Roundup Of Small & Medium Business Cloud Computing Forecasts And Market Estimates, 2013

What sets apart the fastest-growing small businesses is their an innate strength at turning data and information into results.

It’s becoming easy to spot a smaller business who is going to break out and grow quickly.  They often have these qualities:  they highly value knowledge, expertise and speed over seniority or cronyism; they have successfully managed a geographically distributed supply chain, production and service operations early in their history; and long before they reach $20M in sales they have learned how to balance domestic and international customer demands.  In short, they learned fast how to compete and win business globally.

Over the last several months research firms and enterprise software vendors have released studies on cloud computing adoption in small & medium businesses (SMBs).

The following are the key take-aways from these studies:

• Forrester forecasts that channel partners will increase their reliance on cloud software and services from 22% to 27% from 2013 to 2014.  The majority of this growth will be in SMBs. For additional details please see the free reprint of the report, Cloud Channel Trends, 2013 To 2014 by Tim Harmon and Jonathan Silber, February 28, 2013.  You can download the reprint here (no opt in required): http://www.forrester.com/pimages/rws/reprints/document/90001/oid/1-LMIK8X

• 61% of SMBs who responded to a recent survey are using cloud-based solutions today, with an additional 5% planning to add cloud services in the next six months.  69% of SMBs with fewer than 20 employees and 55% of SMBs with 250 to 999 employees are using cloud-based applications today. North American SMBs are more likely to use cloud-based applications co these services than EMEA (64% compared to 56%). Source: State of SMB IT 1H 2013 Semi-Annual Report On Small And Midsize Business Technology Plans & Purchase Intent (Opt-in required): http://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/state-of-smb-it/ The following is a graphic from the report:

• SMB spending on cloud solutions will grow by almost 20% over the next five years, with 3 in 10 midsize firms adopting public cloud solutions.  IBM is offering a free download of the IDC report, Cloud Computing in the Midmarket: Assessing the Options in 2013 (no opt-in required): http://idcdocserv.com/995  IDC’s graphical definition of how their Primary Market and Secondary Market IT Product Taxonomy maps to the NIST Taxonomy is shown below:

• Cisco predicts the U.S. SMB commercial-services market addressable by service providers will grow to more than $200B by 2015. Also included is an analysis of how fundamental differences in business segments drive IT behavior, as the following table illustrates. Source: What Do SMBs Want from Commercial-Services Providers? Insights from Cisco’s U.S. Research on SMB Services Delivery  Link:http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/sp/SMB-Cloud-Survey.pdf. Please click on the image to expand it for easier reading.

• Hosting and cloud services provider Parallels projects that the worldwide SMB SaaS applications market was $14.5B in 2012 today and will grow to $33.8B by 2015, attaining a 32% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR).  Please see the following illustration of a breakdown by region over the forecast period.  Source: Profit from the Cloud 2013 Global Parallels Global SMB Cloud Insights  Opt-in required, Link:  http://www.parallels.com/fileadmin/parallels/documents/smb-reports/2013/2013_SMB_Brochure_Global_web.pdf.  Please click on the image to expand it for easier reading.

• The latest research note from Bain & Company predicts revenue growth for SaaS companies will triple between 2011 and 2014.  The note also includes a revenue projection by category and is shown below. Source: The cloud reshapes the business of software by Ravi Vijayaraghavan http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_cloud_reshapes_the_business_of_software.pdf.  Please click on the image to expand it for easier reading.

• SMEs overwhelmingly prefer to buy or acquire  these critical systems (43%) rather than lease or pay for use (23%) in an SAP-sponsored survey by Oxford Economics.  The study found that the tools most commonly used by SMEs are business management software (48%), mobile (46%), and analytics (44%). Cloud computing adoption is expected to jump from 35% to 47% in three years. An infographic summarizing the results is below. You can get the survey results here: http://cdn.news-sap.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/SAP-SME-analysis-presentation.pdf . Please click on the image to expand it for easier reading.