Upon seeing the gains in business productivity and efficiency despite one of the most torrential economic disasters in modern, small and medium enterprises of all types was better during the recession by using hosted services, according to a new study from Microsoft (www.microsoft. com).
According to Microsoft’s global SMB hosted IT Index 2010 released Thursday, which surveyed more than 3,000 companies in 15 countries, most SMEs surveyed in 2010 reported an increase in revenue in 2008, and that considerable growth as a critical component of business success. It also seems that in 2010, SMEs are beginning to see the benefits of cloud computing.
“In the last five years we have seen nearly 40 percent growth in the use of hosting services,” said Michael Korbacher, director of EMEA Software plus Services in the Communications Sector at Microsoft. “Tit-as-you-go cloud technologies, small and medium businesses can easily afford and have access to enterprise-class insurance services across any platform.”
In the past 12 months, according to the study, 52 percent of SMBs surveyed reported an increase in revenue – with 39 percent in 2008. Fifty-five percent of SMEs view IT as critical to their business instead of only 35 percent in 2008. And of SMEs view IT as critical, 60 percent saw income grow in the last 12 months. In contrast, among the SMEs that stated that it is important, less than 29 percent of income saw increase.3
More than 40 percent of respondents who use the technology installed or cloud has a revenue growth of 30 percent or more, mainly due to reduced cost and IT management and maintenance, and business value, the productivity and competitiveness. However, not nine out of ten respondents use the technology saw the host drops in income.
In addition, the hosted services is increasing awareness with 65 percent of SMBs using the software in some measure, with nearly three quarters of the other consideration. In addition, SMEs are beginning to understand the value of “rental” of IT as a service, with 36 percent reporting that a “pay-as-you-go” would be attractive.
“Our assessment of the report tells us more focus on that correlates with good performance in all size categories of the survey,” Freeform Dynamics (www.freeformdynamics.com), research director Dale Vile said in a statement. “This overall support the idea that technology and hosted services can deliver tangible business value, even for small businesses, and it is not surprising that investment in IT and hosting go hand in hand with good financial results .
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