrix Online is inviting companies in the SMB category to try Citrix GoToMyPC and Citrix GoToMeeting completely free for 60 days. Using GoToMyPC, SMB professionals can quickly and securely access everything on their PC desktops from anywhere, while GoToMeeting lets up to 25 people hold online meetings and share their computer screens from any Internet-connected computer. The remote-access and online-collaboration technologies are designed to help SMBs enhance flexibility, increase productivity, decrease operational costs and optimize sales opportunities.

One SMB that can attest to the benefits of online collaboration technologies is the Trust for Public Land, an organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, historic sites, rural places and other natural settings. "As a nonprofit with limited budget, we're motivated to invest our money into our mission – saving land – rather than big IT budgets," said Jeffrey Karasik, national systems support manager. "We've basically doubled in size in recent years, but, with Citrix Online solutions, we've been able to provide the same quality service to our offices across the country without having to drastically increase our IT staff size."