PCQUEST SMB Forum 2008

Saturday, April 05, 2008

While we are going to press with this issue, we were also amidst running our regular series of events called the PCQuest SMB Forum. Every three months, we travel to certain cities and invite key SMBs to this event. Our objective is pretty simple-to help them understand, along with our partners, how to leverage the power of IT through seminars and practical on-stage demos. This time, however, we broadened our focus and also included telecom and funds management. We partnered with Tata Indicom and State Bank of India to address these two areas. For IT, our partners were HP, SAP, brother, NetCore, and QuickHeal. In each city, we try and guage the IT requirements of the SMBs there to understand their buying patterns. At the time of writing this, we had this data for 5 cities: Baroda, Chandigarh, Noida, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Around 388 delegates had attended our event in these cities, and most of them were CEOs, proprietors, directors, and IT heads of SMBs. Interestingly, 30% of the attendees in these cities planned to purchase PCs in the near future. Next highest were notebooks and servers at 23 and 21% respectively. This isn't surprising, because basic hardware is a key requirement for any organization. Broadband and networking equipment were next in line. Websites trailed at the bottom of the requirements list, and we are pretty much sure it's because most of them already had their own websites. The same logic applies to mail servers as well. ERP wasn't on top of the purchase chart because it's not something for which decisions can be taken on the spot. It requires a complete requirements analysis, and higher budgets than other products. Interestingly, the highest demand for ERP came from Baroda and Kolkata. We didn't have data for Ahmedabad as we were going to press with this issue.

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