Small and Medium Business – Some Facts, Analysis & an Idea

 

Author: Kanishka Ajwani

Kanishka Ajwani works as a Researcher R&D, Tata Consultancy Services and has expertise in Software As A Service.

Over the last few years, the software industry in India has grown like a monster alien grows huge out of heat.  Big players have entered the software market at a fast pace, with all those jargonized software services and products. And the use of IT in the industry has enabled these players to mature and strengthen their stand in the market. Such a condition, on one hand has fortified the Indian markets, but on the other hand has led to the demolishment of SMBs: the Small and Medium Business. 

What exactly is SMB?

SMB is a term used for a collection of small or medium sized companies in terms of infrastructure and count of employees. The concept is standardized by European Union which tag companies with fewer than 50 employees as “small“, and those with more than 50 employees but fewer than 250 employees as “medium“. Such organizations are unable to maintain and sustain themselves against the expert thespians in the market. It has become extremely difficult and challenging for them to compete with the complex technologies today used by the huge established groups due to the lack of capital, resource and opportunity.

There are large number of consultancies and expert associations in the market that offer strategic plans and resources for SMBs to let them grow with the same rate.  

• Many of them aim at engaging the right talent and skill set, designing the right organizational structure for a small/medium company and collaborating with many of the world’s leading service providers and emerging players. 
• Some groups also make available to SMBs IT products/services/tools used in the markets, at lower prices. There are some products specifically designed for SMBs that provide easily manageable, all-encompassing solutions that cover the critical elements of an IT infrastructure such as intranet, email, instant messaging, security and many others. 
• Other organizations provide a model driven approach towards SMB wherein a model is designed to provide an end to end solution following the “pay as you grow” methodology. The SMBs pay to the provider as they keep growing using the solution provided to them. 

These solutions available today in the market do help the SMBs to stand against the big actors, but again the concern comes back to the money that they pay to the providers, which is sizeable to make the SMBs think over it.

An Idea Suggesting a New Approach:

What I suggest goes like this: 5 to 6 SMBs group join together and invest the capital that they have to purchase excellent and superior quality hardware as a joint possession. This system/server/environment will be used by the SMB group to host their IT Infrastructure together on the same host. Say for example, one mail server can be used across 5-6 small companies to provide the employees a mailing facility. This technique would make it possible to develop the entire IT infrastructure without any extra cost being incurred. The only sticky situation this would create is the extra effort of maintainability and security of the hardware.