Effective Vendor Strategies for Targeting SMBs: Vendor positioning and the future outlook for the SMB IT market

Publication Date	June 2009
Publisher	Business Insights
Product Type	Report
Pages	148
ISBN Number	not applicable
Product Code	RBI00315

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Summary

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?

Content

Effective Vendor Strategies for Targeting SMBs
Executive summary
- The SMB market opportunity
- Communication and collaboration
- Security
- Business applications
- Systems management
- Vertical case studies
Chapter 1 Introduction
- What is this report about?
- Who is this report for?
- Defining the SMB market
Chapter 2 The SMB market opportunity
- Summary
- Introduction
- Understanding SMBs
- Presence
- Employees
- Telecom challenges
- IT spending outlook for SMBs
- The big picture
- The recessionary impact on SMB IT budgets
- ???Green shoots??? of recovery
- Likely areas of future IT investment for SMBs
- Competitive market
- Wide choice of suppliers
- Vendor types
- Vendor overview
- How SMBs buy
- Direct vs. Channel
- Trend watch: US providers go back to using account managers for
- SMBs
- The SMB IT buyer
- What SMBs want from an IT supplier
- SMB turnoffs
- IT services / outsourcing
- Actions for vendors
- Improving your channel offering
Chapter 3 Communication and collaboration
- Summary
- Introduction
- Unified communications
- Vendor offerings
- BT
- Cisco
- Nortel
- Mobile
- How mobile are SMBs?
- Vendor offering
- Sybase
- Fixed mobile convergence
- Collaboration
- Vendor offerings
- Cisco
- IBM
- Communications vendors
- BellSouth
- AT&T
- Teleware
- Cisco
Chapter 4 Security
- Summary
- Introduction
- Security concerns
- SMB security spending
- Security software for SMBs
- Trend watch: a move away from point solutions
- Firewalls
- Intrusion detection and prevention
- Content filtering/management
- Security policy enforcement
- Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
- Data protection
- Security-as-a-Service
- SMB concerns
- The particular SMB need
- Types of security-as-a-service
- The pros and cons for users
- Best practices in adopting security-as-a-service
- Security vendors
- McAfee
- Symantec
- SonicWALL
- Juniper Networks
- MessageLabs
- Actions for vendors
Chapter 5 Business applications
- Summary
- Introduction
- Customer relationship management
- Appetite for CRM
- Business intelligence
- Financial software
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Drivers behind SaaS
- Popular SaaS applications
- Benefits of SaaS for SMBs
- Challenges to the model
- Actions for vendors
- Vendor activity
- Business intelligence vendors
- SAS Institute
- Business Objects
- Sage
- NetSuite
- SAP
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- Etelos
Chapter 6 Systems management
- Summary
- Introduction
- Systems management
- Trend watch: blade servers for SMBs
- Trend watch: virtualization
- Increased interest in data protection
- Cloud computing
- Trend watch: local clouds for SMBs
- Cloud computing in action: Singapore's Alatum service
- Vendor activity
- Sun Microsystems
- EMC
- VMware
- Novell
- HP
- IBM
- Vendor actions
Chapter 7 Vertical case studies
- Summary
- Introduction
- SMB manufacturers
- Actions for vendors
- SMB retailers
- Target market
- Vendor actions
- The SOA market opportunity
- Index
List of Figures
- Figure 2.1: Global IT market growth forecasts for 2009
- Figure 2.2: SMB IT spending plans 2009 compared to 2008
- Figure 2.3: SMB cost cutting-measures 2009
- Figure 2.4: The ???green shoots??? of recovery
- Figure 2.5: Customer service and service performance influencing SMB IT buying decisions
- Figure 2.6: Factors that could impact on a vendor's ???strategic' status
- Figure 2.7: 2009 SMB increased demands on partners compared to 2008
- Figure 3.8: 2009 SMB ratings of productivity tools
- Figure 3.9: 2009 SMB increase in uptake of mobile solutions compared to 2008
- Figure 3.10: Communication and collaboration vendor summary
- Figure 4.11: Security and business continuity rank high amongst SMBs
- Figure 4.12: Security vendor summary
- Figure 5.13: SMB interest in Business Intelligence compared to 2008
- Figure 5.14: Usage of SaaS by SMB customers
- Figure 5.15: Business intelligence vendor summary
- Figure 6.16: The IT infrastructure is viewed to be of great strategic value to SMBs
- Figure 6.17: Systems Management vendor summary
List of Tables
- Table 5.1: Growth in the on-demand CRM market by sizeband, 2004-2009 ($m)
- Table 5.2: Growth in the on-demand ERP market by sizeband, 2004-2009 ($m)
- Table 7.3: Retailers in 2006 by region