A note from nearly a decade ago on a software stack for SMEs:

Whole Solution: What the SME needs is a whole solution. The SME software stack takes just that approach by offering a complete package of the applications needed, thus minimising the number of vendors that the SME needs to interact with.

Smart Integration: One of the critical success factors (besides price) is the ability to integrate data across the various silos, such that an SME needs to enter data only once. This is the integration that is offered (very expensively) by the enterprise software packages of companies like SAP and Oracle. Integration is the key building block for the “real-time enterprise”, which is what SMEs should aspire to be.

Intelligent Cloning: SMEs do not need the complete feature set that is available in the high-end enterprise applications that are available today. What is needed during development is the ability to intelligent pick and choose the subset of features that are going to be most important for SMEs. This not only speeds up the development process but also eliminates the “feature overkill” bane of many packages.