BANGALORE, India--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Small and medium businesses (SMBs, or companies with up to 999 employees) in India are gradually becoming more aware of and interested in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Data storage/back up, servers and virus protection, spam filtering or other security solutions are the main focus of this increased interest according to AMI’s study 2011 India SMB State of the Cloud Market Overview.
“Though nascent, the IaaS market in India is gathering steam. The time is right for vendors and partners to invest in educating India SMBs on the role and usage of cloud services,” says Rati Ghose, Director - Market Insights, at AMI.. IaaS adoption will be driven by several factors. The benefits of using Cloud services will percolate down gradually as the availability of reliable and affordable broadband continues to improve and as service providers continue to feature these services,.” Ghose continued.
The ease of usage and maintenance that IaaS offers India SMBs is a huge trigger to adoption. Routine tasks of maintenance such as backups being taken care of by cloud service providers ensure that these SMBs (who on an average have 1.8 full-time internal, dedicated IT professionals) do not have to maintain this type of solution allowing these employees to concentrate on more mission critical issues.
In addition the cloud offers scalability. For most organizations that are starting up, they cannot foresee the exact demand for computing, storage, etc. Most businesses experience peaks and troughs in workloads. “In the course of our deep dive engagements on IaaS,” notes Ghose, “we have met with successful ecommerce businesses that have started their business on the IaaS model a few years back and see no reason to do it any other way. Take the instance of a ticketing portal. They have successfully scaled up their businesses for the past 3 years and met with increasing demand and volume of traffic during festivals, vacations, etc.—a clear cut case of scalability on demand.”
Going forward, in the choice of whether to adopt IaaS or not, the service partner plays a critical role. “Especially in the case of India SMBs,” Ghose continues, “the partners need to be cognizant of the organization’s business road map and gauge where they can use IaaS in a cost-efficient manner and yield best results.” For any IaaS engagement to be truly successful, the experience, infrastructure and user-friendly approach of the service provider are critical. “For instance,” says Ghose, “for an online travel portal, the slightest downtime on the website may cause loss of business. For business-critical applications, the service provider needs to have the expertise to resolve the issue in a seamless manner.”
Related Studies
AMI’s studies examine the SMB Cloud opportunity in 25+ countries, including SMB preference for Cloud-based application bundle, price sensitivity and purchase channel preferences. These studies also provide comprehensive coverage of SMB adoption of Cloud-based applications, managed services, and supporting infrastructure, including platforms and devices. These studies will provide a roadmap for successful Cloud go-to-market strategies and tactics.
The reports provide an overview of the growing impact of cloud services on the SMB market from the following perspectives:
- Cloud mindset and economic influence
- Cloud enabling platforms, infrastructure and devices
- SaaS, unified communications (UC) and remotely managed IT services (RMITS)
- Current and planned adoption and deployment of cloud solutions
- Cloud usage behavior, decision making and purchase channels
For more information about these studies or AMI’s partner targeting solutions, please call 212 944 5100, e-mail ask_ami@amipartners.com or visit our web site at 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.