10,000 Indian SMBs to be cloud-enabled by 2016

MUMBAI, INDIA: The Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME) and Microsoft have come together to enable more than 10,000 micro, small and medium enterprises across the country to adopt cloud computing.

According to the NASSCOM and Frost & Sullivan report, India SMB Market – Monetizing Emerging Opportunities (2014), SMBs employs approximately 40 percent of India’s workforce, contributes more than 17 percent to national GDP, and has close to 45 percent share in manufacturing output and accounts for about 40 percent of India’s total exports.

While most SMB owners understand the benefits of IT, they do not have the knowledge and personnel to deploy and manage the infrastructure. Factors like high total cost of ownership, poor governance due to limited top management support, fear of lack of vendor support, adherence to SLAs attributed to small deal size, limited technology skill sets, strike as challenges in the adoption of IT by SMBs.

“Today, businesses need to embrace technology if they want to transform and scale up their businesses at a minimum cost and accelerate growth. To this end, it is crucial to make technology more accessible for faster adoption. We are excited to partner with Microsoft to drive the next wave of growth for our member organizations”, said Animesh Saxena, Board Member, FISME.

Meetul Patel, General Manager, SMS&P, Microsoft India, said, “Our association will empower SMBs to access new markets and enable them to engage with customers more efficiently and manage their costs better. In addition, these technologies and services help SMBs focus on their core business and not on basic IT infrastructure.  The result is profitable, accelerated growth.”

As per a study by global consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), SMBs that embraced IT solutions grew faster than the ones that lagged in terms of IT adoption. According to the study, SMBs that decided to take the IT plunge created more new jobs and revenue growth over the past three years compared. The BCG study, Ahead of the Curve: Lessons on Technology and Growth from Small Business Leaders’ found that if more SMBs in India adopt the latest IT tools, there is potential for this sector to grow revenues by $56 billion and create as many as 1.1 million new jobs.