SMBs Buck the Cut Back Trend on Tech

Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are often more vulnerable to disruption in the economy. Historically, during economic downturns or market crises, SMBs have tended to reduce or cut IT spending to prioritise other essential expenses such as payroll and supplies. However, new evidence shows that SMBs in Asia Pacific are bucking this trend by maintaining or increasing their investments in cloud technologies., despite rocky market conditions.

Cloud Investment is the Black

The Future of Operations, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by rhipe recently surveyed SMBs across eight countries in the Asia Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea.

The study found that cloud use is up across the board for SMBs, with an average 47% of application portfolios already in the cloud and an average 38% of the remaining applications planned for migration in the next 24 months.

SMBs equated cloud adoption with improved business agility, operational resilience, workforce efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and market competitiveness. This is great stuff, but if we are going to be honest, it could be argued these are the ubiquitously promised (and now generally anticipated) results flowing from modernised operations.

The more intriguing finding was a high and positive correlation between double-digit year-on-year revenue growth and the rate of cloud adoption in those businesses.

In fact, 94% of SMBs that reported between 10-19% revenue growth had either maintained or increased their investment in cloud since 2021. Overall average revenue growth for these businesses held an overall average revenue growth increase of 14%.

Conversely, there was a smaller number of SMBs that grew revenues without having any investment in cloud, and only achieving an overall average growth rate of 8%.

Bottom Line Impact Creates Investment Confidence

Source: The Future of Operations: Maximize Cloud Value with a Strategic Mindset, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by rhipe, 2023

Bottom Line Impact Creates Investment Confidence

It is now clear for SMBs that cloud investments made the difference to company performance and bottom-line outcomes through the pandemic, and into the following financial year.

As such, instead of reducing spend, the Forrester study found 83% of SMBs intend to maintain or increase investment in cloud platforms and solutions over the next two years.

This is excellent news for our partners. As we suggested in our first blog of this series ‘Is Cloud Value at a Crossroad for SMBs’ SMBs will need help if they are to sustain value generating outcomes from continued cloud investment.

There is considerable pent-up demand for cloud services, and the study from Forrester quantifies just how that will translate for your business. Make sure to download a copy and use the insights to your advantage.

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