Worldwide SMB and Midmarket IT spending forecast to reach USD1.25 trillion in 2022

Techaisle's latest research forecasts worldwide small business (1-99 employees), core midmarket (100-999 employees), and upper midmarket (1000-5000 employees) IT spend (excluding telecom services) will reach US$1.25 trillion in 2022. IT services will see the highest proportion of IT spending. Datacenter solutions will exhibit a growth of 4%. Overall worldwide cloud spending within the SMB and midmarket will grow by 21%. By 2025, 43% of global SMB and midmarket IT spending will be in the cloud.

SMB IT investment is increasing to counter inflation, labor shortage, supply chain concerns and accelerate business transformation through digitalization. SMBs are looking for ways to streamline business and IT processes to best return on existing human capital. In the pursuit of greater efficiency, SMBs are also exploring options that help stretch budgets and use efficiency-oriented techniques to optimize the impact of wage inflation and the increasingly competitive landscape. SMBs plan to invest in PCs, analytics, cloud, security, UCaaS / CCaaS, customer experience solutions, and networking.

Networks are a clear pain point for SMBs as they embark on digital transformation to align with the emerging requirements of the post-pandemic world and enablement of connected business. Networks are the critical link providing the connectivity that unlocks all other digital opportunities and potential. Security (including SASE) and SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area networks) will be vital issues in establishing a network foundation that will support the SMBs' hybrid requirements arising from digital transformation initiatives.

SMBs' interest in digital transformation is a unique business driver for scale-up IT services. The fear of digital inequality is acute. To accelerate migration to support a mobile workforce, anxious SMBs are prioritizing automation, application bandwidth, and analytics, each of which requires services outlay. SMBs increasingly need support for hybrid IT environments spanning conventional and cloud infrastructure. There is an urgent need to provide business consulting aligning cloud capabilities with SMB's business requirements, map specific cloud services to these needs, integrate cloud services with existing infrastructure and each other, and provide ongoing support. SMB issues in servicing hardware at home will demand home office software/hardware packs for service.

Cloud-managed services will be an integral component of IT services and will see an accelerated spend during the forecast year and at least until 2030. Especially core and upper midmarket firms are planning to increase IT spending for cloud optimization, application modernization and migration, and IT modernization. In addition, there is an increased demand for containers-as-a-service (Kubernetes), microservices, open-source, agile development, API management, hybrid cloud workload management, and security and compliance management.

Digital transformation will be crucial to continuously improve organizational performance, such as revenue growth, cost management, market reach, efficiency, and shareholder value. However, digital transformation does not have any endpoint. Instead, SMBs aspire to enable a connected business to drive responsiveness and agility, opening up new areas for IT spending.