Friday, June 3, 2011

U.S. and European SMBs Buying Cloud Services

U.S. and Western European small and medium business technology buyers are allocating a larger proportion of their spending to cloud-based services, according to AMI-Partners research.

About 15 percent of U.S. SMBs were buying cloud services in 2010, but that will grow to 15 percent in 2015, AMI-Partners predicts.

At the same time, spending by Western Europe’s 11 million small and medium businesses on cloud services is set to grow at a CAGR of 12.6 percent between now and 2015. See http://www.ami-partners.com/index.php?target=news&mode=details&news_id=205.

U.S. SMB buyers are showing a strong inclination to purchase bundled cloud offerings as opposed to a stand-alone application, AMI-Partners says.

“A significant segment of U.S. SMBs prefer to deploy multiple cloud services in order to achieve flexibility, ease of IT management, and lower CAPEX,” says Donald Best of AMI.

The AMI research shows that 38 percent of U.S. SMBs have a strong preference for obtaining software as a service as part of a package or bundle, versus only 11 percent who are interested in a single service. One third of U.S. SMBs are interested in bundling multiple hosted infrastructure and remotely managed services offerings, versus nine percent of firms who only want a single service.

In Western Europe, adoption of cloud services (SaaS, IaaS and Managed Services) will double by 2015. A key contributor to the impetus of the Cloud is the proliferation of mobile devices, AMI-Partners says.

Nearly two thirds of Western European SMBs surveyed by AMI-Partners equip their employees with smart phones for business purposes, and tablet computers are also experiencing very rapid uptake, according to the study. Some eight percent of SMBs plan to purchase over 1.5 million tablets for their businesses in the next 12 months, the study also found.

“The cloud model’s flexible payment model (pay per user per month) makes access to technology affordable for resource-constrained small and medium businesses,” says Hugh Gibbs, VP Research, EMEA.. “But equally important is that the cloud model eases and speeds up implementation of technology."

About 70 percent of European small businesses have no dedicated IT staff resources.

No comments:

Directv-Dish Merger Fails

Directv’’s termination of its deal to merge with EchoStar, apparently because EchoStar bondholders did not approve, means EchoStar continue...