A data point to kick us off from Jay McBain at Canalys. The SMB market drives 44% of global IT spending, or $2 trillion worldwide, with 80% of spending being partner-delivered. Understanding the sub-product opportunities and variations between small and large SMBs is essential for effective market penetration, especially in LATAM, EMEA, and APAC, where SMBs make up over two-thirds of spending.
JumpCloud’s IT Trends Report highlights the concerns of SME IT admins, including tool sprawl, external threats, and security. Here are some highlights.
- 30% of all surveyed admins reported their organization had gone through layoffs within the last six months
- 49% of workers are back in their office, with 34% working in a hybrid model and 21% working remotely.
- 57% agree or strongly agree that they are happier in their job than a year ago. 30% have the same level of happiness, and 13% disagree that they are happier.
For SMEs working with MSPs, the most popular reason is that MSPs are up to date with the latest technologies (61%), followed by MSPs providing a better user experience (55%), being cost-effective (50%), better securing users’ access and identity than the SME can (41%) and offering strong customer support (22%).
The two most common areas for which SMEs use MSPs are cloud storage (53%) and system security (53%), followed by system management and system monitoring (both 47%), managed backup (40%), hardware procurement (33%), business continuity/disaster recovery (30%), help desk (30%), and change management (26%)
Nearly half of SMEs (46%) are concerned about how MSPs handle security, despite 56% reporting that MSP use has resulted in better security.
A lack of investment and a drop in business confidence due to the war in Ukraine, high living costs, and surging interest rates have caused distributor sales of enterprise servers and storage to plummet in Q2 2023. Context’s Q3 2023 channel forecast report reveals that server sales revenue fell by nearly 12% YoY in Q2, while growth in distributor revenues from storage sales tumbled from a little more than 17% in Q1 to -9.5% in Q2. Context anticipates a further slump in sales in Q3, with server revenues down nearly 29% compared to 2022 and storage sales down close to 15% lower.
Why do we care?
I love a good story. SMBs are nearly half the IT market (remember that, you enterprise peeps!), and 80% of it goes via companies like IT services and MSPs. Providing more for less is why companies work with providers, with an expectation of keeping up to date. There’s worry about how MSPs deliver security… and, frankly, servers and storage are not the growth area in customer sentiment and the data on current sales.
So lean into your customer needs.