NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Despite lingering uncertainty in the eurozone, German small businesses (SBs, with 1-99 employees) reported modest gains thus far in 2011. While SB sentiment still reflects concern about economic conditions, most are planning to hire employees and invest in information and communications technology (ICT) solutions in the coming year, according to AMI’s 2011-12 Germany Small Business Market Opportunity Assessment report. Principally, small businesses are spending a significant portion of their ICT budgets on mobility and related services.
German SBs have spent over $7.5 billion on mobile solutions in 2011 (including tablet and smartphone devices, wireless data plans, netbooks, portable PCs, and related mobility solutions). Mobility spending is expected to grow to more than $10 billion, or 18% of total ICT spending, by 2015.
Currently, over 1.7 million German SBs own smartphones and more than a 750,000 own tablets. Purchase plans continue to pick up, with over one million firms looking to add smartphones and 700,000 firms adding tablets in the next twelve months. As mobility continues to trend, opportunities for device service and support will arise.
“With the increasingly mobile work style of German employees,” notes AMI’s Monik Sheth, “nearly half of all small businesses are expanding their security spotlight to encompass their employees’ mobile devices. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, implementing security solutions such as anti-virus and data storage for these devices is considered to be an important IT issue going forward.”
Mobile security is more important than ever, as employees are increasingly working outside the office. In doing so, many small businesses are utilizing advanced business applications on their mobile devices, moving beyond basic communications applications such as company email, IM, and productivity suites. In 2011, a growing number of SBs have adopted mobile business process applications such as business analytics, project management, CRM, and IT and network management.
“As small businesses adopt more advanced mobile solutions,” continues Sheth, “they will look to partners for more than just basic 24/7 online support. Providers who are able to integrate real-time security and quickly deploy advanced mobile business software will best support the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce.”
Related Study
AMI’s 2011-12 Germany Small Business Market Opportunity Assessment report captures current deployment and future plans pertaining to budgets, spending, usage, channels, service and support, hardware devices, software, applications and services—across a range of IT, telecommunications and Internet products and services.
This study tracks firmographics, decision making, business processes and outsourcing, attitudes and strategic planning activities of SBs. We’re seeing a confluence of factors that are giving cloud and mobility adoption stronger momentum among SBs. Additionally, social media is now a mainstream influence vehicle. This study also assesses the impact social media has on buying behavior, as well as examining purchase channel preferences/ Routes to Market (RTM) for a broad array of ICT solutions.
For more information about this study or AMI’s partner targeting solutions, please call 212 944 5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.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 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 25 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.