[June 02, 2011]

SMB Cloud Services Adoption in Western Europe Set to Double

Spending by Western Europe's 11 million small and medium businesses on cloud services is set to grow at a CAGR of 12.6% between now and 2015. Adoption of cloud services (SaaS (News - Alert), IaaS and Managed Services) will double. A key contributor to the impetus of the Cloud is the proliferation of mobile devices, according to a new market study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners.

Nearly two thirds of SMBs equip their employees with smart phones for business purposes, and tablet computers are also experiencing very rapid uptake, according to the study. 8% of SMBs plan to purchase over 1.5 million tablets for their businesses in the next 12 months, the study also found. Collaborative working services such as hosted document sharing and UC (conferencing, messaging and presence) are provoking the highest level of future interest.

"The phenomenal expansion of mobile devices in the consumer world is having its effect on the SMB workplace," noted Hugh Gibbs, VP Research at AMI in EMEA, and author of the report. "Users now want to take the things they can do in their private lives into their professional working practices: for example, accessing email, simple internet apps and social networking sites, or checking availability of colleagues - and to do so wherever and whenever they need to."

"The cloud model's flexible payment model (pay per user per month) makes access to technology affordable for resource-constrained small and medium businesses," Gibbs continued. "But equally important is that the cloud model eases and speeds up implementation of technology. 70% of European small businesses have no dedicated IT staff resources to draw on. So passing the responsibility for deivering applications to a skilled service provider who manages the whole process is not just attractive, for many, it now makes adoption possible." For hard-pressed mid-market IT departments, mobile and remote access to company IT resources presents huge security and administrative headaches. "Outsourcing these workloads to service providers in more secure environments," Gibbs concluded, "managed 24x7 by dedicated and skilled staff, is also making great sense."

About the Studies

AMI's 2010-2011 State of SMB Cloud Services Market studies, based on over 1,500 interviews with key SMB business and technical decision makers in Western Europe, provide comprehensive and detailed analysis of the current and future adoption of different SaaS productivity/collaboration and business management applications, and of the impact of key hosted infrastructure and managed services. The studies provide segment by segment analysis (size and vertical sector) of adoption patterns, and explore SMB buyer preferences for private vs. public cloud solutions and the channels they prefer to purchase from.

These studies are available for 23 countries worldwide. Single country studies for Europe cover UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia and Turkey.

For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail [email protected] or visit the AMI Web site at www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence - with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and "go-to-market" solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years' experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.

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