AMI-Partners: SMBs Showing Increased Appetite for Converged Communications
SMB IP Communications and Managed Services Market Opens Up – No Dominant Players Yet, According To Latest AMI Communications Study
Small and medium businesses (SMBs, or companies with up to 999 employees) in the United States have so far been slow to adopt converged communications. However, this trend looks likely to change from this year, according to AMI-Partners’ latest communications report which assesses SMBs’ needs and drivers for traditional and converged communications solutions. The study shows the total U.S. IP communications and managed services opportunity—including managed IP-PBX, managed security, managed backup/business continuity, managed networks, VPNs and web hosting in the U.S. SMB space—is estimated to be over $30 billion for 2007 and will grow at a CAGR of 15.6% out to 2010.
“SMBs are migrating toward converged communications solutions over a single IP network for voice, data, video to support ubiquitous communications, and outsourcing processes which their internal IT staff are unable to manage,” says Sanjeev Aggarwal, AMI’s New York-based Vice President for SMB Infrastructure Solutions.
“The SMB IP communications market is sizzling, leading to increased interest and competition from global and regional voice/data vendors, software vendors, internet/portal vendors, and large traditional telecom service providers. In addition to voice communications solutions, over the past few years telecom service providers have started to offer an expanded bundle of complementary services—Internet connectivity and managed services, including security, online backup/business continuity, web hosting and e-commerce, hosted e-mail and collaboration solutions, and hosted applications and databases,” Mr. Aggarwal says. “However, no single dominant vendor has yet emerged in this rapidly evolving space.”
In the absence of any single dominant players or offerings, SMBs are going ahead and adopting a mix of IP communications products and managed services in a best-of-breed manner to meet their immediate needs.
This report provides an in-depth view of the SMB needs assessment for theses solutions, propensity to buy, and vendor preferences for these value-added solutions in the U.S.
Some of the key findings from the report include:
-- IP-telephony:
—US SMB IP-PBX shipments now exceed traditional TDM-PBX (including key systems) systems.
—IP-PBX penetration among US MBs rose from 20% in 2005 to 25% in 2006.
—Hosted VoIP penetration, currently under 5% of US SMBs, is now entering a high-growth phase that will drive SMB productivity well into the next decade.
—Collaborative communications such as webcasting, calendaring and scheduling are now being used by over 15% of US SMBs.
—Skype has become a convenient communication tool for quick long-distance chats and is being used by over 5% of US SMBs.
-- Managed Services:
—With in-house IT staff busy addressing basic break-fix issues, both SBs and MBs are looking to outsource non-core IT services. Key functions outsourced to managed service providers are - security, backup/business continuity, network management, e-mail services, web-hosting, applications and database hosting, and IT Infrastructure management.
—Over 10% of U.S. SMBs now use a managed firewall service and over 15% are using managed VPNs. The opportunity for online/off-site data storage and backup is also increasing, driven by business continuity and disaster recovery needs, and has risen to 11% among SBs and 15% among MBs.
About the Study
Based on AMI’s 2006-2007 U.S. Small and Medium Business end-user surveys, the 2006-2007 U.S. Small and Medium Business Telecom/IP Communications and Managed Services Market Assessment report, authored by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Deepinder Sahni, details these and other major industry and end-user trends and spending forecasts in various sectors of the telecom/IP communications industry, including Internet solutions, and IT and application outsourcing services.
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. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies over the last ten years. 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 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.