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Follow UsIn markets which are deemed 'matured economies', SMBs have grown to being a rapid adopter of technologies and as a result of the opportunity they provide, necessitated customized technology offerings, sales routes and services.
From the same author: Digital info explosion and the story thereof
It is in these markets where SMBs have perhaps already reached a stage of maturity in terms of technology adoption.
In markets which are seen as 'emerging economies', SMBs are still early into leaveraging the power of IT. Further explained, these are markets where an SMB customer may not have a concept of clearly defined IT requirements.
Its need of IT may be generalized by technology vendors and analysts as falling somewhere between large-to-medium enterprises and individual home buyers.
There is definitely a third kind of a market, though it is typically undefined by economists and policy-makers. This market basically is on the journey of an emerging economy and yet showing certain strong traits of a matured economy.
It could be a 'maturing' economy, so to say. And India could be a classic example of it, as neither is it an emerging economy, nor is it a fully matured one.
In India’s case, while large enterprises still continue to offer strong opportunity in our industry with growing requirements for information storage and infrastructure technologies, SMBs are comparatively new with regard to the adoption of cutting-edge storage products and solutions.
Zinnov’s estimate and opinion of the SMB segment is quite interesting — it says India is home to 35 million SMB companies, the second-largest such base in the world, and that the current IT focus of these companies is on standardizing processes and aligning IT to the business for operational efficiency and global best practices.
Within the drive to leaverage IT, there is a great demand for information storage and infrastructure products and solutions in the SMB segment, summed up in two parts:
First, ongoing digital data creation is going to be as important a problem to tackle for SMBs, as it is for large or medium-sized enterprises. As a business grows from a small outfit into a higher scale of an SMB, it is bound to increase the number of transactions between its staff and customers and partners, and use different communication tools.
SMBs are also great subscribers of the Internet and social media — an AMI Partners market study found that nine in ten internet-using SMBs in India used digital social media in some form for professional purposes.
Other factors such as managed printing and publishing services are creating more and more digital data within an SMB’s purview.
Second, data protection and security is one of the foremost priorities in this segment. A very interesting data point supports this — as per a rough estimation from in-house survey data by AMI Partners, SMBs globally have spent more than $188 billion in recovering lost data and fixing issues on online attacks.
This figure apparently is more than the total annual ICT spending by SMBs across many countries.
The way storage is being consumed by SMBs is an indication of the growing IT investment the segment is making for greater productivity, scale-planning and competitive advantage.
Technology vendors are investing in R&D specifically to develop products for the SMB audience, as against scaling down products offered to large enterprises. In the storage industry specifically, there is huge belief that the unique demand for storage and infrastructure will lend to the development of customized products and approaches for the SMB segment, and the demand-supply equation will continue to feed one another… We will explore more of this in the next part to this article.
Hope the readers had a happy and prosperous time brought on by Diwali!
The author is regional president, Global Accounts, APJ, EMC.