Techaisle Analyst Insights

There are many differences in the cloud outlooks of large vendors and niche suppliers, startups and Fortune 500 firms, traditional channel members and online markets, but there is one common issue that firms across the cloud spectrum face: the need to find an effective way to attract and engage prospective SMB cloud customers. What are the best ways to reach SMB buyers as they make cloud decisions?

Techaisle’s SMB Cloud Computing Adoption survey research shows that there is no one method that will engage cloud buyers within the small business or midmarket segments: in both markets, buyers use a mixture of multiple reach and multiple depth vehicles to understand and evaluate options.

As a means of providing some meaningful clarity to the question of how to allocate resources across the buyer’s journey and to help indicate where buyer time is spent today – and where marketers will need to invest Techaisle looked at fifteen different influencer options and segmented them into one of three categories:

1. “shallow” (TV and print advertising),
2. “moderate” (technology websites, IT magazines, brochures/fact sheets/newsletters, catalogues, search), and
3. “deep” (vendor websites, recommendations, personal sales calls, conferences, webinars, case studies, white papers, blogs/forums)

Techaisle’s recently completed study 2015 SMB Cloud Computing Adoption Trends shows that SMB cloud buyers look first to large, established vendors for cloud solutions, but their sourcing preferences diverge from there, with small businesses most likely to trust product vendors and midmarket firms willing to investigate a wide range of specialist providers.

Over 30% of current small and midmarket cloud users report that they turned to a large IT vendor (including Amazon in this group) for in-use cloud solution. Small businesses were also very likely to have acquired cloud from a specialized vendor selling security, storage, virtualization or a similar offering. Small businesses also frequently rely on software vendors like Salesforce.com or their telecom service provider for cloud, and are somewhat likely to acquire solutions from SIs, consultants or outsourcing companies.

The midmarket results are fascinating.

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.

1. Hybrid arrives – not as a strategy but as the result of many discrete decisions. Sources ranging from Consumption Economics to (many) vendors would have us believe that businesses decide on a cloud strategy first, and then layer new workloads on top of whichever platform they select. The reality is very much different – Techaisle research shows that businesses make platform decisions on a workload-by-workload basis, and that over time this results in companies supporting a mix of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premise products. The result is that public, private and on-premise are all part of the mix...and that an ability to manage hybrid infrastructure will become a key corporate IT requirement in 2015.