Paradigm Shift in SMB Preference Could Benefit Service Providers: Report

AMI Partners' Route-to-Market Opportunity Model indicates substantial growth in cloud service revenue and market share, especially in the emerging markets, where cloud computing is slowly gaining greater acceptance.

According to AMI, small and medium businesses (SMBs) in these markets appear to be spending more and increasing their investment on cloud services that could well leapfrog from $111M in 2011 to $615M by 2015. At this rate it is expected to outpace even the growth in total SaaS (News - Alert) spending over the same period.

Rohan Bose, associate for AMI's Channels Practice, enumerated some of the many reasons why service providers would gain considerable market share in the cloud services space.

Merger and Acquisition activity within the channel landscape was cited as an important factor. With the acquisition of smaller VARs and local partners or resellers, Bose said, the bigger telcos and service providers are better positioned to diversify their product portfolios and provide cloud solutions across a wide spectrum of industry.

Simultaneously, with the growth of voice, data and video services over the next couple of years, service providers can differentiate their services by availing of cloud services.

This would see a corresponding demand for high speed Internet. Bose noted that service providers would bundle their SaaS solution in such a manner so that it could cater to cost-conscious SMBs, who would want broadband included in the bundled package.

Many service providers were already offering datacenters and hosting capabilities to SMBs and they could extend this facility to include channel partners also, who required space to host their own apps.

Bose concluded by saying that the paradigm shift in SMB preference could be beneficial to vendors, who could enter into strategic and symbiotic relationships with small service providers and enhance the value of their services.

In other news, recent research from AMI Partners points to some bright points in the Unified Communications (News - Alert) marketplace. According to the research findings, while deployment of full or complete Unified Communications solutions in North America is low, adoption of individual components of UC is actually rather high.

Want to learn more about Managed Service Providers? Then be sure to attend MSPWorld, collocated with TMC’s ITEXPO East 2012 taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. Since its inception, MSPWorld has been the only event with a single, vendor-agnostic focus of supporting Managed Service providers and their respective ecosystems. MSPWorld in Miami will delve into the most pressing channel and end-user issues that MSPs and their customers confront every day. For more information on registering for MSPWorld click here.

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Mini Swamy is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell

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