This morning, Spiceworks released the findings of their bi-annual State of the SMB IT survey. This survey, which is based on the responses of 1000 SMB IT professionals from the company’s 2.5 million community-member base, found an overall optimistic view of the current SMB state.
In particular, the survey found that SMB IT budgets are up 19% overall, with an average of $192,000. Budgets for the “S” space are up a bit more than for those in the “M” space, however, which only showed a 13% increase. Though budgets are on the rise, the hiring rate for SMBs is down by 4%, with only 22% of respondents saying they plan to hire new staff this year.
Additional findings include:
- Cloud holds steady at 61% use for at least one service, though the smallest SMBs (1-20 employees) are both adopting cloud faster, and dedicating more resources to current cloud services.
- Server Virtualization is also up, with 72% of respondents saying that they either use one service, or plan to migrate this year. The most common services used were for e-mail, printing and security.
- 39% of SMBs spend most of their budget on hardware, particularly tablets. Software follows at 30%, with IT services coming in third at 19%.
Kathryn Pribish, Program Manager for Voice of IT, Spiceworks, spoke a bit about the survey results in a press release this morning: “The results of our most recent survey highlight optimism among SMB IT departments and a focus on the tools and technologies IT departments need to support their growing businesses. SMBs account for half of all IT spending worldwide, so the results of this survey bode well for technology vendors developing the latest SMB products and services.”
The full survey results are available from Spiceworks at the site here.
