The critical role of small and medium businesses in the economic recovery was confirmed this week by the appointment of Lord Young as enterprise tsar. A raft of sources put SMBs at the vanguard of recovery while recent IT research reveals SMBs are hiring more IT staff to achieve growth.
Analyst firm, Forrester Research, reports in Demand Insights: The SMB Software Market 2010 that SMBs are the likeliest in 2010 to invest in internal IT support staff. They are also embracing open source and matching large enterprises in their zest for enterprise applications.
The days when SMBs bought only an operating system, an office suite, and a bit of security software to meet their business needs, are long gone. Instead concludes Forrester, they will be visible in the following activities:
Hiring more support staff
Forrester findings crucially include that hiring rates are up in this profile of business: “As SMBs recognise the increasingly important role played by business technology in local and global operations, they are starting to expand investment in support staff who can keep their business infrastructures humming,” according to report author, Tim Harmon, principal analyst.
Harmon found that while 20% of companies with between 100 and 999 employees were due to hire internal IT staff in 2010, small businesses (20 to 99 employees) were likely to exceed the figure by 25%.
Champions of open source
More SMBs have ambitions to fully exploit open source software. “SMBs have always been drawn to the ‘free’ aspect of open source software. But the configuration and maintenance chores necessary to make many open source software products relevant to SMBs often meant that the software went underutilised”, according to Harman.
Now, many SMBs have the ability to customise open source software and are planning to increase their utilisation of open source software significantly over the previous year's usage.
As SMBs shift their orientation from information technology to business technology, they are tracking enterprises in terms of software adoption in many areas. Collaboration and content management top the list: a whopping 44% of SMBs will expand or initially invest in collaboration software this year, and 40% will do so in content management software.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) are and SMBs are also investing in marketing and customer-facing applications to fuel their newfound marketing appetites. About one-quarter of SMBs will invest or expand their investments in ERP and vertical applications this year.
SMBs winners – says who?
David Cameron declared this week that he wanted ‘a wholesale change in attitude’ from government towards small business. To that end he has tasked former cabinet minister Lord Young with reviewing government practice with ‘brutal honesty’.
• CBI in its latest quarterly SME Trends Survey shows the strongest growth in output since
April 1995. As SMEs looked to rebuild inventories and orders rose significantly- in particular, there was stronger than expected growth in export orders.
• Business Link research around attitudes to economic recovery published in Q1 revealed SME optimism levels about growth in their company’s turnover, at pre-recession levels.
Search for IT support jobs | search for Linux jobs | search for SAP jobs
