Techaisle Blog

Cloud is clearly established within the US SMB market, in a way that is unique in the global context: nowhere else have the vast majority of SMBs leapt into the cloud. Cloud is also gaining acceptance in Asia/Pacific, Europe & even in Middle-East, regions where Cloud is being seen by SMBs as solving real-world business problems. But most suppliers are peddling their technology assets, focusing on non-viable channel relationships & showcasing wrong-sized solutions for workloads that have very short acquisition & deployment time window.

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.