Study: SMBs to spend $125 billion on advanced technology in 2011

Small- and medium-sized businesses are still facing challenging economic times and are still struggling to gain access to credit, but they've bounced back significantly since the low point of the recession and are beginning to be more aggressive in their acquisition of new technology.

In fact, a recent study shows that IT spending growth by SMBs has returned more rapidly than expected, since the recession officially ended in 2009. The study also forecasts that emerging technologies will spur them to spend $125 billion in 2011, outside the normal spending paters established in the past.

"SMBs account for an increasing share of overall corporate IT spending in the U.S.," said Justin Jaffe, a senior research analyst for Small- and Medium-sized Business and Home Office research at IDC, which conducted the study. "Vendors that understand how changing economic conditions and emerging technologies are affecting IT acquisition for different company size segments will have a considerable advantage in developing and marketing technology products and services for SMBs."

Additional key findings of this study include the following:

• U.S. SMBs will spend more than $125 billion on advanced technology in 2011, an increase from approximately $120 billion in 2010. These two years of spending growth represent a substantial rebound from 2009, when SMB IT spending declined by 4.2 perce, nt.
• Although the small business segment has traditionally shown higher IT spending growth, that pattern was broken in the past two years as smaller firms were more adversely affected by the economic downturn.
• Notebook PCs will continue to be the form factor of choice and will represent a larger share of total PC shipments into the SMB market than desktops. In 2015, the number of SMBs with notebooks will approach 4.7 million.
• The number of SMBs with local area networks will exceed 4.5 million in 2015, as even smaller businesses look to connect their users' PCs.

For more:
- see this release

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