BizKnowledge Watch

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This new report from Microsoft Corp investigates how cloud computing will impact small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the next three years. The research finds that 39 percent of SMBs expect to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years, an increase of 34 percent from the current 29 percent. It also finds that in the next three years the number of cloud services SMBs pay for will nearly double in most countries.

The research report was designed and conducted in conjunction with Edge Strategies Inc. The research questioned 3,258 SMBs that employ up to 250 employees across 16 countries worldwide: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

The study’s main findings are as follows: 

• Those SMBs paying for cloud services will be using an average of just over three services, up from fewer than two services today.
• Past experience with support from a service provider is a key driver of service provider selection among SMBs. Eighty-two percent of SMBs say buying cloud services from a provider with local presence is critical or important.
• The larger the business, the more likely it is to pay for cloud services. For example, 56 percent of companies with 51–250 employees will pay for an average of 3.7 services within three years.
• Within three years, 43 percent of workloads will become paid cloud services, but 28 percent will remain on-premises, and 29 percent will be free or bundled with other services.

For more information visit Microsoft’s website.

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Business Insights has just published the report, The Business Intelligence Market Outlook. IT majors need a new rallying cry to get big businesses and wider user communities excited about new types of IT systems, driving IT expenditure across the wider economy. There is a sense of agreement among the leading IT vendors that business intelligence is that rallying cry. Key IT vendors such as IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and SAS have made a series of acquisitions in this area, and the centrality of business intelligence in the companies’ marketing messages is testimony to the emergence of business intelligence as the “next big application of the future.”

Every fresh human action generates new data points. What has changed, at least in the business domain, is that we are now able to capture this data and store it for a considerably longer period of time, without much loss. This is when we move to the realm of digital data and data storage. We act on business data in three main ways: collect, store and access. And three pressing questions in the context of data collection are:

• What data to collect (e.g. transaction, customer, process)?
• How to collect the data (at the point of action e.g. customer call, bank transfer, store purchase)?
• How often to collect the data?

The full-text of the report is available on the web to members of the IESE community.