The latest semi-annual State of SMB IT report from Spiceworks was released last week. It contains some interesting mobile and cloud computing trends, culled from 1,300 users of the SaaS-based IT management software. They found that the “growth engine is well warmed up and on a path of continued growth and investment” for SMB-related IT spending. Budgets grew nine percent year over year, the largest increase in two years.
Also on the rise is the adoption of virtualization. 61% of the respondents, up from 54% this part spring, plan on adding virtual servers to their companies, with key concentrations to core apps such as Web and database services. Spiceworks has found that cloud service adoption has skyrocketed among SMBs, with 46% now using cloud services, up from just 28% in the first half of 2011, and a significant spike from the 14% that reported doing so mid-year 2010.
About half of SMB IT professionals either have deployed or plan to deploy tablets within the next 6 months. A third of respondents have already deployed tablets on their networks.
This is the fifth survey from Spiceworks on IT spending and usage. Twenty-five percent of the respondents are from businesses with less than 20 employees, while more than 30% are from businesses with 100 or more employees. More than four-fifths of all respondents (83.7%) come from businesses with 5 or fewer full-time IT staff. Respondents are from all over the world, with 40% in North America.
