Small and medium-sized enterprises (businesses with less than 250 employees) represent almost 99% of all businesses worldwide, employ 1.5 billion people and in 2012 spent $203 billion on ICT services annually. While the vast majority of the ICT spend is on traditional communications services like mobile voice, fixed-line and broadband, the growth for telcos is in cloud services.
According to forecasts by Analysys Mason, worldwide revenue from SMEs for ICT will jump from $203 billion in 2012 to $226 billion by 2017.
SMEs will spend about $2 billion on cloud services in developed and emerging Asia Pacific. Our forecasts show that the compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) from 2012-2017 for telecom services are 0.12% and 19% for developed and emerging Asia Pacific. But the growth rate for cloud services are 19% and 42%, respectively (see figure on next page). Cloud services will account for 6% of total SME ICT services revenues in developed Asia Pacific, up from 2% in 2012.
In developed Asia Pacific cloud services supplement relatively anemic growth of traditional communication services. In emerging Asia Pacific, cloud services provide telcos with the tools to differentiate their offerings to SME customers.
Remote desktop solutions are becoming increasingly important for SMEs because they support two key trends: remote working and bring-your-own-device (BYOD). Such services help employees that wish to work from home or another location outside the office because they enable them to receive remote IT support by inviting a third party (either in-house or external) to control or view their screen. In addition, employees that wish to use their personal devices for work are able to use these devices to access their work computer, with full access to the files and software that are available to that computer.
The cloud-based remote desktop services market will be worth more than $252 million in Asia Pacific in 2017. Communications service providers and vendors are already forming partnerships to provide these services to their SME customers.
We recently wrote a report profiling Splashtop, a provider of remote desktop management solutions for SMEs and enterprises. Splashtop does not have a direct sales team. To bring its products to SMEs, Splashtop uses numerous partners, such as Taiwan-based technology manufacturer Acer, Japan-based industrial systems supplier Daikin Industries, and mobile device management providers such as Good Technology and MobileIron, which use remote desktop solutions to enhance their own product offerings. These channel partners have established customer bases across a range of verticals and geographies including Asia Pacific, which broadens Splashtop’s reach.
Increasingly, Splashtop is building reseller relationships with operators, which might eventually decide to host the Splashtop solution in their own data centers to increase the simplicity of the offering. There are many examples of operators worldwide that are partnering with technology vendors to offer cloud services to SMEs.