Consumerisation, cloud services, mobility, mobile device management and social technology are expected to reshape SMB IT spending in 2013, according to a new report.
Business solution vendors are exploiting these major trends to increase growth in the SMB market during the coming days.
Strategy Analytics’ latest report, ‘2013 Top Trends Reshaping the SMB Mobility Market’, revealed that continuing effects of the global recession will set hurdles for the SMB mobility market growth, while the overall SMB IT spending has recovered to a significant degree.
Strategy Analytics Wireless Enterprise senior analyst, Gina Luk, said that historically several business solutions vendors have taken scaled down, retrofitted versions of their large enterprise solutions to the SMB market.
"Lately, however, many are taking a new tack, starting with a bottoms-up approach where vendors design SMB applications to more closely resemble easy-to-use, highly functional consumer-social-oriented solutions, rather than complex, unwieldy enterprise software," Luk said.
In addition, the research firm considers that several factors have been collaborating to develop a change that would support SMBs to use business solutions.
In technology-mature countries, always-on Internet has become a part of the business fabric, which would impact SMB IT investment, such as mobility, cloud services, mobile device management, and social technology.
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Strategy Analytics Enterprise research executive director, Andrew Brown, said that in keeping with changing SMB needs and the mix of technology that will meet those needs, consumer-oriented vendors such as Amazon and Google, to Zoho are putting a user-friendly experience first, as they extend from consumer to business markets, and established SMB vendors, such as Intacct, Intuit, NetSuite, Microsoft, and Sage are upping their investments to make their solutions more accessible and simpler to use.
"Even vendors that have made their mark in the large enterprise space are revisiting SMB design points. Citrix, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP, for instance, are offering business products that were designed expressly for companies with limited IT personnel," Brown said.
