SMB Cloud Services Adoption In Western Europe Expected To Double

Spending by Western Europe's 11 million small and medium businesses on cloud services is set to grow at a CAGR of 12.6 percent between now and 2015, according to a study.

Adoption of cloud services (SaaS, IaaS and Managed Services) will double. A key contributor to the impetus of the Cloud is the proliferation of mobile devices, according to a new market study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners.

Nearly two thirds of SMBs equip their employees with smart phones for business purposes, and tablet computers are also experiencing very rapid uptake, according to the study. 8 percent of SMBs plan to purchase over 1.5 million tablets for their businesses in the next 12 months, the study also found. Collaborative working services such as hosted document sharing and UC (conferencing, messaging and presence) are provoking the highest level of future interest.

Comment from Hugh Gibbs, VP Research at AMI in EMEA: The phenomenal expansion of mobile devices in the consumer world is having its effect on the SMB workplace. Users now want to take the things they can do in their private lives into their professional working practices: for example, accessing email, simple internet apps and social networking sites, or checking availability of colleagues -- and to do so wherever and whenever they need to. The cloud model's flexible payment model (pay per user per month) makes access to technology affordable for resource-constrained small and medium businesses. But equally important is that the cloud model eases and speeds up implementation of technology. 70 percent of European small businesses have no dedicated IT staff resources to draw on. So passing the responsibility for delivering applications to a skilled service provider who manages the whole process is not just attractive, for many, it now makes adoption possible. For hard-pressed mid-market IT departments, mobile and remote access to company IT resources presents huge security and administrative headaches. Outsourcing these workloads to service providers in more secure environments, managed 24x7 by dedicated and skilled staff, is also making great sense.

About the studies: AMI's 2010-2011 State of SMB Cloud Services Market studies are based on over 1,500 interviews with key SMB business and technical decision makers in Western Europe.

Contact: http://www.ami-partners.com