Techaisle Blog

Techaisle’s recently completely study 2015 US SMB Cloud Computing Adoption Trends shows that Cloud adoption within US SMB is currently 89 percent and will reach 96 percent in 2015. Cloud is no longer a trend that is discrete from mainstream IT. Cloud is not a future issue – it is an essential (if new) component of SMB IT. Cloud addresses real business needs. The key to accelerating growth within SMBs will be increased Cloud vendor sophistication. Techaisle expects Cloud suppliers will work with SMB buyers to overcome current SMB cloud challenges and will focus on “growing the pie” rather than share-shifting as the market itself becomes firmly entrenched in the early-mass-market stage of the market lifecycle.

Most SMB channel partners are positioned as “your one-stop solution provider.” The approach – which one might refer to as “we sell IT stuff, and you need IT stuff, and we understand it better than you do, so buy it from us” – is likely to come under pressure in 2015. More successful SMB VARs would focus on understanding how technology is used within business processes. Processes in turn can be horizontal (e.g., content management) or vertical, specific to the needs of a particular type of business (e.g., construction project management). Understanding the connection between vertical processes and IT – the stuff a VAR might sell, the (cloud) stuff a VAR might broker, and the stuff the SMB client is already using – represents a kind of expertise that will support a long-term billable relationship between “trusted advisor” VAR and client, and that this kind of relationship will become more important than the capacity to deliver IT as a horizontal solution source.

Techaisle's recently completed survey of SMBs and Mid-market companies reveals the following Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges and Business Issues that the IT and Business Decision makers are facing in 2015. For the first time in many years the top SMB business issue is Increasing Profitability. This is followed by Increasing Business Growth and Reducing Operating Costs.

For the midmarket businesses Reducing Operating Costs is the top business issue for 2015 followed by Increasing Profitability and Increasing Business Growth. Also appearing for the for the first time in 2015, Managing Uncertainty is among the top ten business issues for both small and midmarket businesses.

VDI gets a bad rap because of cost and complexity but its utility in a mobility driven market segment cannot be underestimated. Although Techaisle's most recent SMB VDI adoption survey is still in the field, as per our last survey conducted in January 2014, the US SMB VDI adoption continues to increase. Techaisle's quantitative VDI/DaaS research shows that the SMB objectives in adopting either on-premise or hosted VDI/DaaS solutions revolved around mobility, application availability from anywhere and on any device, disaster recovery, centralized management and administration of end-point devices at the same time reducing costs. SMBs are recognizing the need to adopt virtualization within their businesses, however, Techaisle survey also shows that 56 percent of SMBs consider the technology complex to understand and implement.