Techaisle Blog

As is the case in each year’s research, the 2015 Techaisle SMB Mobility Adoption Trends survey asked respondents to detail their plans for acquisition of different types of client devices. Two of the major categories investigated by the survey were desktop PCs and notebook PCs. Here, as was the case last year, Techaisle finds stronger purchase intentions for desktops than for notebooks: 30% of US small businesses and 75% of US midmarket companies are planning to buy desktops in 2015, as compared with 18% of small businesses and 63% of midmarket firms reporting notebook purchase intentions. Projected volumes of purchases are also generally higher for desktops than for notebooks.

However, corporate purchase intentions do not provide a complete perspective on mobile device acquisitions. While one can assume that all desktops connected within a business are company-owned, both data and experience suggests that some of the notebooks used within a corporate environment are employee-owned. By including potential employee purchases of notebooks as a factor in the expansion or refresh of corporate notebook fleets, the SMB PC acquisition outlook for 2015 gets altered.

There are many differences in the cloud outlooks of large vendors and niche suppliers, startups and Fortune 500 firms, traditional channel members and online markets, but there is one common issue that firms across the cloud spectrum face: the need to find an effective way to attract and engage prospective SMB cloud customers. What are the best ways to reach SMB buyers as they make cloud decisions?

Techaisle’s SMB Cloud Computing Adoption survey research shows that there is no one method that will engage cloud buyers within the small business or midmarket segments: in both markets, buyers use a mixture of multiple reach and multiple depth vehicles to understand and evaluate options.

As a means of providing some meaningful clarity to the question of how to allocate resources across the buyer’s journey and to help indicate where buyer time is spent today – and where marketers will need to invest Techaisle looked at fifteen different influencer options and segmented them into one of three categories:

1. “shallow” (TV and print advertising),
2. “moderate” (technology websites, IT magazines, brochures/fact sheets/newsletters, catalogues, search), and
3. “deep” (vendor websites, recommendations, personal sales calls, conferences, webinars, case studies, white papers, blogs/forums)

Techaisle’s SMB Virtualization Adoption Trends and SMB Converged Infrastructure Adoption Trends studies show that virtualization and converged infrastructure are poised for strong growth in 2015 within the US SMB market because they both address specific high-priority IT and SMB business issues. SMBs have a clear need to reduce costs and improve efficiency of back-end infrastructure and to establish better control over mobile resources. Virtualization helps accomplish both of these goals and converged infrastructure provides a platform that sophisticated SMB users are already finding compelling.

Server virtualization: the thin edge of the wedge?
Sever virtualization is not the only virtualization option available to SMBs, client virtualization technologies VDI and DaaS are also increasingly prominent in SMB IT strategies. However, VDI and DaaS should not be seen simply as “next steps in virtualization.” Like server virtualization, VDI and DaaS address key SMB corporate issues – but they are different issues - support for mobility solutions and improving productivity rather than cost control.

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