AMI-Partners: Cloud Services Momentum on Track Among SMBs

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Early results from AMI-Partners’ World Wide Cloud Services Study indicate small and medium businesses (SMBs) are rapidly adopting a variety of cloud services consistent with their stated intentions over the past 12-18 months. With the economic situation still in a state of flux particularly across North America and Europe, cloud services are well positioned as a cost-effective strategy that not only reduces costs, but also enables greater SMB agility.

“or about 11% of total WW SMB ICT spending – indicative of a CAGR of 13%.”

As the study confirms, CRM, payroll, accounting/financials and web-conferencing tend to be the leading applications currently used in the cloud. Adoption intentions remain strong for CRM, Business Intelligence (BI) and web/video conferencing for the next 12 months. Notably, there is also growing interest in using cloud-based productivity suites, along with bundling additional value-added components such as security, storage and wireless broadband access.

“The SMB ICT landscape will get a makeover during the next 5-7 years, as new entrants and new services claim a piece of the total ICT spending pie,” noted Deepinder Sahni, AMI’s Senior VP for Global Sizing and Segmentation, based in New York. “In several instances we are seeing SMBs adding new ICT capabilities (and expanding the total spending pie) because the cloud makes them more affordable and easy to deploy, especially CRM.” In the case of fairly simple bread-and-butter solutions and processes, including a variety of managed IT services, the cloud essentially acts as a replacement mechanism driving costs lower. “ILECs and CLECs have a strong opportunity to reposition,” Sahni continued, “and be viewed as a ‘trusted ICT partner’ among U.S. SMBs if they can create compelling services bundles and deliver these in a highly reliable fashion.”

Total cloud-related ICT spending among SMBs WW exceeded $52 billion in 2009, representing about 6% of total WW SMB ICT spending. “By 2014 we expect this to exceed $95 billion,” noted Sahni, “or about 11% of total WW SMB ICT spending – indicative of a CAGR of 13%.” Remote managed IT services (RMITS), SaaS and web/video conferencing are the highest-growth components within the cloud, with a 20%+ CAGR, each.

Related Study

SMB preferences for cloud-based application bundles, their price sensitivity and purchase channel preferences are further explored in AMI's upcoming Worldwide SMB Cloud Services Study. This study provides comprehensive coverage of: platforms and devices; IT infrastructure services; business productivity applications; business management/line-of-business applications; and unified communications. Research will be available later in 2010.

For more information about AMI-Partners, our Global SMB Cloud Services, or our other global SMB research, please call 212 944 5100, e-mail [e-mail] or visit www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners, the leader in global ICT market intelligence and go-to-market consulting in the SMB space, has launched a groundbreaking, unique series of services focused on assessing the market opportunity for cloud offerings in the SMB market. AMI specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions.

AMI has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.