Small and medium businesses (SMB) apparently cannot resist cloud services, 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.

So why are such high numbers being thrown around? 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.”

Nowadays, SMBs are some of the largest backers of mobile phones as almost two-thirds hand their employees smartphones for business purposes. Moreover, tablet computers are taking over and, according to the study, eight percent of SMBs plan to purchase over 1.5 million tablets for their businesses in the next 12 months. Collaborative working services such as hosted document sharing and UC (conferencing, messaging and presence) are provoking the highest level of future interest.

 “The cloud model’s flexible payment model (pay per user per month) makes access to technology affordable for resource-constrained small and medium businesses,” Gibbs said. “But equally important is that the cloud model eases and speeds up implementation of technology. Seventy percent of European small businesses have no dedicated IT staff resources to draw on. So passing the responsibility for delivering applications to a skilled service provider who manages the whole process is not just attractive, for many, it now makes adoption possible.”

“For hard-pressed mid-market IT departments, mobile and remote access to company IT resources presents huge security and administrative headaches,” Gibbs added. “Outsourcing these workloads to service providers in more secure environments managed 24x7 by dedicated and skilled staff, is also making great sense.”

The study was based off of more than 1,500 interviews with key SMB business and technical decision makers in Western Europe and provided in-depth analysis of the current and future adoption of different SaaS (News - Alert) productivity/collaboration and business management applications, and of the impact of key hosted infrastructure and managed services. The studies provide segment by segment analysis (size and vertical sector) of adoption patterns, and explore SMB buyer preferences for private vs. public cloud solutions and the channels they prefer to purchase from, according to the researchers.