According to a survey conducted by Microsoft on more than 500 Microsoft Small Business Specialist Partners related to 5 major IT markets, 63% of their SMB customers are expected to spend more on IT this year, when compared to last year. This is a 38% increase form the last year results.
It was also found that, 44% of the 500 Microsoft’s SMB Specialist partners, who were concentrating on markets in U.S, U.K, Canada, India and Brazil, opined that popularity of windows 7, will encourage deployment of new servers. Therfore, it was found that ‘Server virtualization’ as the best cost saving technology in Brazil, U.K, Canada, slightly edged out by U.S. But it was found that in India, software as a service was most preferred(37%), than server virtualization(17%).
Further, it was found that, 24% of their customers will adopt the latest version of, soon-to-debut, Microsoft Office 2010, for their company’s productivity applications. But 68% of them still continue to run older versions of Office, for time being.
In addition, it was found that 74% of the SMBs surveyed, say that their customers increased the number of remote workers on their payrolls. It is a significant rise from 54% in 2009.
Therefore, from the whole “2010 Microsoft SMB/Partner Insight Report”, Microsoft has reasons to be optimistic besides the present recession.