17 percent SMBs cancelled their cloud contracts last year

MUMBAI, INDIA: It’s time cloud service providers (CSPs) improved their ante or be prepared to perish.

As more and more SMBs are turning to cloud and newer mobile applications as a means of business automation, they are turning to their CSPs for support. They expect the CSPs to be experts and help them in selecting the right cloud services for their business.

However, AMI said in the 2015 India SMB ICT & Cloud Services Tracker Overview, that the satisfaction level of SMBs with their cloud services providers (CSPs) can at best be termed moderate.

In its new note, AMI wrote that a majority (around 68 percent SBs & 57 percent of MBs) are non-committal when asked about their satisfaction with their present provider with 17 percent of SBs and 18 percent of MBs clearly voicing dissatisfaction.

“This is a wake-up call for CSPs to improve customer services. Fourteen percent SBs and 21 percent of MBs cancelled their cloud contracts last year,” said Partha Sarathi Sengupta, AVP, AMI. “Increased investment by OEMs to improve cloud technical expertise of their partners will allow their channel partners to become more familiar with the technical aspect of cloud-based services.”

In the future, web-based and mobile applications as well as on-demand and cloud-based services are likely to drive a majority of the SMB ICT opportunity in India. These services will significantly enhance the speed at which SMBs conduct business and deliver productivity.

Hybrid deployments will be the norm in the India SMB space; requiring high-quality managed and cloud services. Customers will want their channel partners to strategically support their business around cloud and mobile applications, IaaS, social media and big data.

Speaking about the opportunities for the channel in the SMB segment, AMI said that the India SMB spending on ICT products and services is anticipated to reach $52 billion by 2019, up from $31 billion in 2015. The key IT segments driving this growth include IT services, software, security and storage—all having a high compounded annual growth rate of around 20 percent over the next 4 years (2015-2019).

Rapid growth in smart phone sales (and related data plan expenses), and the growing deployment of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, remotely managed IT services (RMITS) and unified communications services (UCS) by the Indian SMBs, will propel the adoption AMI said in the 2015 India SMB ICT & Cloud Services Tracker Overview.

The combined mobility and cloud share of SMB wallet is expected to increase from 36 percent in 2015 to almost 50 percent by 2019, Sengupta noted.