SMBs: a market ripe for servicing over broadband

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 12 October 2006 12:52

IT Industry - Deals

The latest edition of Pacific Internets Broadband Barometer annual survey of  small and medium businesses' usage of broadband shows a market with 100 percent take-up but hungry for higher speeds and more sophisticated broadband-delivered services.

The key indicators of this market are broadband uptake, now at 92 percent compared to 79 percent last year, a huge growth in uptake of externally hosted applications, to 42 percent, managed backup and recovery services at 56 percent, and VoIP at 19 percent, compared to just one percent a year ago.  Firewall usage has leapt to 92 percent from 65 percent a year ago.

Pacific Internet CEO, Dennis Muscat, said the requirements of SMEs were now becoming quite sophisticated: "Small businesses want what big businesses have got." While this might seem like a potential bonanza for suppliers, Muscat added: "but they do not want to pay a lot."

Despite widespread deployment of security solutions such as firewalls, virus and spam filtering, the survey found a strong theme of vulnerability running through responses and with good reason: 29 percent of respondents had suffered some downtime in the past 12 months, and three percent at least a week's  downtime.

The report concluded that  SMBs were "doing more with their ICT infrastructure, deploying ICT tools for large proportions of their staff and connecting these tools to the wider world via Internet access technologies. However with half of respondents on broadband speeds of 1.5MBps or lower, the report concluded that these businesses "do not have the necessary bandwidth to move to the next level of Internet applications usage."

For the purposes of the survey, undertaken by  GfK Marketing Services Australia, SMBs were taken to be those employing between five  and 199 people, excluding those in the energy and agriculture sectors. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates there are about  243,00 active businesses in Australia in this category.

GfK conducted the survey by telephone interview with a sample of 525. The 514 with internet access formed the basis of the survey. Sixty eight percent were in metropolitan areas and 32 percent in non-metro. Those employing 5-19 people formed the bulk of the sample, 58 percent, followed by 20-49 employees at 25 percent.

The Broadband Barometer report is available for download from Pacific Internet.