Wow, another year ahead of us.

2009 will bring its load of challenges. The economic situation forces everyone to take a fresh look at expense. The idea is not to spend less, but to spent smart.

This is good for online software. Online software removes the burden of hosting, maintaining and upgrading both computer hardware and software. Take AceProject: for 99$ per month, all your staff gets access to a project management systems that also doubles as a time sheet system. For the price of one or two desktop software licenses, you’ll give project management software access to your entire staff for a year.

Using online software is not only cheaper, it’s smarter: people use the software with their favorite Web browser. It doesn’t matter anymore if the graphic design guy uses a Mac and the administrative assistant uses a PC. As long as their Web browser is fairly recent, the software works and the work gets done.

And because the system itself is not on the user’s computer, there is less demand on the computer’s hardware, like hard drive, RAM, processor, etc.

Think about how smart you could spend the money from those software licenses and computer upgrades.