AMI-Partners: SMBs in the U.S. to Spend 16% More on Security & Storage This Year

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Small and medium businesses (SMBs, or companies with up to 999 employees) in the United States will close the year by spending about US$240 billion on beefing up their IT and telecom infrastructure and applications, up 16% over all of 2006. A quarter of that will be devoted to IT services such as consulting, software support, IT management, computing and network support. Another quarter will be spent on telecom services, including cell phone service, IP centrex, local and long-distance telephony, pager services and WAN.

This comes from the latest study from Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. The study also found that medium businesses (MBs, or companies between 100 and 999 employees) in the US show a high level of sophistication when it comes to IT and telecom and are in “Wave III” of technology development. This involves leveraging their strong infrastructure to connect outside the enterprise, to suppliers and resellers. Small businesses (SBs, or companies with up to 99 employees) in the US are also slowly following their larger counterparts by connecting and extending their network.

“In the data security space, SBs are primarily spending their IT security funds on anti-virus products and security services while MBs are allocating a large chunk of their funds to security services providers and security hardware,” says Pauline Courtiau, New York-based Analyst at AMI-Partners. “SMBs will be spending 17% more on security in 2007 over 2006.”

SBs in the US are investing their storage budgets on hardware devices, principally for SAN (server-attached storage). On the other hand, MBs are using their storage resources on services required to support their data storage needs. Despite the fact that inadequate protection from disasters or malicious attacks does adversely affect business productivity, hard-drive failure is the leading cause of data loss among US SMBs.

“SMBs – especially MBs – in the US are slowly taking a position about separating their IT infrastructure resources and their employees, and placing them at different physical locations,” says Ms. Courtiau. “Having data storage devices located in distinct places provides a greater level of security. Hence, even if online or offsite data storage and backup offered by third-party providers is still in its infancy, it already has a promising future. This applies especially to MBs that already demonstrate a much higher planned implementation of that storage technology than any of its on-site counterparts.”

SMBs feel Hewlett-Packard is an excellent hardware brand. However, when it comes to purchase behavior HP takes the second position behind Dell for desktops, notebooks, and servers. However, HP is the leader in the most frequently used printer brand. In the software space, Microsoft is the leading brand. In telecoms, Cisco Systems emerges as their favorite. And in online services, Google leads as the best brand among SMBs in the US.

About the Study

AMI’s 2007 US Small Business Market Overview and Comprehensive Market Opportunity Assessment and 2007 US Medium Business Market Overview and Comprehensive Market Opportunity Assessment studies highlights these and other major trends in the context of current/planned IT, Internet and communications usage and spending. Products and services covered include established and emerging hardware, software, applications and business process solutions. Based on AMI’s annual surveys of SBs and MBs across the United States, the studies track a broad spectrum of issues pertaining to budgets, purchase behaviors, decision influencers, channel preferences, outsourcing, service and support. Also covered are detailed firmographics and critically important technology attitudes and strategic planning priorities. This data points to key opportunities and messaging hot buttons for vendors and service providers seeking to match their offerings to SMB market requirements.

For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com, or visit the AMI Web site at www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners 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. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies over the last ten years. 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.