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Effective Vendor Strategies for Targeting SMBs: Vendor Positioning and the Future Outlook for the SMB IT market
[July 16, 2009]

Effective Vendor Strategies for Targeting SMBs: Vendor Positioning and the Future Outlook for the SMB IT market


(M2 PressWIRE Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Dublin - Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/a0a70a/effective_vendor_s) has announced the addition of the "Effective Vendor Strategies for Targeting SMBs: Vendor Positioning and the Future Outlook for the SMB IT market" report to their offering.



Small and medium businesses (SMBs) represent an important and growing market for many IT product and services vendors. Although their individual budgets are smaller than those controlled by larger enterprises, SMBs understand that IT is critical to their business in order to keep them competitive and operating efficiently.

'Effective Vendor Strategies for Targeting SMBs: Vendor positioning and the future outlook for the SMB IT market' is a new report published by Business Insights that examines the market opportunities for IT vendors including security, communications and collaboration, business applications and systems management. This report provides insight into how vendors can enter the IT market and also uses a case study analysis to focus on the impact of the current economic downturn on SMBs in manufacturing and retail industries.


Key Findings Customer relationship management (CRM) has been the fastest-growing Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) segment and is expected to reach a value of $1.3 billion by 2010.

Mobile solutions have displayed increased uptake in 2009 with SMBs investing far more in mobile devices and applications, driven by the fact that mobility can improve business functionality and create more flexible working.

59% of SMBs have not implemented software to protect 'end points' such as laptops, desktops and servers. SMBs are prone to attacks by viruses and security hackers as they often do not have the necessary protections in place.

An important SMB opportunity for vendors is service-oriented architecture (SOA) offerings. SOA solutions are expected to be deployed by 17.9% of SMB retailers by 2012. Vendors can help the SMB market move to SOA by focusing on the flexibility and scalability it offers.

Use this report to - Understand the areas of future IT investment for SMBs based on this report's analysis on the latest IT spending and budgetary outlook for SMBs in 2009.

- Enhance the competitiveness of your products and services with this report's strategic recommendations detailing how to improve your go-to-market strategy, purchasing behaviour and vendor preferences within the SMB sector.

- Assess the evolving SMB competitive landscape with this report's insight into market drivers and barriers to technology adoption.

- Examine the impact of the current economic climate on manufacturing and retail SMBs with the in-depth case studies on both these sectors provided in this report.

Explore issues including...

Systems management: SMBs find the formality and expense of many system management tools to be a barrier to adoption. Reaching target customers is a challenge faced by large systems management vendors in entering the SMB market.

Unified communications: Packaged UC solutions specifically for SMBs have only recently become available due to the market being relatively immature. Competitive differentiation in UC will depend on software applications, in particular new and innovative collaboration applications that work with existing business applications from a wide variety of vendors Security: Viruses are SMBs' biggest concern, yet spam and data breaches are also a major issue with 70 per cent of respondents expressing these as their top security worries.

Discover - What areas of IT are SMBs investing in? - Who are the leading vendors serving the SMB market? - What is the competitive positioning of each of the leading vendors in the SMB space? - What influences SMB decisions on purchasing IT applications? - How should vendors target the SMB market? - What are the barriers to technology adoption? - Which technologies are SMBs investing in during the current economic downturn Key Topics Covered: Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 The SMB market opportunity Chapter 3 Communication and collaboration Chapter 4 Security Chapter 5 Business applications Chapter 6 Systems management Chapter 7 Vertical case studies Companies Mentioned: - BT - Cisco - Nortel - Mobile - Sybase - IBM - AT&T - Teleware - BellSouth - Sage - NetSuite - SAP - Oracle - Microsoft - Etelos - Sun Microsystems - EMC - VMware - Novell - HP For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/a0a70a/effective_vendor_s Source: Business Insights ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) (c) 2009 M2 COMMUNICATIONS

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