• 2025 TOP 10 SMB BUSINESS ISSUES, IT PRIORITIES, IT CHALLENGES

    2025 TOP 10 SMB BUSINESS ISSUES, IT PRIORITIES, IT CHALLENGES

  • 2025 TOP 10 PREDICTIONS

    2025 TOP 10 PREDICTIONS

    SMB & Midmarket Predictions
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    SIMPLIFY. EXPAND. GROW.

    SMB. CORE MIDMARKET. UPPER MIDMARKET. ECOSYSTEM
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    SMB & Midmarket Analytics & Artificial Intelligence Adoption
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    IT SECURITY TRENDS

    SMB & Midmarket Security Adoption Trends
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    CHANNEL PARTNER RESEARCH

    Channel Partner Trends
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  • FEATURED INFOGRAPHIC

    FEATURED INFOGRAPHIC

    2024 Top 10 SMB Business Issues, IT Priorities, IT Challenges
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  • CHANNEL INFOGRAPHIC

    CHANNEL INFOGRAPHIC

    2024 Top 10 Partner Business Challenges
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  • 2024 TOP 10 PREDICTIONS

    2024 TOP 10 PREDICTIONS

    Channel Partner Predictions
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    CLOUD ADOPTION TRENDS

    SMB & Midmarket Cloud Adoption
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    FUTURE OF PARTNER ECOSYSTEM

    Networked, Engaged, Extended, Hybrid
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    BUYERS JOURNEY

    Influence map & care-abouts
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    Connected Business
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  • MANAGED SERVICES RESEARCH

    MANAGED SERVICES RESEARCH

    SMB & Midmarket Managed Services Adoption
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Techaisle Blog

Insightful research, flexible data, and deep analysis by a global SMB IT Market Research and Industry Analyst organization dedicated to tracking the Future of SMBs and Channels.
Anurag Agrawal

Red Hat Partner Program accelerating partner business velocity

Markets behave logically, and therefore channel partners exist for logical reasons. Channel partners are essential to intercepting demand, connecting technology to business outcomes, enabling efficiencies, and providing customer relevance. A sizable majority of IT industry sales are concluded through partners and are not likely to slow down soon. As we emerge from the pandemic, it is clear that the cloud has transformed the IT industry by its ability to provide agile transformation, resiliency, and adaptability. The market has shifted from discrete purchase-and-deploy deals aligned with refresh cycles to a 'hybrid IT' approach that blends a limited number of on-premise assets with a growing range of on-demand services. Application modernization, migration, cloud consulting services, and cloud managed services. Containers have become the PoC beachheads, small to enterprise firms are building the Edge. Techaisle data shows that the need for updated understandings of channel management imperatives has expanded beyond the tactical questions of sales or management metrics or marketing activities. There is a reason why I have written a long preamble before unfolding the main point of the Techaisle Take.

Red Hat is a platform company whose goal is to continue to deliver platforms and the relevant pieces around it that enable a customer to have the maximum flexibility and core capabilities for security, stability, and resiliency. In addition, these customers should be able to deploy applications faster and at scale. Therefore, its open hybrid cloud initiative has to have as broad a partner ecosystem as possible to deliver on Red Hat's promise. Red Hat is still Red Hat retaining its independence and neutrality, but its partner program is changing to tackle the ecosystem challenges. Red Hat has been listening to its partners. Red Hat's Stefanie Chiras, Sr. Vice-President, Partner Ecosystem Success is focusing on partner success. She and her team recognize that partners contribute to creating, shaping, defining demand – in some cases by making customers aware of a new category or product, in others by helping to define solution requirements or specifications. In the hybrid world, the solution deployment is based not on a specified hardware/software configuration but the orchestration of multiple on-demand services integrated with existing legacy systems - a liberating factor for the partner ecosystem in a meaningful sense.

Anurag Agrawal

Lenovo Partner Hub – a one-stop-shop for services offerings – neatly fulfilling Lenovo 360 promise

Techaisle's channel partner research shows a top tier of four must-have vendor attributes to pursue new partner relationships and build on existing ones. These are 1/ease of doing business, 2/ technical support, 3/ competitive pricing, and 4/ well-designed partner programs/partner portals. Each of these elements is considered necessary by 40% or more of channel decision-makers.

Lenovo is addressing each of the attributes. For example, at the center of its partner program transformation under One Lenovo and Lenovo 360 (partner program framework) is its Lenovo Partner Hub, undergoing continuous enhancements since its introduction in 2020. Its most recent improvements integrate managed services to product sales. Partners love the enhanced partner portal because of its simplicity of layout, ability to serve contextual information quickly, easy navigation, and enabling partners to add services components in customer bids effortlessly. It is a one-stop-shop for everything services – training, marketing, and deliverables.

Anurag Agrawal

Worldwide SMB and Midmarket IT spending forecast to reach USD1.25 trillion in 2022

Techaisle's latest research forecasts worldwide small business (1-99 employees), core midmarket (100-999 employees), and upper midmarket (1000-5000 employees) IT spend (excluding telecom services) will reach US$1.25 trillion in 2022. IT services will see the highest proportion of IT spending. Datacenter solutions will exhibit a growth of 4%. Overall worldwide cloud spending within the SMB and midmarket will grow by 21%. By 2025, 43% of global SMB and midmarket IT spending will be in the cloud.

SMB IT investment is increasing to counter inflation, labor shortage, supply chain concerns and accelerate business transformation through digitalization. SMBs are looking for ways to streamline business and IT processes to best return on existing human capital. In the pursuit of greater efficiency, SMBs are also exploring options that help stretch budgets and use efficiency-oriented techniques to optimize the impact of wage inflation and the increasingly competitive landscape. SMBs plan to invest in PCs, analytics, cloud, security, UCaaS / CCaaS, customer experience solutions, and networking.

Anurag Agrawal

Top 10 SMB and Midmarket business issues, IT priorities and challenges for 2022

They are here - Techaisle's annual SMB and Midmarket Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges, and Business Issues infographics, 12th year of Techaisle tracking at a WW level, and is sought after by IT vendors, channel partners, and media. Techaisle surveyed a total of 5850 SMBs, quota sampled to ensure adequate coverage of four small business (1-9, 10-19, 20-49, and 50-99 employees), three midmarket (100-249, 250-499, and 500-999 employees) and two upper midmarket (1000-2499, 2500-4999) segments. As a result, the data represents a robust and reliable sampling of the market segment for IT products and services.

Compared to previous years, for 2022, Techaisle expanded the lists of the technology areas, business, and IT challenges studied. In addition, this year, we have also added a fourth column in the infographic – Highest Planned Adoption.

2022 top10 smb it priorities business issues techaisle infographic


Please scroll down/read more to view and download the SMB, core Midmarket, and Upper Midmarket infographics.

Research You Can Rely On | Analysis You Can Act Upon

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