SMEs are migrating to cloud computing

With our C365 Cloud hat on it’s interesting to look at the latest developments in cloud computing. What sets apart the fastest-growing small businesses is their innate strength at turning data and information into results.


It’s becoming easy to spot a smaller business which is going to break out and grow quickly.
They often have these qualities:

• They highly value knowledge, expertise and speed
• They have successfully managed a geographically distributed supply chain, production and service operations early in their history
• and long before they reach $20M in sales they have learned how to balance domestic and international customer demands. 

In short, they learned fast how to compete and win business globally. Over the last several months research firms and enterprise software vendors have released studies on cloud computing adoption in small & medium enterprises. With that in mind – here are some key recent findings on cloud computing.

Forrester forecasts that channel partners will increase their reliance on cloud software and services from 22% to 27% from 2013 to 2014.  The majority of this growth will be in SMEs. More information here.

Sixty per cent of SMEs who responded to a recent survey are using cloud-based solutions today, with an additional five per cent planning to add cloud services in the next six months.  Sixty nine per cent of SMEs with fewer than 20 employees and 55 per cent of SMEs with 250 to 999 employees are using cloud-based applications today. More information here.

Investment in cloud solutions will grow by almost 20 per cent over the next five years, with three in 10 midsize firms adopting public cloud solutions according to a recent report from  IBM and IDC called Cloud Computing in the Midmarket: Assessing the Options in 2013.

Hosting and cloud services provider Parallels projects that the worldwide SME SaaS applications market was $14.5B in 2012 and will grow to $33.8B by 2015. More information here.

Finally SMEs prefer to lease or pay-as-they-go for  the cloud (43 per cent) rather than buy or acquire (23 per cent) a system according to SAP-sponsored survey by Oxford Economics.  The study found that the tools most commonly used by SMEs are business management software (48 per cent), mobile (46 per cent), and analytics (44 per cent). Cloud computing adoption is expected to jump from 35 per cent to 47 per cent in three years. A good presentation on the results can be found here.

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C365Cloud is an a cloud-hosted compliance management system designed to help any organisation audit, manage and improve their statutory compliance. The award-winning system is now used by 17,000 individual users and 3500 suppliers for over 100 compliance areas at 500,000 properties.

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