Techaisle Blog

Techaisle’s SMB and Midmarket Hybrid Work Adoption Trends survey indicates that 41% of SMBs plan a phased approach to return to the office, up from 22% in 2021. 20% of employees will likely work from home, in sharp contrast to 58% in 2021, similar to pre-pandemic levels in 2019 when 29% of small business (1-99) employees, 9% of employees within midmarket firms (100-999), and 7% within upper-midmarket firms (1000-4999), who worked from home. Techaisle survey also shows that 42% of employees want to work 3-4 days per week from home.

Security, remote IT support, and unreliable networks continue to be significant technology challenges in managing remote workers. Remote IT support is an especially acute inhibitor for 46% of small businesses. On the people-side of the hybrid work equation, work-life conflict, maintaining team cohesiveness, and lack of training/career implications are dominant challenges. As a result, only 11% have a hybrid first mindset, but 37% believe they have mature remote work practices.

Team collaboration solutions, office collaboration tools (conference room devices), and remote worker collaboration devices (headsets, video cameras, etc.) are the top three priorities for 45% to 58% of SMBs. PC upgrades and refreshes to enable a hybrid workforce are the fourth top priority for 39% of SMBs.

Techaisle’s PC market study forecasts SMBs worldwide are likely to purchase 104.5 million PCs in 2022, a growth of 3.4 percent from 2021. The North American and Western Europe SMB PC shipment growth rates will likely be below 3 percent. 20-49 employee size segment will see a 3.9 percent growth rate, the highest among all employee sizes.

In 2022, SMBs are looking past the PC supply-chain challenges and focusing on improving employee experience, better security features offered by Windows 11, and accelerated move to cloud infrastructure requiring modern PCs. The transition to cloud infrastructure will also enable SMBs to utilize computing as a service rather than physical servers for their businesses, shifting spending from CAPEX to OPEX. The IT budget surplus will allow SMBs to purchase newer, more powerful PCs for further growth endeavors. In addition, SMBs prefer easier manageability, cost-effective provisioning, and simpler remote management to improve IT efficiency, available in Windows 11. Techaisle research data suggests that Windows 11 deployment momentum is building. Each of the above factors will drive SMB PC shipment and growth in 2022. PC is still the centerpiece of business productivity, and buying a new PC is likely to have a more significant impact on productivity than any other technology. Modern PCs promise to deliver more than an incremental improvement in performance and features, and even price-conscious small businesses benefit significantly from replacing older PCs with newer PCs.

Techaisle's latest research forecasts worldwide small business (1-99 employees), core midmarket (100-999 employees), and upper midmarket (1000-5000 employees) IT spend (excluding telecom services) will reach US$1.25 trillion in 2022. IT services will see the highest proportion of IT spending. Datacenter solutions will exhibit a growth of 4%. Overall worldwide cloud spending within the SMB and midmarket will grow by 21%. By 2025, 43% of global SMB and midmarket IT spending will be in the cloud.

SMB IT investment is increasing to counter inflation, labor shortage, supply chain concerns and accelerate business transformation through digitalization. SMBs are looking for ways to streamline business and IT processes to best return on existing human capital. In the pursuit of greater efficiency, SMBs are also exploring options that help stretch budgets and use efficiency-oriented techniques to optimize the impact of wage inflation and the increasingly competitive landscape. SMBs plan to invest in PCs, analytics, cloud, security, UCaaS / CCaaS, customer experience solutions, and networking.

They are here - Techaisle's annual SMB and Midmarket Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges, and Business Issues infographics, 12th year of Techaisle tracking at a WW level, and is sought after by IT vendors, channel partners, and media. Techaisle surveyed a total of 5850 SMBs, quota sampled to ensure adequate coverage of four small business (1-9, 10-19, 20-49, and 50-99 employees), three midmarket (100-249, 250-499, and 500-999 employees) and two upper midmarket (1000-2499, 2500-4999) segments. As a result, the data represents a robust and reliable sampling of the market segment for IT products and services.

Compared to previous years, for 2022, Techaisle expanded the lists of the technology areas, business, and IT challenges studied. In addition, this year, we have also added a fourth column in the infographic – Highest Planned Adoption.

Please scroll down/read more to view and download the SMB, core Midmarket, and Upper Midmarket infographics.