* Small businesses have their own messaging requirements
A couple of weeks ago, above the Boston bar that was the inspiration for the TV series “Cheers,” I had the privilege of participating in a roundtable discussion sponsored by Inc. Magazine and Ipswitch. The discussion focused on the difficulties in meeting the needs of small and midsized businesses for vendors and SMBs alike.
One of the fundamental problems for vendors in the SMB market is that the sales model is very different than for enterprise customers. Because the value of each sale is much lower than when selling into the Fortune 1000, channel partners are a critical component for vendors to effectively reach SMB customers. Many vendors of messaging and other technologies are simply not as well equipped as they need to be to address SMBs, since they require not only a different approach to selling products, but also to supporting them.
Likewise, it’s tougher for SMBs to purchase, deploy and manage technology. Since they typically have significantly fewer resources than enterprise customers do, their cost per user is typically much higher because they can’t spread the cost of IT labor over a large base of users. But the sophistication of their needs is generally on par with those of their enterprise counterparts.
The roundtable brought out the differing needs for products aimed at the SMB market compared to the enterprise market. Enterprises, for example, can afford to deploy products that need lots of tinkering and that are more temperamental because they have the resources to devote to closely managing these systems. SMBs, on the other hand, need technology that their users cannot inadvertently break and that simply run on their own, since the person in the 100-employee company who manages e-mail also may double as the office manager.
We’re currently conducting a survey of SMBs to understand their practices and concerns and will shortly be publishing a report on our findings. I’d like to get your thoughts on managing messaging systems in the SMB space from both the vendor and the customer perspective. Please drop me a line at mailto:michael@ostermanrsearch.com
