A recent Techaisle survey of small businesses (1-99 employees) within US, UK, Germany, Italy and Brazil shows that only  37 percent of SBs have heard about cloud computing. Among those who have heard about cloud computing, 13 percent said that they did not know what it meant. 44 percent of the respondents think that cloud computing means subscribing to services such as servers or storage hosted by a third party and 29 percent think that it means access to applications over the web.

Even among the 29 percent of small business that use SaaS, not all of them have heard of cloud computing.

Clearly a tremendous education initiative has to be undertaken by both the channel partners and IT vendors to articulate the use of cloud computing. At Techaisle we believe that the vendors are busy courting large enterprises as they are easily identifiable and have established IT departments. Small businesses do not generally have IT departments let along knowledge and focus on cloud computing.

Techaisle survey finds that channel partners are most effective in approaching small businesses regarding cloud computing. To that extent if the vendors are empowering the channels then they are certainly succeeding. But it may be opposite that channel partners in order to survive are changing their business model to embrace cloud computing.

26 percent of small businesses have heard about cloud computing from their channels while only 13 percent have heard about it from an IT company. 25 percent of small businesses have also heard about cloud computing from blogs/forums and other social media websites.

Of those with dedicated channel partners, 48 percent say that their channels have approached them with some cloud computing offering.

While it may be said that the use of cloud computing among small businesses is on the rise there is definitely confusion and lack of knowledge about what it really means.

Anurag Agrawal
Techaisle