Small teams buy SaaS the way you buy extension cords. One for the new desk. One for the printer. One for the “temporary” fan. Soon you live inside a plastic vine and you still cannot find the outlet you need.
Tool sprawl works the same way.
A CRM for sales. A help desk for support. Invoicing. Email marketing. A form builder. A “lightweight” project board that somehow needs a full-time priest to keep it blessed. Each tool solves a problem. Together they create a new job: synchronization.
Data gets copied, pasted, and quietly corrupted.
Someone updates a customer address in the CRM. The invoice system still ships to the old one. Support sees three “different” customers because names vary by one space and a missing LLC. Your team starts asking the saddest question in business: “Which system is the real one?”
Meanwhile the subscriptions breed. SMBs already use a lot of apps. Okta’s SMB Businesses @ Work report found companies with 1 to 200 employees averaged 93 apps in 2023, up from 73 in 2021 (Okta, Businesses at Work 2024). Ninety-three. That is not a stack. That is a junk drawer with a monthly invoice.
And migration is no picnic. Data migrations fail often enough to be a genre. Gartner has estimated that 83 percent of data migration projects fail or exceed their budgets and schedules (Gartner, via Nextlabs). Rip-and-replace sounds brave until you meet the CSVs.
So consolidation needs a third option: centralize work without moving your data and without rebuilding your business on a new vendor’s schema.
That is where InfoLobby fits.
InfoLobby turns the MySQL or MariaDB database you already own into a collaborative business app. No migration. No code. Your tables stay put. You get a clean visual interface over the data: grid views, forms, search. People stop treating the database like a forbidden basement and start using it like a shared workspace.
Workspaces matter. Sales does not need a delete button in accounting. Support does not need to see payroll. InfoLobby lets you create team workspaces and apply role-based permissions: Read Only, Read and Write, Admin. The database stays central; access stays sane.
Then come the handoffs, the place where tool sprawl usually wins.
InfoLobby can automate workflows that trigger on record changes, schedules, or webhooks. A new lead hits the database, an email goes out through SMTP. An order status flips to “paid,” a webhook pings the shipping system. A scheduled job archives stale records at 2:00 a.m., when nobody is awake to break it.
InfoLobby also collects data without extra duct tape. You can build web forms that write straight into your database tables: contact requests, quote forms, order intake, surveys. The submission lands where it should land, not in a tool that later exports to a spreadsheet that later imports into something else where it later dies.
Integrations keep the perimeter open. InfoLobby can talk to REST APIs. It can send email via SMTP. It can call OpenAI/GPT inside a workflow to summarize a messy request, translate a message, or categorize an incoming ticket. AI here works best as a small knife, not a new religion.
The payoff is dull in the best way.
Fewer logins. Fewer “source of truth” debates. Less duplicate entry. Cleaner customer records. A database that acts like the spine of the business instead of a relic you fear touching.
Consolidation does not need a bonfire of your current tools. It needs a center. InfoLobby gives you one, built on the data you already paid to collect.