IT for small business - a separate market segment

    For a long time, small business was undeservedly out of sight of IT companies. There are many explanations for this fact, but the most obvious is that small businesses are not so “tasty” in terms of profit and implementation costs.

    The first and still the main sales sector is the corporate market. Large budgets, almost constant consumption volumes and long implementation periods. Add to this technical support, the situation for the IT-company of the contractor is evolving. Large projects in the corporate market have another nice feature - relatively low risks in the event of a project failure. If anyone is in the subject, remember if you have seen major scandals related to the failure of the project? As a rule, everything is quietly forgotten under the pretext of a new technology or something else. This does not mean at all that the number of successful IT projects in the corporate sector is small. It's just that it’s not so sensitive there - all the same, the budget had to be mastered.

    Further, the attention of IT companies was attracted by home users. This is the sweet word multimedia! Home users have given a good impetus to gaming technologies, mass access technologies to the Internet and manufacturers of audio and video hardware. Actually everything. Only manufacturers of hardware, gaming applications and operating systems won. Well, maybe more antiviruses.

    Small business all this time has remained undeservedly forgotten. It was believed that corporate-oriented applications could be introduced there. It doesn’t matter that the cost of these decisions can equal the annual turnover of a small company. Because of this, the level of piracy in this sector of the market tended to 100%. Perhaps the only IT companies that successfully worked in this sector were accounting software manufacturers. Not the last role in this was played by our wonderful tax authorities, which change reporting forms with enviable regularity. ;-) And according to some rumors, they openly demanded that the accounting documents be prepared in such or such programs. As a result, we got an interesting effect: people who cannot spend a single extra penny on anything other than their main activity, began to buy software and support.

    In addition, the markets for corporate and home users seem to be saturated. Software and hardware manufacturers needed a new market, but by this time it was no longer empty. What does a person who needs a small network in an office with a file server and printer for minimal money do? That's right, he hires guys who give him either pirated versions or free software. And the latter is worse for software manufacturers than a pirated copy. The service business model will never bring them such profits. As a result of the development of these trends, many software manufacturers have recently released specialized products and licensing schemes aimed at the small and medium business sector. Moreover, they found that if they offer a small business a product that really helps them, they buy it.

    About these products and the role of Internet technologies in small business a little later.

    PS Not too long and boring?

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