That’s according to a survey sponsored by Microsoft, which quizzed more than 1,300 small businesses around the world. The survey focused on enterprises with fewer than 50 employees, and was especially concerned with companies’ attitudes to hosted IT software and services.
Microsoft said a key finding was that 41% of decision-makers do not understand how hosting would help their company. In a separate announcement earlier this week, Microsoft announced its own hosting strategy will kick off next year, in the shape of the Azure Services Platform.
At a roundtable to discuss the survey results, Dale Vile, MD at analysis firm Freeform Dynamics, said: “Hosted services is not a new idea per se, but some things have happened over the last few years that make it more relevant. Software is now more hostable and service providers have started tuning in to what customers need, so it has matured. The problem is that there is a big gap between awareness and understanding among small enterprises.
“A lot still don’t know what is available to them and of those that are aware, there are still a lot of misconceptions, said Vile. We need to be careful of these bandwagons and some of the jargon and of confusing people.”
The survey found that despite the precarious economic situation, 39% of small businesses said their business had grown while 34% said it had remained steady. 17% said their business had declined slightly and just 4% said it had declined significantly.
The majority of small enterprises (79%) suffer from what can be called “IT envy” – the belief that bigger enterprises gain a significant advantage from having access to better IT resources. Of respondents, 47% said they felt their business would be better if they had more IT available.
The survey also picked up on geographical differences between small businesses. An impressive 67% of small businesses in China that have embraced social networking use it to talk to existing customers. This figure was 30% in the US, 24% in the UK, 23% in Canada, 21% in France and just 20% in Italy.
In terms of hosted services, 38% of those quizzed suggested that freeing up resources to focus on core business needs would be a major driving force behind using hosted IT services.
When asked what discourages them from the idea of using hosted services, 41% said they did not understand how it would help the company, just ahead of those who claimed they do not use IT enough to warrant the investment.
Dean Parry, technical services manager at IT2 Treasury Solutions, said; “You have to think of hosted services as a hub and spoke. The hub is the people who do the hosting and the spoke is the people who do the IT. Hosting and looking after our own IT isn’t really an option as we have a presence in three major time-zones: Hong Kong, New York and the UK. We don’t have the internal support structure to look after people out of hours. That’s one of the spokes.”
It seems a far cry from the way IT used to be run at small businesses. Parry said: “I used to work for a small firm where the MD would tinker, and you’d come in on a Monday morning and there would be no emails. That email server used to live in our server room, which doubled as a kitchen. Later on, we set up our own ASP-hosted solution, which resided in the ‘server’ room. I was on the phone to the helpdesk of a very important customer of ours when the cleaner came in and started Hoovering.”
Parry echoed Vile’s comments that the technology and the hosted services industry is now maturing. “The market is more mature and the infrastructure is in place now. Back in the early days we had to do it ourselves; the data centres weren’t there. Data centres used to be for the big boys, the enterprise-level firms. That seems to have been reversed now, so we see a hosted solution as our primary IT delivery platform. Our disaster recovery is our local office,” he said.
