The AMI-Partners Blog

This chart posted on the Obama administration’s website makes the job situation visually pretty clear.

Good news today in the Washington Post. The U.S. economy “soared” at its highest growth rate in six years (5.7%):

The U.S. economy roared ahead in the final months of 2009, growing at its fastest rate in six years, as corporate America stopped slashing its inventories and again started to invest for the future.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, rose at a 5.7 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. That is the highest pace of growth since 2003, and it constitutes strong proof that the recession reached its end earlier in 2009. It was also a surprisingly positive result, well above the 4.6 percent rate of GDP growth forecasters had expected.

Some of this is just an adjustment from the prior quarter, the article notes:

But there remained reason to doubt how strong the economic recovery will be in 2010. The biggest component of the GDP growth was a steep drop in the pace at which businesses were cutting back on their inventories. Firms reduced their inventories by $33.5 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $139 billion in the third. In the math of GDP, which attempts to capture the value of goods and services produced within U.S. borders, that added 3.4 percentage points to overall growth.

Read the whole story here:

AMI has a new press release on the top un-reported SMB trends for 2010. It begins:

Top 2010 ICT trends the industry isn’t talking about in the global SMB markets were released today by AMI-Partners.

Much attention has been given to 2010 trends such as the increasing adoption of SaaS, managed services, virtualization and mobile applications. Although AMI acknowledges most of these are well documented predictions, its team of go-to-market analysts have identified the following six (6) trends that the industry hasn’t fully explored.

Read the rest here:

Figure 1:

New AMI research shows that President Obama and Congress may not be doing the best job of soothing SMBs’ concerns over the economy. US SMBs are showing a little optimism in the new year, with a lot of apprehension.

As a recent AMI report shows, US SBs who felt the government was responding very well to the economic crisis went from 39% in the third quarter to a paltry 24% in the fourth. MBs tell an even more dramatic story. In the MB sphere the number went from 47% to 21%.

This is problematic for a president struggling to sooth worries of SMBs, who are the backbone of the economy. President Obama went on 60 Minutes in early December partly to boost his jobs program and tax breaks for small businesses. (You can watch that appearance here.)

Do these numbers mean that with his clutch of other crises, including a push for healthcare reform and a redoubled terror panic, the president is failing to take his message to SMBs? A few more numbers suggest it could.

US SBs unaware of any stimulus money due to them, as a result of the Economic Recovery Act, jumped from 52% in the third quarter to a whopping 70% in the fourth. Among MBs, it went from 62% to 69%.

These and other numbers come from AMI’s ongoing US Quarterly Pulse. You can take a look at that here.

In a few days, we’ll look at the same survey questions posed to Germany, the UK and France.

AMI has a new press release with some positive news, called, FIRE & Retail SMBs in India show a positive trend towards recovery – is the worst over?

Here’s the first paragraph:

Bangalore, India – January 8, 2010 – India SMBs (small and medium business or companies with up to 999 employees) took requisite steps to increase revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009. These SMBs are set to spend US$4.49B on ICT in the next three months. There is a significant increase in investments for new customer acquisition among verticals such as transportation, construction, healthcare and FIRE (comprised of banking and financial services, insurance and real estate). This comes from the latest study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. In the retail sector, over one fifth of India SMBs mentioned another key focus area for technology adoption is data management.

Read the full release here.

The current economic downturn has forced European SMBs to scrutinize every aspect of their spending. Much has been made about how strained financial circumstances are making the predictable, regular opex outlay of “in-the-cloud” IT services propositions more attractive to SMB decision-makers. Certainly AMI is seeing this reflected in the uptake of Remote Managed IT Services (RMITS), which has experienced a spurt in growth during the last few months (see AMI’s recently published report on The Emerging SMB Managed Services Market Opportunity & Ecosystem in EMEA, August 2009).

In response to this opportunity, AMI has been seeing a range of players enter the market, each vying for their piece of the pie. read more »

When word came yesterday that Facebook was acquiring the social networking aggregator FriendFeed, my thoughts immediately flashed back to a conversation I had in the summer of 2008 with Chris Pallé of The UX Workshop. During our conversation, Chris offered the most offensive thing to my ears at the time: There was something better than Twitter. Still head over heels in love with Twitter, I couldn’t believe Chris would dare to suggest that the basic simplicity of Twitter could be rivaled. What could be better than an instant commiseration among 200 friends about a horrible bus ride I had just taken? An amazing debate we had all watched together on television? A shared reveling in a new product?

This something better was FriendFeed. It wasn’t a Twitter killer, Chris insisted, but was an alternative worth investigating. read more »

With worsening economic condition, negative sentiments, cutbacks in expenses, and climbing lay-offs, SMBs* are looking at various ways to keep their businesses up and running. Everyone is cutting back on costs: even individuals are reprioritizing their needs. While companies have put the brakes on expenses, there is still opportunity for the Telecommunication Service Providers to smile. read more »

Despite what could be considered the most challenging economic environment for information technology, one segment of channel partners is thriving in this market. The economic downturn has forced a number of channel partners to reassess their business model and look beyond their current portfolio of IT solutions. This has led to the growth of partners focused on providing Software-as-a-Service based solutions (SaaS partners). SaaS partners continue to drive significant growth by addressing the key challenges faced by their Small and Mid-sized Business (SMB) customers.

As the recession takes a tighter hold on global IT markets, the attitudes and purchasing behaviors of SMB customers have changed dramatically.  Now even the smallest businesses cautiously calculate the practical and financial impact of their IT investments. Given these challenges, the priorities for SMBs have shifted from longer term growth strategies to more immediate needs, specifically:

1. customer retention
2. efficiency optimization
3. cost control

What separates SaaS Partners from other partners?
SaaS partners provide ideas and solutions that speak to each of the above three areas of their clients’ business. read more »

The business plan is brilliant; value proposition (Customer delivered value) is apt for the current tumultuous times; bandwidth/network availability is all time high in top cities; addressable market is vast and awareness levels are on the rise….. So are we ready to witness a rise in ground level adoption of the cloud computing concept (PaaS/SaaS/IaaS) in India?

One is being presumptuous of the value on offer. Isn’t the very idea of availing business applications on the web with fraction of the cost of traditional routes lucrative enough? What are users saying? AMI Partners Q-pulse provides demand side quarterly updates on the current dynamic market conditions where sentiments, mindset and purchase plans are being constantly re-assessed against the backdrop of changing macro-environmental factors as well as internal company issues. read more »