Techaisle Analyst Insights

Techaisle recently analyzed 1,116 survey responses that provide insights needed to build and execute on analytics strategies for targeting the small and midmarket customer segments.

SMBs are prioritizing a wide range of improved outcomes within their businesses: improvement within existing operations and processes, expansion of the customer base, profitability, creation and accelerated delivery of new offerings, reduced cost, and enhanced ability to manage the unknown. Remarkably, each of the top SMB business issues can be addressed with analytics solutions – and indeed, SMBs are using analytics to address each today. Overall, SMB analytics investments are being driven primarily by productivity and process improvements with the top two reasons for SMB investments in analytics solutions as increased productivity and improved processes.

Regardless of the business issue, analytics provides an answer. And SMB analytics begins with cloud. More than 50% of both small and midmarket businesses consider cloud to be an essential analytics technology.

Techaisle survey shows that a strong link between analytics, Big Data and IoT. The connection between IoT solutions supporting process analysis and analytics and Big Data is not lost on the SMBs included in the Techaisle SMB and midmarket IoT Adoption survey. Findings from the research reveal that there are strong links between analytics/Big Data use and intentions and IoT use and intentions and sophisticated SMB use explicitly ties these two together.

Consider the data presented in the figure below. The top left quadrant of the tables shows the proportion of current analytics and Big Data users who have also deployed IoT; at 37% and 47% respectively. There is evidence that current users of analytics and Big Data are the lead adopters of IoT, a finding that is further supported by the fact that 53% of current analytics users and 45% of Big Data users are planning to use IoT in the near term, which will bring the proportion of analytics/Big Data users who are also deploying IoT to about 90%.

Techaisle’s US SMB & midmarket IoT adoption trends data survey shows that use of IoT today may be low within small businesses generally, and particularly within microbusinesses, it is more widespread within midmarket firms, with roughly 30% reporting that they are currently using IoT. As is often the case with emerging technologies, production-grade usage levels are not yet quite as high as the data would appear to suggest. Detailed perspective on SMB use of IoT is gained by examining the nature of current deployments and the survey finds that there is a five-level IoT progression.

As the figure below shows, just over half of SMBs who are using IoT today are at one of the two bottom levels: they either have a limited number of sensors feeding isolated systems, or are using IoT devices to enable remote monitoring/service/control. SMBs who reported that they are using IoT to “provide basic information” or are in an “ad hoc pilot” are included in these first two levels.

They are here. Techaisle's annual SMB and Midmarket Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges and Business Issues. This is the 5th year of Techaisle tracking at a WW level and is much sought after by IT vendors, channels and media. For 2017, Techaisle investigated 15 different technology areas, each with several sub-technology categories, 20 different IT challenges and 20 different business issues.

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When compared with 2016 the list for 2017 SMB and Midmarket Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges and Business Issues reveals major changes – digitalization has become an IT priority and supporting digital marketing/workplace an IT challenge, improving workforce productivity as a business issue has catapulted to the top, enabling mobile workforce is among the top 3 IT challenges and Collaboration, Cloud, Mobility and Security are the IT priorities. Cloud orchestration has also appeared for the first time in the list of IT challenges as IT is finding it necessary to orchestrate across the entire enterprise to deliver business infrastructure via the cloud.