Key Trends in the SMB Space

By Michael Osterman
in

We have just published a major study of messaging in the small- and mid-sized business (SMB) market in North America. Here’s some of what we found:

  • Interestingly, despite the fact that SaaS can reduce the cost of providing email, particularly for smaller organizations, many decision makers are absolutely against the use of this delivery model for email. Most SMB decision makers believe that in-house infrastructure managed by internal IT staff is the most desirable approach for managing email capabilities. Not surprisingly, appliances are preferred by a large proportion of SMBs—even more than SaaS services. However, many SMBs would likely or definitely deploy—or seriously consider deploying—an email system using more than one delivery model.
  • The top four problems in managing SMB email systems are storage related: increase backup/restore times, growing sizes of messages, users sending large attachments, and overall growth in email storage requirements.
  • Some of the more popular social networking tools are generally not perceived by IT decision makers to be legitimate. For example, Twitter is viewed by fewer than one in three decision makers to be legitimate and Facebook fares only slightly better. Even LinkedIn, a clearly business-focused social networking site, is viewed as non-legitimate by two out of five decision makers.
  • Mobile platforms in the SMB space are led by RIM BlackBerry devices, accounting for a substantial proportion of end users’ mobile devices. This penetration is expected to remain steady into 2010. However, the penetration of the iPhone will increase substantially during the forecast period. Similarly, mobile phones that use the Google Android operating system are expected to approximately double in use between 2009 and 2010.
  • Green computing, while certainly not dead as an issue in server, data center and other IT infrastructure planning, is probably not going to be a major factor for purchasing decisions among SMBs over the next few years. While SMBs will want to reap the benefits of green computing, such as hardware cost savings and reduced power consumption, the economics of these decisions will likely play a much greater role than the PR value of “going green.”
Published April 16, 2010