Web 'U' RSS Feeds
Archive for the ‘small business’ Category
Spiceworks, a social network for the IT community and a provider of a provider of IT management software, has released its bi-annual State of SMB IT survey of technology purchasing and adoption trends.
The survey revealed that SMBs are expanding their IT budgets, growing 6 percent in the first half of 2012 from the second half of 2011, and 15 percent year-over year. The research found that SMBs are adopting tablets, cloud services and virtualization and have some strong opinions on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.
"Data from this recent survey confirms that the consumerization of IT is flourishing among SMBs, although opinions vary on how to manage its impact on organizations," says Jay Hallberg, co-founder and vice president of marketing for Spiceworks. "The results also show that SMBs are spending more on technology across the board, from hardware and devices to cloud services and virtualization. This bodes well for technology vendors serving the SMB market in 2012."
A few more highlights from the survey include the following:
- Fifty-six percent of SMBs are retaining their IT headcount and 30 percent intend to hire additional staff over the next six months. These metrics remain consistent with the results from the second half of 2011.
- Sixty-two percent of SMBs have deployed or plan to deploy tablet devices, such as iPads, within the next six months. That figure is up from the 50 percent reported for the second half of 2011.
- The largest portion of IT budgets (40 percent) will be allocated to hardware purchases, followed by software (34 percent) and IT services (26 percent). The two biggest planned IT services purchases are web hosting (54 percent) and ISP (44 percent).
- Cloud services are now used by 48 percent of SMBs, up from 46 percent in the second half of 2011 and 28 percent for the first half of 2011.
- The top five cloud services by usage are Web hosting (49 percent), e-mail hosting (32 percent), data backup (25 percent), content filtering (24 percent) and application hosting (23 percent).
- The top cloud services that respondents plan to purchase in the next six months are data backup (17 percent), application hosting (12 percent), data storage (12 percent) and e-mail hosting (11 percent).
- Currently, 64 percent of respondents use virtualization, up from 61 percent during the second half of 2011 and the 54 percent reported for the first half of 2011. In addition, SMBs using virtualization are now virtualizing an average of 3.1 applications compared with an average of 2.1 applications a year ago.
Comments Off
Yahoo Gets Serious with its Marketing Dashboard
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 6:59 AM
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Yahoo, yes Yahoo, has launched a tool for businesses to obtain a "consolidated picture" of marketing results and reputation. Is this the first step in Yahoo!'s return?
Using the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, small business owners can monitor their search engine and directory listings and receive recommendations on new opportunities on over 100 sites and monitor their online reputation on up to 8,000 digital sources (including Facebook and Twitter).
The dashboard also offers users access to site traffic analysis reports, integrating data from Yahoo Merchant Solutions and Google Analytics. Yahoo is also offering up a way for SMB users of the marketing dashboard to integration with other services - notably email service provider Constant Contact and local internet marketing solution OrangeSoda.
“We created the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard to help small business owners who feel overwhelmed by online marketing options and monitoring a wide range of sites and social networks to keep up with customer feedback,” said Shannon Parker Hane, Director of Product Marketing, Yahoo! Small Business. “Now, within a single tool customers can conveniently evaluate their marketing options, campaign results and online reputation without having to search across the Web for information.”
While I believe there are stronger unified software services for monitoring and managing search and social, it's good to see the company moving in what I believe to be the right direction. The Yahoo Marketing Dashboard requires businesses to list within the Yahoo Small Business, but based on some of the features offered out of the virtual box, that's a small price to pay for use of the free service.
Comments Off
Recent Comments