Forrester SMB study mirrors activity in accounting market.
It looks like many small and medium-size businesses are acting a lot like many accounting firms… which makes sense when you consider that most accounting firms are working hard to keep up with their clients and yet not stray too far ahead to the bleeding edge, nor fall too far behind. See Survey Results: Top Tech Trends 2009. All of this will be examined in-depth in an upcoming Aug. 11 webinar with Jean Caragher of Capstone Marketing and made possible by BizActions.
Meanwhile, Fredric Paul at bMighty reports:
According to the study, application integration and cost cutting are SMBs top goals, followed by boosting innovation. But relatively few SMBs are focusing on expanding the use of SaaS or moving applications off-premise. That makes sense to me, because those are essentially tactics, not goals. At the same time, though, concerns about SaaS is dropping dramatically, the report said in many cases by half or two-thirds, which should lead to greater adoption even if it’s not a specific goal for most SMBs. The most popular SaaS apps are CRM — can you say, Salesforce.com — but Web 2.0 technologies are also starting to show up. Other popular initiatives resemble enterprise choices, including updating key legacy apps and increasing use of collaboration technologies.
Surprisingly, Unified Communications was the top software technology of interest to SMBs, even though only 25% have either implemented it or are about to do so. Another 10% are piloting UC apps, and 30% are looking into it. Other top choices include the following, in descending order of importance:
- Unified communications
- Open source software
- Mobile development tools and middleware
- Business process management (BPM)
- Business activity management
- Information as a Service
- Event-driven applications
- Platform as as Service (PaaS)
- Contract life-cycle management
- Information life-cycle management (ILM)
- Business rules engines
- Application life-cycle management (ALM)
- Complex event processing
- Enterprise service bus (ESB)
Among packaged applications and information and knowledge management, human capital management software is the most widely implemented (23%) but ERP will attract the most growth (19%).
Many SMBs are still unsure about platform software and SOA. Only a quarter of SMBs are either using or will pursue SOA in the next 12 months. Of those, internal integration is by far the most popular use.
On the infrastructure side, database software leads platform and infrastructure software activity, implemented at 32% of SMBs, with another 28% planning to expand. Portal server software (8%) and enterprise collaboration software (8%) are mostly in pilot phases. Other technologies SMBs are considering include SOA and Web services management, application servers and platform software, and business process management (BPM) software.
