Camille Mendler, Practice Leader, SoHo & SME Services, Ovum said there’s an injustice in the technology industry – we’re looking at it the wrong way up – digital transformation improvement via tech is not just for large enterprises – the real opportunity is in transforming small enterprises.
This is an opportunity and understanding of that is starting to emerge.
SMEs don’t have IT departments to make it all work. We’re going to be talking about what they need. But how to reach them? SMEs realise they need to change how they do business. And the economic health of countries depend on the SME – so they’re important.
Who can they trust? There’s no front runner so it could be a local tech reseller or the telco. The service provider needs to be that trusted partner? They’re not buying on self-serve basis – they need help. There’s a very very long tail of self employed or very small companies. There’s also a hollow in the graph of middle sized companies.
What sectors are they in? Retail, wholesale, manufacturing, professional & technical services, construction. The services they consume will be different and they require specialist knowledge from services providers.
Q: What services does an SME need to run its business digitally?
Kevin Pang, Cloud Director, Solutions Development, StarHub Ltd, said it depends on the business but the focus should be on manufacturing – though it depends on the local economy. The SP has a key role in terms of delivery of eg SaaS.
Chong Powmin, Group Head Enterprise Products and Services, MyRepublic, said the government helps in this part of the world, eg Singapore. It has funds available to help the SME with cloud adoption. About 10k businesses have benefited – but it’s is a very small number out of 200k businesses in Singapore. Also, the tax department has a refund scheme for hardware eg network switches, and for services like document management. Take up is low – people are too busy worrying about their business! What they need is retail in a box – all the services they need including eg EPOS for $499 month. Entire business is then digitised – run by the service provider, who do it all, from fixing your printer etc.
Bernie Trudel, Data Center CTO, Cisco Systems, Asia Pacific and Chairman of the Asia Cloud Computing Association, said SMEs need to leapfrog from zero tech to get all their services from the cloud. But what about security?
Powmin said we have a programme that allows customers to sell our services as an agent to other businesses. Like the Avon lady model.
Pang said we go to very small resellers who have boots on the ground. At this level there’s a very small distinction between consumers and the business, it’s difficult to categorise them.
Trudel said it’s about what services they consume, they need security, wifi, broadband, analytics, face recognition… I like the idea of the bundle.
Courtesy: NetEvents
