Vendors need to Understand Technology Awareness among SMBs

By Kedar Joshi ,‎General Manager - CRM, Vodafone India Services Pvt.Ltd.

Kedar Joshi ,‎General Manager - CRM, Vodafone India Services Pvt.Ltd.

Information Technology has become the backbone of industry today. Be it a sprouting small business or a large enterprise which has showed its mettle to thrive against all odds, none of them can continue to pass muster without the support and objective transformation which IT can offer to streamline their business processes.

The small and medium businesses are still allocating huge budgets every year to manage their in-house setups and they do not have ROI calculation benchmarks to analyze their investments. By evaluating global ERP applications, it can easily be corroborated that the exorbitant cost of implementations are too high in context of SMBs’ turnovers. Most of the SMBs who have invested substantial budgets on these applications are not able to utilize their investments because the applications are not compatible with their segments.

SaaS has a Vital Role to play in the Growth of SMBs

The global economic scenario of mergers, acquisitions and closures is discouraging for non-performing SMBs and in the absence of end-to-end strong process integration at minimal recurring cost, they will be unable to compete and sustain. SMBs in India have a very different working culture compared to the big business houses and each one has its unique way of working. Solution providers need to understand the level of technology awareness among SMBs’ workforce, their IT budgets and the available IT expertise of this sector to bring a solution on non-resistible investments, based on proper studies.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is still in its initial stage in India, can play a vital role for the prosperity of SMBs and those who adopt change in terms of technology and process management will definitely survive and grow. It can go a long way in building confidence among entrepreneurs of this sector on data confidentiality, seamless 24x7x365 application connectivity, mobile application development and robust application suiting almost every specific business needs of this sector. The flexibility, manageability, user-friendliness and adoptability which come along, strengthens business process integration. Apart from application, SMBs can also benefit from the vendors bringing proposals where they provide hardware, networking and bandwidth on lease. Leasing their hardware, networking and bandwidth will provide them peace of mind to concentrate on core business requirements.

Competitive Atmosphere for an Innovative Organization

When it comes to the core business, the primary concerns for the IT Heads is to concentrate on management’s vision, building resources and driving innovation. As the SMBs’ budget does not attract highly qualified resources, they make the work culture inclusive by giving the employees responsibility and motivating them to bring exceptional results. The senior management executives also keep eyes on latest technology trends which can add value to their businesses. They conduct meetings with vendors to get updates on the current trends in application, hardware, mobility and cloud. The competitive atmosphere thus created, inspires the workers to come up with innovative ideas and play an active role in the growth of organization.