According to recent news reports, “SMBs continue to lead the adoption of cloud services, as the U.S. market experienced a 25 percent increase in 2011, growing to $15.1 billion.”
That’s according to Parallels, a hosting and cloud services enablement provider, which recently released the latest updates of its Parallels SMB Cloud Insights research series profiling ”cloud buying behavior of small to midsize businesses (SMBs).”
SmallBusinessComputing.com noted that the report called SMBs “poised to adopt cloud services in a big way over the next few years,” adding that according to the latest research, while the SMB cloud services market grew 25 percent in 2011 to reach $15.1 billion in the United States, “globally, that figure is set to hit $68 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent.”
Reasons for that are not hard to imagine. Small shops have far less in-house IT expertise and are willing to pay to outsource that to the service providers, allowing them to spend their time and energy focusing on what it is they actually do for their business. Security concerns, although not the widespread problem they were a couple years ago, also tend to bother smaller shops less than bigger ones.
And, let’s face it -- the big enterprise market is pretty well picked over by now. Vendors are turning to romancing the SMB market as a way to keep their own profits flowing, and are paying more attention to what it is SMBs actually need and want. As a result yes, the market will grow.
One quirk the research highlighted is how much more likely SMBs with fewer than 20 employees are to choose cloud over premise services -- “at least three times more likely,” the study found.
Industry observer Nathan Eddy wrote that the survey results confirm “why Parallels – and service providers – should remain laser-beam focused on meeting the demand for SMB cloud services.”
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Tammy Wolf