KOLKTA, INDIA: The need of mobility is gradually being felt with Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs or companies with up to 999 employees). As businesses expand in terms of employee-size and branch locations, business complexity rises, and so does the need of building a long-term relationship with customers and suppliers.

The gamut of business and marketing activities of India SMBs also display a gradual shift from “travel within own city” to “travel in other cities in same state and other states”. Hence there is a likely rise in the penetration of mobile employees who concentrate upon marketing and relationship building with business partners.

“An analysis of the mobility penetration within India SMBs has shown that nearly two-in-five SMBs have mobile or ‘on-the-move’ employees who are regularly on tours,” said Swati Sasmal, senior research manager, AMI-Partners, a global research and consulting firm focusing on IT and Telecom.
 
Notebooks act as a valuable mobility tool for Indian SMBs. Through laptops, these mobile employees can keep in touch with their colleagues in different branch-offices and also maintain connectivity with customers “on-the-go”; thus facilitating answering queries, providing quick quotes, rapid troubleshooting, etc. Of course, most laptop vendors have taken an initiative to include mobility-friendly features within newer notebook models – eg. Wireless LAN capability.
 
The non-PC owning small businesses in India is a sizable chunk of the market force to reckon with in terms of sheer volume and importance of mobility-related aspects also shows an upturn. AMI has conducted an analysis of the preferences of non-PC small businesses in India who are contemplating notebook-purchase within the next 12 months. This indicates that preference of laptops is on the rise within intending small business PC-buyers.

“When queried about their preferred brand of laptop purchase, HCL emerges as the most favored laptop vendor – as indicated by 39 per cent of non-PC SBs planning to buy a laptop within the next 12 months. The key drivers for the preference of HCL are the relatively lower price of HCL notebooks coupled with its customer-friendly sales and post-sales-service network,” said  Sasmal. HCL has also tied up with BSNL to provide HCL PCs with BSNL Dataone broadband as a bundled offer; thus providing a more attractive offer to customers.