Cloud Communications

Cloud Communications Feature

July 06, 2011

SMBs Rapidly Turning to Cloud Communications

By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor

One of the biggest trends of 2011 so far is indisputably the surge of small and medium businesses (SMBs) who are increasingly turning to cloud services.

For years, organizations and market leaders have debated when it will actually be the year of the cloud, if organizations will be ready for cloud communications and if cloud will emerge as a trend or a simple fad. Currently, the statistics speak loud and clear that cloud is here to stay.

Last week, IDC reported that worldwide revenue for servers deployed to public clouds will reach $3.6 billion in 2015 while private cloud server revenue will reach $5.8 billion. Why are we seeing such large numbers suddenly? Because IT managers are more eager than ever to simplify their current IT infrastructures and find new ways to enjoy cost savings and increased efficiencies.

“These evolutionary, and revolutionary, changes in IT deployment and business attitudes are having a profound impact on traditional IT environments,” said Katie Broderick, senior research analyst, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends and Strategies, IDC (News - Alert), in a statement.

“Off-loading some of the more mundane tasks to the cloud and freeing up manpower to focus on adding value to the business is critical to driving cloud adoption,” Broderick added.

With widespread adoption of cloud communications underway, SMBs are perhaps one of the largest groups clamoring to reap the benefits of the cloud.

While SMBs may have been reluctant in past years to adopt the cloud – because they don’t know which provider to use, they are concerned about getting locked into a provider and there is worry that they will experience a lack of interoperability – companies like Telepshere have been working to quell these concerns.

Telesphere, a company that advocates to consumers to adopt its “Telesphere (News - Alert) Difference,” was set up specifically to address SMB concerns and help them enjoy the “extensive service and features” generally available only to larger corporations—all without the “cost, hassle, and limitations of traditional systems,” according to company officials.

Telesphere centralizes all of the functionality of a traditional PBX into a central softswitch for the whole country, so that SMBs do not need to purchase an expensive PBX (News - Alert) for their office and then pay a technician to maintain it. By connecting a customer’s office with a private and dedicated pure IP T1, Telesphere is able to provide all telephone and Internet service through a “hosted” solution.

Broadview is another company that has picked up on the trend of SMBs to cloud communications.

Broadview, a network-based business communications provider serving customers nationwide, provides total solutions for business communications, including all distance voice communications, premise-based and patented hosted VoIP systems and data services encompassing VPN- and MPLS-enabled applications, traditional telephone hardware, high-speed Internet services, a full suite of managed services and a range of professional service, according to company officials.

The company has also found a sweet spot in the SMB space after it recently launched a cloud offering in March that can be of great benefit to this group. Broadview now offers Cloud Computing Services, a suite of fully-managed enterprise-grade business software and infrastructure applications hosted in the cloud and tailored for SMB market.

The trend towards cloud communications is perhaps strongest for the SMBs in Western Europe, as spending by Western Europe’s 11 million SMBs is expected to swell at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6 percent between now and 2015. Analysts are also predicting that the adoption of cloud-based services such as Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and managed services will double. Western SMBs are quick to adopt this trend because the proliferation of mobile devices has become the leading force driving people to the cloud, according to a new market study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, the 2010-2011 State of SMB Cloud Services Market.

“The phenomenal expansion of mobile devices in the consumer world is having its effect on the SMB workplace,” said Hugh Gibbs, vice president of research at AMI in EMEA and author of the report, said in a statement. “Users now want to take the things they can do in their private lives into their professional working practices: for example, accessing email, simple internet apps and social networking sites, or checking availability of colleagues – and to do so wherever and whenever they need to.”


Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jamie Epstein
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