Techaisle Analyst Insights

Techaisle routinely conducts depth interviews with actual SMB and Midmarket customers using technology to understand their business issues, challenges and lessons learned. For the first time, Techaisle is opting to publish select interviews (five in each report) under its SMB Spotlight Series reports - Insights from the Trenches of Implementers.

These reports are:

20 Questions with SMB NetSuite ERP Users
20 Questions with SMB SAP Business One ERP Users
20 Questions with Midmarket Big Data Users
20 Questions with SMB PaaS Users: SoftLayer, Azure, AWS

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.

Most SMB channel partners are positioned as “your one-stop solution provider.” The approach – which one might refer to as “we sell IT stuff, and you need IT stuff, and we understand it better than you do, so buy it from us” – is likely to come under pressure in 2015. More successful SMB VARs would focus on understanding how technology is used within business processes. Processes in turn can be horizontal (e.g., content management) or vertical, specific to the needs of a particular type of business (e.g., construction project management). Understanding the connection between vertical processes and IT – the stuff a VAR might sell, the (cloud) stuff a VAR might broker, and the stuff the SMB client is already using – represents a kind of expertise that will support a long-term billable relationship between “trusted advisor” VAR and client, and that this kind of relationship will become more important than the capacity to deliver IT as a horizontal solution source.

Trends in the channel are felt throughout the IT ecosystem: they affect the pace at which new products gain market acceptance, play a role in determining which vendors rise and fall in market share, and have an enormous effect on the ability of small and even midmarket businesses to absorb new technologies and apply them successfully to business challenges. The epicenter of the trend impact is, of course, channel businesses themselves as they act as a key connection point in the IT product lifecycle.

What will we see in the channel in 2015?