Nov 3, 2008 : MS Releases Hosted Services Study

📅 November 3, 2008 - Microsoft (microsoft.com) announced last week it has released the results of a global study that analyzes the way small businesses use and manage their IT, as well as their attitudes toward hosted IT services.


The study shows how many small businesses are using IT services to compete with larger businesses, while recognizing the many advantages that mobile working and social networking can bring.

Despite the current economic downturn, most small businesses say they had performed well in the past year. The findings reveal that 39 percent of global businesses have grown, while 36 percent have remained steady in the past year.

Additionally, hosted IT solutions seem to have helped those small businesses surveyed, who state that purchasing software on a subscription basis have helped reduce their reliance on IT skills, enabled them to offer enterprise-class security protection, and allow them to focus on other business priorities.

Other findings show that emerging markets are outpacing western countries in terms of new technology adoption, with 87 percent of Russian small businesses stating they have branded company email, 63 percent have a customer database and an above-average 24 percent use mobile email.

Overall, the findings show that 97 percent of Russian business have IT services compared to the 91 percent of US small businesses that use IT.

Chinese small businesses also rely heavily on IT services with 67 percent of surveyed Chinese businesses stating that they use social networking applications to communicate to existing customers and 57 percent using them to promote their business, compared to just 26 percent and 24 percent, respectively, of small businesses in the UK.

The research also revealed that 65 percent of the small businesses surveyed would consider buying IT services on a subscription basis, such as hosted email, shared calendaring and other applications.

"Despite their varying businesses and greatly differing needs, many small businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on information technology and the Internet for networking, communications and sales," says John Zanni, general manager of the software and services industry team for the communications sector at Microsoft. "As they become more Web-savvy, we're seeing that small businesses are starting to seriously consider hosted services to meet some of their IT needs. At this time of economic uncertainty, the benefits of buying IT services on a subscription basis become ever more apparent."

The research also found that the majority of businesses surveyed have "IT envy" for the resources of larger businesses, with 79 percent stating that larger businesses gain significant advantage from having access to better IT resources. However, 37 percent say they still use free webmail services like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! instead of business email services such as Microsoft Hosted Exchange.

Meanwhile, small businesses are highly dependent on IT services for managing relationships and customer service, with 89 percent of firms also agreeing that professional communications are important to their business.

These findings are consistent with the results of a recent Rackspace study, which showed that the number of IT functions outsourced to hosting, SaaS or cloud service providers will increase significantly over the next five years.