Check out the top priorities of SMB for 2013!

BANGALORE, INDIA: A recent study conducted by PCQuest indicates that the top priorities of SMBs today are to reduce operational costs, improve productivity, and enhance customer service.

So, effectively, they want to "Do More", improve productivity and enhance customer service, "With Less" i.e. reduce operational costs.

With that thought in our mind, we headed out to five cities, Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Chennai, with our SMB Forum series of on ground events, along with our telecom partner Airtel to address these concerns.

The events were very well received by the audience, which stood strong at an average of 50+ CIOs, CTOs, and IT decision makers of SMBs attending in each city.

The Editor of PCQuest, Anil Chopra and Online Editor, Binesh Kutty shared the findings of the above mentioned study with the audience in all the cities. Besides, they also made a presentation on 'Technolgies that SMBs Should Adopt in 2013'.

In each city, there were experienced keynote speakers and Panelist who shared their insights on the topic, how to "Do More, with Less" by using technology. Here is a quick rundown of the key takeaways from our esteemed speakers and Panelist.

Mumbai

Hilton Hotel, December 06, 2012

PCQuest Speaker & Moderator: Binesh Kutty, Online Editor, PCQuest

Keynote Speaker & Panelist: Sumeer Goyal, CTO, Quikr.com

Key Takeaways: Goyal shared some great insights on how Quickr does more with less. For instance, there was some issue where ads were getting posted on four servers, but didn't get posted on the fifth server. The solution was simple - they setup a cron-job to frequently check the key metrics of the server availability, with a dashboard displaying all key stats.

Speaker & Panelist: Divya Sethi, Data Services - Head, Product Sales, Airtel

Key Takeaways: Sethi emphasized the fact that the world around a business is fast changing and businesses need to adapt to these changes to have an edge. Key changes he shared were: explosion of mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc), internet becoming an integral part of the society, videos are becoming very pervasive, cloud computing is enabling businesses like never before. An intelligent network in the backend lets businesses cope with all this and more.

Speaker & Panelist: Rajesh Gupta, GM Airtel

Key Takeaways: Gupta firmly presented his belief that cloud technologies have opened up doors for SMBs to develop a competitive edge in the market. Quite simply put, he shared how the managed SaaS services of Airtel can enable businesses with high productivity and RoI without heavy investments on IT infrastructure. He also touched upon how Office 365 is a feasible solution for the SMB community to make use of.

Panelist: Lalit Wadhwani, CIO, Frameboxx Animation

Key Takeaways: Wadhwani shared how he tackled the challenge of producing a proof of concept to a prospective client, which called for more computers and people working on it temporarily at an external premise. He simply removed about 14 servers from the server room, and replaced it with 3 blade servers. This saved on space, and the team were easily accommodated in the same premises.

Panelist: : Akshay Shah, COO & Founder, iWeb Technologies

Key Takeaways: Shah, who has a cloud based solutions (Enterprise ERP) in his product line himself, he shared how money, people, etc is always less for a startup like the one he runs. He strongly advocated technologies enabling building of frameworks that allow customers to customize the products and services that they buy.