The recent
AMI Partners study – “ILECs, CLECs or Cable Broadband Providers: Who Owns the Highest Value SMB Customers?” –
finds that 30 percent of U.S. small and medium-sized businesses can be classified as “high-value customers,” defined as “those with a deep reliance on IT and communications technologies.”
As befits their status these are the big spenders on IT and communications gear and services as well, accounting for 60 percent of the total amount spent each year. For IP-based communications products and services, such as IP-PBXs and Web conferencing, AMI found their share of spend to be “significantly higher.”
An analysis of the customer bases of AT&T, Verizon (
News -
Alert), cable broadband providers and other CLECs shows that they’re attracting these high-value small businesses (1-99 employees) when compared to national averages. But the study found that while AT&T (
News -
Alert) is doing well on those metrics in the mid-market space (100-999 employees), “cable providers are notably losing out quite significantly.”
Deepinder Sahni, Sr. VP at AMI-Partners, says that these firms do indeed rely heavily on IT and communications, “yet are trying to keep their IT cost structure manageable.” Managed IT services, he says are “key for such firms: If ISPs can attract this type of a customer into their fold, then the effort involved in cross-selling a larger portfolio of value-add services on top of broadband becomes a lot easier.”
Earlier this month,
TMC had the news that another AMI Partners study found Indian small and medium businesses are themselves on track to spend $1.04 billion on networking products and services this year, up by 11 percent over 2008.
Medium businesses, those from 100 to 999 employees, “will be generating a major portion of this spending,” the study concluded, “accounting for nearly 59 percent of the total SMB networking expenditure. The growth in networking spending among small businesses will be spearheaded by wireless networking.”
The estimated growth level is down amid this current economic slowdown, AMI officials explained, adding that it’s “still much better than other geographies.”
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by
Michael Dinan
