Small Businesses Turn to Clouds and Tablets

By Rieva Lesonsky

I blogged here earlier this week about the growing trend of consumers shopping via tablet computers. But consumers aren’t the only ones warming up to tablets, according to a new study issued today by Spiceworks Inc.  Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) are increasingly using tablets, along with cloud computing and virtualization technology, and are spending more money on technology than they have in recent years.

The Spiceworks State of SMB IT survey found that:

Business use of tablets is on the rise among SMBs. Fifty percent have either deployed tablet computers, such as iPads, or plan to do so within the next six months.

Cloud services are rapidly growing in popularity. Nearly half (46 percent) of SMBs now use cloud services, a major increase from the 28 percent that reported using cloud services in the first half of 2011 and the 14 percent that were doing so in mid-2010.

IT budgets are rising. Overall, IT budgets in the second half of 2011 grew 9 percent when compared with IT budgets for the first half of 2011. This is the largest increase in two years. The average annual IT budget for SMBs in the survey was $143,000, an increase from $132,000 in the first half of 2011.

SMBs are adding IT staff. Nearly one-third of SMBs (31 percent) say they will hire IT staff in the next 6 months.

“Despite market fluctuations, 2011 proved to be a great year for disruptive technologies as SMBs increasingly adopted tablet computers, cloud services and virtualization technology,” said Jay Hallberg, Spiceworks co-founder and vice president of marketing, in announcing the survey. “The results of our most recent survey show SMBs making similar strategic technology investments with expanded budgets – pointing to a stronger market for IT products and services among SMBs in 2012.”

Seeing small businesses spending more on technology is good news in a challenging economy. Smart entrepreneurs are recognizing that investing in technology can be worth the cost by enabling their businesses to stay one step ahead of the pack. And with a wider range of technology offerings—both tablets and cloud services—than ever, it’s a buyer’s market.

What technology changes will your business be making in the coming months?

Image by Flickr user Karin Dalziel (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Small Business, small business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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