What Users Want
PC refreshes will be one of the biggest opportunities for solution providers as two out of three businesses plan to purchase PCs in the next 12 months. Furthermore, 77 percent will be purchasing more PCs than they did last year, with 66 percent planning to spend up to $10,000 and 32 percent expecting to spend $11,000 to $50,000 on PCs, according to NPD.
Timothy Shea, CEO of Alpha NetSolutions, a Marlborough, Mass., solution provider, said he has seen a marked turnaround in the SMB market segment with manufacturing companies starting to hire employees.
"Project work is back on the upswing," he said. "I can't keep up with proposal generation, which is a good problem to have. There is a lot of pent-up demand. Our big opportunity right now is PC refresh and upgrading infrastructure that is four to five years old."
That echoes the NPD report, which found that the networking, storage and server infrastructure segments will see healthy growth. Eighty-five percent of those surveyed said they would spend up to $30,000 on networking equipment, with 69 percent indicating they will spend the same or more on networking equipment than they did last year. Fourteen percent said they would spend more than $41,000 in the coming year.
Meanwhile, the insatiable demand for storage and backup has fueled interest in storage for the next year. Seventy percent of SMB respondents plan to spend the same or more in storage. Thirty-four percent plan to spend $21,000 to more than $50,000 on storage, and 70 percent said this expenditure was the same as or more than they spent last year.
As for servers, 71 percent said they were spending the same or more this year than last year. Nine percent said they were going to spend more than $50,000, and 53 percent were going to spend $11,000 to $50,000, the report said.
Joe Balsarotti, president of solution provider Software To Go, St. Peters, Mo., said sales are up about 15 percent year-over-year as small-business customers refresh their installed technology base with new servers, desktops, laptops and services.
"Our business is hitting on all cylinders right now," said Balsarotti, who has been in business for 28 years. "Knock on wood. The smaller customers are coming back. We have seen a fair amount of customers we haven't seen in the past three to five years. Customers are not throwing money around, but they are buying what is necessary to increase productivity. They are doing the things that need to get done."