Step Up To SMB Demands

The consumer-crazed American landscape has shifted power from business to consumers. And now the mentality has made its way into the IT services industry. Small and midsize business (SMB) owners especially want to make sure they're getting their money's worth. And the same amount of money goes further for an SMB than it does for a large enterprise. But there's power in numbers and SMB owners know that they aren't alone. Therefore, they expect and demand the same as their larger counterparts.

As technology ages and equipment needs to be replaced, SMBs are opening their doors to support options. The government has facilitated some of this adoption. Businesses, regardless of size, are being held accountable for the information stored and transmitted on their network(s). A VARBusiness article in the Sept. 4, 2006 edition, "Customers' Desires," concluded that compliance is one of the greatest motivators for risk management, security and corporate governance. And market research firm Gartner Group estimates that by 2008, 60 percent of U.S. firms with less than $5 billion in assets will have aligned their corporate risk management to regulatory compliance. And 20 percent of firms are spending between 1 percent and 5 percent of their budgets on compliance issues.

As businesses become more accountable and SMBs become more demanding, IT service providers are forced to step up. Businesses want to reduce operating costs and increase efficiency. However, mitigating risk is more often the reason that SMBs will adopt managed services.

Managed services allow small business to better manage risk. Small businesses often don't recognize how dependent they are on technology. Ten years ago, SMB operations were paper-based. Over the course of the last 10 years, they've added more automation. For example, e-mail is now mission-critical. Unfortunately, it often takes a technology system outage for SMBs to realize their vulnerability to technology.

Over time, SMBs will begin to take more of a proactive approach to seek technology partners that can help them manage risk, and managed services will be the support model of choice.

Don Begg is CEO of San Diego-based managed service provider Do IT Smarter.