SMBs see 30% rise in revenue from cloud computing

In a new Microsoft survey, SMB organisations are linking rises in revenue to the use of cloud-based managed services. Services such as e-mail and website hosting are proving increasingly popular among small business owners as they look to increase productivity without increasing overheads.

The report, SMB IT and Hosted IT Index 2010, was conducted by independent analyst firm Freeform Dynamics which looked at the effects of IT adoption on revenue growth among 3193 SMBs in 15 countries.  It claims that 40% of the respondents using managed services reported revenue rises of 30% compared with 90% of respondents not using hosted technology that reported an overall decrease in revenue.

"Over the last five years, we have seen nearly 40% growth in usage of hosted services," said Michael Korbacher, director of EMEA Software plus Services in the Communications Sector at Microsoft. "Using pay-as-you-go cloud technologies, small and midsize businesses can now afford and easily have access to enterprise-class, secure services across any platform."

"Our assessment of the report tells us that an increased focus on IT correlates with good performance in all of the size categories surveyed," said Dale Vile, research director of Freeform Dynamics. "This whole picture corroborates the notion that technology and hosted services can provide tangible business advantage, even for smaller companies, and it's not surprising to see that investment in IT and hosting goes hand in hand with good financial performance

The awareness of cloud-based services in the SMB space and its inherent cost and management advantages is also on the rise. 73% of SMBs expressed interest in using hosted software, as opposed to 44% in the 2008 version of the index.