Techaisle Blog

The first step in understanding if a particular type of technology will be important to a market is to understand why it might be important: how can the technology meaningfully address the business needs within the target community? This begs in turn a more fundamental question – what are these needs?

Techaisle’s recent SMB Cloud Adoption survey shows that the top ten business issues identified by SMBs align with well-recognized cloud attributes or applications. For example, cloud is seen as a way of delivering improved automation to a very wide range of functions, within IT and across the business as a whole; these solutions improve processes, which in turn will improve production and support of products. Cloud also supports key collaborative technologies (notably, mobility and file exchange), which have a positive impact on productivity, and cloud is viewed as the primary platform for ‘systems of engagement’ that help businesses attract and retain new customers. Cloud encompasses many different types of offerings, which deliver benefits that align with SMB needs.

Similar observations are made regarding the challenges faced by small and midmarket businesses.

It would be unusual to find a “Chief Strategy Officer” or an equivalent group dedicated solely to long-term planning within a small business, or even inside most midmarket enterprises. For the most part, a small team of executives shares responsibility for both charting the company’s direction and managing its daily operational activities. This can make it difficult for SMBs to separate the strategic from the tactical – but it has the advantage of ensuring that ‘big picture’ priorities are reflected in the day-to-day actions taken by the management team.

This direct, visceral link between business imperatives and daily activities has some interesting implications for IT suppliers. Because the business decision maker (BDM) is often responsible for IT-related decisions, the IT supplier needs to ensure that its messaging is relevant to BDM ‘care-abouts’ – and because the BDM is often the source of both strategic and tactical direction, it is important for the IT supplier to root marketing messages and activity in an understanding of how their offerings, and/or the solutions in which their offerings are positioned, address the high-level objectives of the SMB customer.

Why Analytics?

Intrinsic to positioning any IT-enabled solution is an understanding of the benefits that the customer anticipates obtaining from deployment of the technology. Buyers need to understand how the solution helps them to increase revenues, cut costs, improve efficiency or otherwise enhance shareholder value; vendors need to be able to position their offerings as a means to achieving these objectives.

While there is a close relationship between “analytics” and “Big Data” – and they are often conflated in the press – the two technologies follow somewhat different paths into SMB user environments. Techaisle research has found that analytics solutions tend to be driven by BDMs – business users looking for better ways of approaching high-priority business issues. In some cases, this requires access to vast quantities of high-velocity, variegated sources, which in turn demands a Big Data solution – but in contrast to analytics adoption, Big Data initiatives rely heavily on IT for implementation and ongoing management, and represents a solution area that requires collaboration between BDMs and ITDMs.

While SMB Big Data buyers view support for (predictive) analytics as their top acquisition driver, they also have distinct needs and preferences that suppliers must consider in building a sales and marketing strategy.

It is here. Techaisle's 2016 Top 10 SMB and Midmarket IT Priorities, Business Issues and IT Challenges. 

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 2016. In its detailed global SMB and Midmarket survey Techaisle investigated 14 different technology areas and a lot more sub-technologies, 19 different IT challenges and 19 different business issues.

2016 Top 10 SMB Business Issues, IT Challenges, IT Priorities

2016 Top 10 Mid-Market Business Issues, IT Priorities, IT Challenges