The security vendor landscape is one of the most diffused in the IT industry. Within the past 6 months Techaisle has received press releases and briefing requests from more than 60 different suppliers. Despite the incredible diversity of prospective suppliers, though, small businesses and midmarket firms are largely focused on the same handful of security technology suppliers. Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee rank among the top three security solution vendors in SMB segment. It appears that with security, brand leadership extends throughout the SMB market, with suppliers who are well-positioned in the small business or midmarket community tending to be strong in the other segment as well. This statement does not necessarily mean that overall leadership will extend into the myriad niches that are apparent in the market. What it does mean, though, is that suppliers addressing specific niches will need to develop convincing positioning statements explaining how their niche solutions extend and integrate with products available from the overall market leaders.
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Although much of the public debate around mobility involves hardware brands and feature sets and overall penetration rates, the real business benefit of mobility is delivered via applications that address specific task requirements within the business, and mobility solutions that overlay the management and security structures needed to integrate these apps with corporate IT systems.
Data drawn from the Techaisle 2017 SMB & Midmarket Mobility adoption survey shows that 2017 will see an explosion in the number of mobility application types used by US SMBs. The data presented in figure below shows that small businesses will go from a current average of seven mobility application categories in use to 14 in 2017, and midmarket firms will increase from an average of about six mobility app categories to 13. This 100%-ish growth pattern is demonstrated across most employee-size segments, with all but the 250-499 group anticipating a 2017 net increase in mobile app categories used of 86% or more.
The Cloud channel partners are operating between the raindrops. Techaisle’s channel survey trend data clearly shows that the sources of competition and channel conflicts for cloud business is increasing thereby creating untenable conditions for many channel partners. From 2013 to 2017, the percent of channel partners experiencing competition from vendors has gone up by 15 percent whereas from distributors it has increased by 55 percent.
At a high level there are three types of channel conflict:
- Competition between the vendor and its channel partners,
- Competition between distributors and channel partners, and
- Competition between similar types of channel partners (e.g., VAR/VAR).
Figure below shows the trend data from 2013 to 2017.
Techaisle recently analyzed 1,116 survey responses that provide insights needed to build and execute on analytics strategies for targeting the small and midmarket customer segments.
SMBs are prioritizing a wide range of improved outcomes within their businesses: improvement within existing operations and processes, expansion of the customer base, profitability, creation and accelerated delivery of new offerings, reduced cost, and enhanced ability to manage the unknown. Remarkably, each of the top SMB business issues can be addressed with analytics solutions – and indeed, SMBs are using analytics to address each today. Overall, SMB analytics investments are being driven primarily by productivity and process improvements with the top two reasons for SMB investments in analytics solutions as increased productivity and improved processes.
Regardless of the business issue, analytics provides an answer. And SMB analytics begins with cloud. More than 50% of both small and midmarket businesses consider cloud to be an essential analytics technology.
