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U.S. SMBs to spend $240 Bn on technology by year-end: AMI
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 05 January 2008, 17:41 IST
In the U.S. small and medium businesses (SMBs) will be spending about $240 billion on strengthening their IT and telecom infrastructure and applications, a 16 percent increase over 2006 by year end. According to AMI Partners study, a quarter of that will be devoted to IT services such as consulting, software support, IT management, computing and network support. Another quarter will be spent on telecom services, including cell phone service, IP centrex, local and long-distance telephony, pager services and WAN.
According to the study, medium businesses(MBs)in the U.S. show a high level of sophistication in IT and telecom and are in 'Wave III' of technology development. As a part of this move, these companies are involved in leveraging their strong infrastructure to connect outside the enterprise, to suppliers and resellers. Small businesses in the U.S. are also slowly following their larger counterparts by connecting and extending their network.
"In the data security space, SBs are primarily spending their IT security funds on anti-virus products and security services while MBs are allocating a large chunk of their funds to security services providers and security hardware," said Pauline Courtiau, analyst, AMI-Partners. "SMBs will be spending 17 percent more on security in 2007 over 2006."
In the U.S., SBs are investing their storage budgets on hardware devices, principally for server-attached storage (SAN). On the other hand, MBs are using their storage resources on services required to support their data storage needs, according to the study.
"SMBs - especially MBs - in the U.S. are slowly taking a position about separating their IT infrastructure resources and their employees, and placing them at different physical locations," said Courtiau. "Having data storage devices located in distinct places provides a greater level of security. Hence, even if online or offsite data storage and backup offered by third-party providers is still in its infancy, it already has a promising future. This applies especially to MBs that already demonstrate a much higher planned implementation of that storage technology than any of its on-site counterparts."
