Change is a constant in the IT industry. Despite the constant evolution of technology itself, it can be argued that the biggest change in the IT landscape is not a technology or set of technologies but the evolution of the buyer’s journey. It is more pronounced within the SMBs than any other segment.
The IT industry is abuzz with discussion of digital transformation. SMBs and Midmarket firms are adopting digital transformation for operational efficiency, customer intimacy, employee empowerment and product innovation. There are nearly as many definitions of DX as there are firms looking to profit from the trend. Techaisle views digital transformation as the use and integration of digital business processes across an enterprise.
In many SMBs, cloud may have first been introduced as a means of reducing CAPEX and/or overall IT costs, but today, it is viewed by SMBs as a means of increasing business agility and of introducing capabilities that would have been cost or time-prohibitive to deploy on traditional technology.
SMB buyers, especially the business decision makers (BDMs) are moving past devices to a mobile solution strategy that capitalizes on the capabilities of new types of end-points..
For decades, “endpoint device” has been synonymous with “PC,” and “PC” has implied a device based on Microsoft Windows and Intel microprocessors. Through the course of this decade, that definition has been eroding.
The allure of VDI, DaaS and Server virtualization is clear – but the technology itself and the path to realizing its benefits can still seem somewhat mysterious to many small and mid-market businesses. In many cases, SMBs now combine mobile and fixed devices.
Digital marketing has become very important to SMBs to improve sales, reduce cost of customer acquisition and retain existing customers. The core functions of lead generation, opportunity conversion and life-cycle customer relationship management remain at the center of marketing objectives and are the focus of automation.
As IoT outputs do deliver visible and tangible benefits, the momentum for IoT is building within SMBs. SMBs are beginning to use IoT for supply chain visibility, asset tracking, cost efficiencies and in general facilitating collaboration with employees, partners, suppliers, and customers.
While the most prominent tools used by SMBs are those that support basic ad hoc queries, there is evidence that current small business users are investigating more advanced analytics options.
Collaboration is now a central component to virtually all SMB business activities. As the lines of demarcation between tasks have been eroded by the increased pace and changing nature of business activities, SMBs have moved past the time when they linked discrete actions through linear, sequential processes.
A key challenge for SMBs is that paying for & maintaining leading-edge Information Technology is too expensive and complex for the average company to manage on its’ own. The old model of IT asset ownership and large supporting organizations is broken and is being replaced with a pay-as-you-go alternative called Managed Services.
Effective SMB IT security practices go beyond “raising the shields” around users, data & networks – they enable innovation throughout the IT/business infrastructure. SMBs are not only increasingly dependent on IT – they are dependent on increasingly-interconnected systems, which are in turn open to an ever-expanding population of devices and access points.
Today, the Decision Making Unit (DMU) within SMBs is much bigger, much more diverse, much more difficult to inform, and can be much slower to take action. Business decision makers (BDMs) are an intrinsic force within DMUs in most SMBs, and are the primary decision makers in some high-growth areas.
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