NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The use of smart phones and tablet PCs by U.S. small and medium businesses (SMBs, with fewer than 1000 employees) is experiencing tremendous growth. New York-based AMI-Partners cited nearly 3.5 million U.S. SMBs are currently using smart phones and 700,000 using tablet PCs. In the next 12 months, AMI estimates that the number of SMBs owning these devices will increase by 40% and 85%, respectively.
The success of Apple’s iPhone, iPad and similar Android devices has spurred this charge, and the adoption en masse drives a larger demand for more specialized, business-focused mobile apps.
“The current generation of workers is never without their mobile devices. These workers already use mobile devices to email and browse the web,” said Prashanth Motupalli, Survey Research Analyst at AMI, “but they are now looking for more sophisticated business applications while not in the office. This opportunity means much more than spreadsheets and documents,” Motupalli continued.
These mobile apps are fueled by data that live in the Cloud. It is no surprise that their adoption is analogous to what AMI has observed with the Cloud; U.S. SMBs have been adopting cloud services to meet a wide variety of business needs, starting with basic communication which—over time—led to advanced, analytics-based applications.
“Similarly,” Motupalli said, “early success within mobile apps was driven by communication applications such as email and IM. Future growth for mobile apps is expected to meet more sophisticated business needs. These applications have become ‘must haves’ for this generation of workers which is ‘always on.’”
U.S. SMBs are looking to service providers of smart phones and tablets to offer solutions with the mobile devices to meet this need, either out-of-the-box or as a quick, headache-free add-on. Productivity suites will be the next applications to experience high growth. However, as the mobile needs of U.S. SMBs continue to evolve, more specialized mobile applications, such CRM and analytics, will likely be next to gain mainstream adoption.
About the Study
AMI’s 2011 U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook – Strategic and Tactical GTM Planning Guide provides a tactical framework for architecting cloud-based services offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud services “bundles” and a perspective on cloud-related dynamics shaping up in the SMB space, including:
- Cloud-related needs among four types of SMB segments; behavioral and usage characteristics; future adoption plans
- Cloud and ICT spending, market opportunity, price sensitivity
- Service bundling preferences and demand uplift; vendor value propositions and offers/bundles
- Purchase channel mix and capabilities
For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit our www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.