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: The small & medium business (SMB) sector in India is now more receptive to information technology than before. About 40% of the more than 7.6 million SMBs are seeking to leverage technology to reduce costs, make processes more efficient and improve employee productivity. This finding of the AMI Partners, in its latest quarterly study, corroborates earlier IDC forecasts that despite the current economic slowdown, SMB IT spending will continue to grow more rapidly than the IT spending of larger firms. This presents a huge opportunity for IT vendors and infrastructure service providers.
However, the rapid growth of the SMB sector over the years presents several challenges that need to be addressed to maintain the growth momentum. Two primary challenges are upgrading IT/network infrastructure and finding skilled manpower at affordable cost. Here, simply adding a new application or technology in the organisation only adds to the cost and the need for trained IT staff and security specialists to manage the IT infrastructure.
More recently, the economic downturn has significantly impacted SMBs' perceptions, usage and purchasing behaviours related to IT. Although the economy is starting to stabilise, businesses are still seeking ways to significantly reduce costs and increase revenues. This includes exploring IT products and services that can directly and immediately help ease exaggerated pain points like restricted cash flow and limited access to credit.
Managed Data Services consumption model offers operational expenditure (opex)-based flexible payment options that are very attractive to SMBs, as they struggle to overcome the very tight IT budgets.
Many SMBs have begun to consider outsourcing key services, while focusing on their core competencies to increase productivity and scale for the long term. A successful trend in the international markets that is gaining traction in the Indian market is outsourcing services to telecom service providers.
Telecom service providers, who have been mostly providing bandwidth to SMBs, have also begun to offer additional value-added services on their existing network infrastructure. This “one network, many services” opportunity makes strong financial sense for the provider and the customer. To address the unique needs of different SMBs cost effectively, service providers are increasingly offering bundled managed data services on an opex model. For example, for an SMB with branches in remote locations, some service providers have launched IP-based VPN services for standard data requirement, at affordable cost. With integrated ethernet access available at all remote branches, SMBs can then leverage a scalable option to meet changing bandwidth...
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