Is Cloud Value at a Crossroad for SMBs?

With little choice but to burn serious rubber to survive the crisis, SMBs across Asia Pacific drove through the challenging hair pin turns in the economy by adopting cloud solutions at breakneck speed.  Those that successfully navigated their way through the pandemic soon recognised the quick wins that flow from modernised operations.

The following two years saw SMBs take huge cloud powered strides on business agility, operational resilience, workforce efficiency, cost effectiveness, and market competitiveness. Advances and gains were fuelled in part by the Capex to Opex switch, and the benefits of subscription-based scale up, scale down compute capacity and spend.

The result is that 2022 will likely go down in the books as the financial year that many SMBs will first achieve revenue growth that is directly attributed to cloud adoptions. A value realisation breakthrough, many, many years in the making.

If correct, this means we can anticipate that SMBs will swing firmly toward wanting more of the same. SMB customers will actively engage in looking for ways that cloud can accrue or add even more value to their businesses.

Importantly for you, dear reader, this scenario would likely result in larger amounts invested to achieve that aim.

Only three years ago, large tracts of the SMB segment in APAC were still on a rambling, piecemeal, ‘each business to their own’ journey to the cloud.

The pandemic rolled the vast majority into a mass cloud adoption and migration event, and at the end of the 2022 financial year, a hundreds of thousands of cloud-powered SMB businesses achieved revenue growth – in the middle of a global crisis. Conversely, those that failed to invest or left it too late found survival very difficult.

This tipping point on value realisation has been achieved, and this is great news for partners. SMBs want more cloud, they want to layer in different solution categories, and importantly, they want partners that deliver ‘value realised’ cloud development strategy. This means they will seek out partners that not only have the technical capabilities to implement cloud solution but can work with their customers to identify opportunities to use cloud, data, and applications to innovate and generate entirely new forms of value in their businesses.

SMBs have pivoted into deep strategy, and partners that can respond and co-innovate with their customers have a lot to look forward to over the next few years.

In the coming months, we will continue to unpack how partners can mobilise around their SMB customers ahead of the fast-emerging Cloud 4.0 innovations. Subscribe to the series and be the first to the finish line.