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Three trends set to impact SMB IT in the next five years

In the last five years IT has made some major shifts. The most interesting being the focus of the primary source of technical innovation moving from enterprise to a consumer focus. This has exposed low-cost, well-designed and highly functional technology to the masses. As a result smaller businesses, that have found enterprise IT tools out of reach and consumer tools not quite workplace-ready in the past, have now been presented with an opportunity.

Here are some of the trends and technologies that we think will have a major impact on SMB IT in the next five to seven years:

The Cloud

Large companies once had an immeasurable advantage over the small in terms of sheer IT resources. With the recent advent of cloud-based services, an internal or external IT department starts looking out-of-date. Now a credit card and a day’s work can provision everything from corporate-grade email to CRM and customer service applications.

While the cloud is often overhyped, we think its impact on smaller companies is that it reduces the technical disparity between large and small organisations and, in many cases, actually works in favour of smaller organisations. A 100-person company can abandon an internally hosted application with relative ease, while a large organisation with decades of custom code faces a far more difficult choice.

Agile marketing

With an IT operation that can purchase cloud-based analytical tools, smaller companies can develop deeply personal relationships with customers while larger competitors are busy having legal perform a lengthy approval process on every communication.

As social media becomes the primary method of customer interaction, we hold the view that this gives smaller businesses the chance to react nimbly to changing customer tastes and respond in a personal manner to customer inquiries. Just as smaller companies distinguished themselves by having a real human answer the phone rather than a robotic recording, these companies can distinguish themselves by personalised interactions over social media.

Virtualisation

As IT applications have increasingly become available through the cloud, so too have entire business functions. For years large companies have outsourced everything from product design and manufacturing to HR, and these functions are now within the reach of even the smallest companies. Organisations of one or two individuals can now acquire world-class IT, manufacturing, and marketing at commodity prices and, in many cases, have access to the same companies and facilities as the world’s largest companies.

Just as many emerging technologies give the smallest players access to enterprise-grade technology, these same tools are allowing large service providers to profitably serve smaller organisations.

As this becomes increasingly common, we feel that smaller companies can combine a closer relationship with customers, cloud based IT operations, and access to world class service providers to enter new markets, create and ship new products, and transform into entirely new organisations in a matter of days. Combined with a smaller organisations’ ability to rapidly recognise and react to change, we think SMB’s will have everything they need to revolutionise the way they compete in the marketplace.