SMBs Continue to Accelerate Cloud, Virtualization Spending
Small and midsize businesses are increasing their IT budgets 8 percent this year compared to 2010, and SMB demand for a range of IT services — particularly cloud services and virtualization — continues to accelerate, according to a recent Spiceworks survey. The findings were hardly surprising… until you look at some of the IT staffing predictions.
Roughly 3,000 SMB IT professionals worldwide participated in the Spiceworks survey, which revealed:
- The average annual SMB IT budget is now $132,000 — up from $121,770 last year.
- Twenty-six percent have allocated budget to improving their hosted IT services, while another 65 percent of IT departments plan to purchase hosted IT services at some point during the first half of 2011.
- SMB cloud computing use doubled to 28 percent of survey participants; and cloud usage will rise to 42 percent of small businesses this year.
- Thirty-one percent of SMBs plan to hire IT staff, the largest increase in the past 18 months.
Eager to assist the cloud trend, Spiceworks has upgraded its platform to support Google Apps and Rackspace Cloud deployments for SMBs.
Of the trends in the survey only one caught us by surprise: IT staff hiring. Generally speaking, it seems like small businesses have been swapping out staff in favor of managed IT services. But perhaps the hiring uptick is more related to midsize companies that participated in the survey.
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I’ve seen a number of recent studies that — despite different statistical results — all come to the same conclusion. SMBs are spending more money on the cloud. This makes it more important than ever that IT service providers in the channel position themselves to be the “bridge” for SMBs to the cloud computing arena. Here is an article that takes a more in depth look at how to capture more of the SMB market share as an MSP.
http://www.doyenz.com/articles/first-cloud-microsoft-predicts-strong-cloud-adoption-rates-smbs
Mollie: Thanks for the link. I have to concede… my ears are numb to all the cloud “research” because I think the SMBs can speak for themselves at this point: Generally speaking, I think it’s safe to say that…
1. SMBs are shifting a larger percentage of their IT spend toward the cloud.
2. SMBs are spending more with the cloud.
-jp
It is interesting and somewhat predictable to look at what areas these investments are being made. Typically, it is still the areas where the ROI is insanely good. The cloud will really arrive to SMBs when they choose it simply because it is better and not better and cheaper.
Mitchell: I hate to sound like a hype machine but the cloud has arrived in SMB — especially start-up SMBs.
-jp