SMB and midmarket Cloud adoption driving increased IT services outsourcing

Techaisle’s SMB cloud computing adoption survey shows that 90% of US SMBs and 77% of SMBs at worldwide level are either using or planning to engage with external professionals for cloud assessment and/or cloud implementation.

Both small and midmarket firms are using outsourcing, but they are doing so in different ways. In many small businesses (and most micro-businesses with fewer than 20 employees), outsourced IT services take the place of internal staff. In midmarket organizations, outsourcing provides specialized skills to augment in-house capabilities, and/or delivers additional bandwidth to address staff shortages.

Drilling down into the US market, data shows that in both small and midmarket businesses these outsourced resources are deployed across a wide range of areas and that cloud is prominent in this mix. There are several reasons why SMBs engage with external professionals and consultants. At least within midmarket businesses, 42% use external providers for cloud implementation whereas 31% of small businesses use consulting organizations for cloud readiness assessment and strategy development. Data further goes on to show that 35% of SMBs usually decide to use the supplier that helps them in formulating cloud strategy. Overall, data finds that 39% of SMBs are planning to outsource cloud migration services within the next one year. Looking at the same data from a regional geography lens, it is found that the trend of outsourcing cloud services is higher than the US in Asia/Pacific, similar in Europe and somewhat lower in Latin America.

There is an important learning in the survey data for channel partners and IT services organizations. Simply reselling cloud solutions (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) is not a long-term and sustainable strategy. They must be the trusted cloud advisor for the SMB end-customer. Fully 80% of midmarket firms planning new cloud initiatives are evaluating cloud options with only 7% focused on evaluating suppliers. Combining this data with the fact that 94% of SMBs are already using some form of cloud solution, one gets a picture of a midsized enterprise market that is in the process of assessing where and how the use of cloud should expand through the enterprise. Small businesses, on the other hand, have a roughly normal distribution across different stages of cloud expansion with 24% reporting that they are gathering information and 30% evaluating suppliers.

It is interesting to note the difference in scale between the two market segments. The midmarket results reflect a more strategic approach to outsourcing focused on the skills that are most important to meeting high-priority, emerging business requirements. This starts with cloud migration and SaaS services, and testing of these applications; advanced software systems like ERP and CRM come next and the other capabilities follow from there. The top three areas that midmarket businesses are planning to outsource are implementation of cloud packages such as ERP/CRM, cloud migration services, and mobility/mobile app development. Small businesses are giving equal importance to many different outsourcing initiatives, such as, cloud infrastructure rollout and support, cloud migration/SaaS services, mobility/mobile app development as well as custom software development.