SMB IT Spending Bouncing Back

It's a truism that small business spending leads the country out of recessions.

Market researchers at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC are forecasting that a spending rebound by small and medium businesses is happening. On a morning when the Dow Jones Industrial Average is plunging and markets are fixated on the continuing fall in housing prices, IDC's forecast is welcome news indeed.

What IDC said specifically in a statement Wednesday is that U.S. SMB "IT spending growth has returned more rapidly than expected since the recession officially ended in 2009."

With this midyear forecast, IDC expects the nation's 8 million SMBs to spend $125 billion on advanced technology this year, up from about $120 million in 2010.

"These two years of spending growth represent a substantial rebound from 2009, when SMB IT spending declined by 4.2%," IDC's statement said.

Key takeaways for the SMB channel from IDC's findings were:

• To concentrate on notebook PCs, which are becoming the form factor of choice among SMBs;
  
  
• Networking could continue to be promising as more small shops look to connect their PCs; and
  
  
• Server deployments will be an opportunity among midsize firms, which will be motivated by declining prices of entry-level hardware to virtualize, upgrade and consolidate their environments.

Posted by Scott Bekker on June 01, 2011 at 11:58 AM