by Scott Tyler Shafer

Tech companies target SMBs

news
Jan 22, 20041 min

More and more I’ve been hearing how companies are repositioning its products to address the needs of small and medium business (SMBs). At first I didn’t get, so I asked.

One person I talked to was Atchison Frazer, the vice president of marketing at ServGate. I definitely asked the right guy.

He explained to me that the aggregate spend of the 10 million SMBs this year is the same as the Fortune 1000. He also mentioned IBM is spending $400 million on a marketing program to reach the SMBs, and that Cisco Systems is privy to the fact that less than 50 percent of SMBs don’t have a LAN. The Linksys acquisition is starting to make even more sense.

He attests the arrival of worms, like Sobig, exploited the needs of the SMBs. Now everyone is out to redesign its products to be more modular, easier to manage, and chockfull of features, so that the non-savvy IT companies can operate into today’s networked world.

Beyond the security market, I also see storage vendors targeting SMBs. The arrival of the iSCSI protocol makes it easier for those SMBs with a LAN to also begin networking its storage.