Parallels: SME Cloud Services Market to Reach $95 Billion by 2015

More and more small and medium-sized enterprises adopt cloud technologies at different levels. SMEs are an important part of the cloud market and are at the heart of SaaS growth, according to the releases a report about the small business market (SMB) by Parallels.

Across the world, Parallels estimated $45 billion in the market for cloud services for SMEs last year, with a growth outlook to $95 billion by 2015 at a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent.

For the next three years, Parallels anticipates an increase of cloud market for SMEs. It is therefore important that service providers are familiar now with the different profiles of SMEs and implement a marketing strategy targeted to take advantage of this trend.

SMBs are adopting cloud services at an accelerating rate, and they also have more choice than ever before in where to buy their cloud services. Thanks to the presence of more cloud providers, SMEs have access to affordable services and applications, computer or other equally powerful and rich features as those for large companies. SMBs used four cloud services on average in 2012, and the number will grow to 7 cloud services by 2015.

Parallels categorized into four main groups representing SMEs growth potential for cloud services. These are Infrastructure as a Service that represent $31.3 billion of the total market, business apps $33.8 billion, collaboration and hosted communications $14.3 billion and overall web presence represents $16.3 billion. A recent SAP report revealed that SMBs are moving faster into Big Data arena than their bigger competitors. Another SMB Disaster Preparedness survey by Symantec Corp, insights how cloud computing, virtualization and mobility is assisting SMBs to improve their ability to recover from a disaster.

In the US alone, SaaS applications saw 60 percent growth in 2012 and the SMB cloud market is now $18.9 billion. Parallels forecasts SMB cloud market in the US is expected to grow 19 percent through 2015. Additionally, 68 percent of SMBs indicated they would prefer to buy their cloud services as part of a discounted bundle.

In the currently-released study, Parallels says the results identify storage as a strong upsell opportunity for IaaS providers, with 50 percent of SMBs indicating they’re willing to pay more for additional storage. It also identifies website building tools as a way for service providers to differentiate their offerings, with 22 percent of US SMBs saying they use such a tool now and 30 percent saying they plan to by 2015.