SMBs: Outsourcing a growth tool

Encharter Insurance, in Lexington, Mass., prides itself on its hometown appeal. That feel for the neighborhood has contributed to its rapid growth - Encharter doubled in size in the last few years, to 55 employees and about $8 million in revenue.

But while business boomed, like many small companies Encharter paid little attention to developing an IT strategy to support expanding technology demands.

"I came into this job and found that there was no IT department," says Michael Sher, who last year was named president and CEO of the group of seven insurance agencies in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

He started looking for outside help, a maverick decision for the head of a small company. Most small and midsize businesses are reluctant to hand over IT functions to outsourcers, in large part because SMBs lack familiarity with the idea of outsourcing and fear they will lose control.

In addition, while some smaller outsourcing vendors such as CenterBeam and Everdream have built their businesses by focusing on SMBs, big-name providers such as Electronic Data Systems and IBM have yet to carve out a niche in the low end of the market, creating a supply-side issue that is holding back more widespread demand, analysts say.

Gartner estimates that about 90% of all new businesses created in the United States are in the SMB sector. It's a huge opportunity for outsourcers as these small firms begin to recognize that they can achieve the same benefits that large organizations enjoy when they hand over non-core IT functions to outside service providers.

"There is a small but growing legion of SMBs that are considering outsourcing," says Robert Brown, a research director at Gartner. He notes that the base is small: Companies with 100 to 499 employees now account for just 7.8% of the $50.5 billion business-process outsourcing market, but that number is expected to grow to more than 8% of a $78.8 billion market by 2009, according to Gartner.

"For most SMBs, there is an unfamiliarity with outsourcing that dictates that when they make technology buying decisions, the first thing they are going to think about is buying hardware and software, and then trying to integrate those through internal resources and staff, as opposed to turning to an outsourcer to help," Brown says.