Survey: SMB IT Budgets Climb 19%

A new report from vendor Spiceworks indicates that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) increased their IT budgets dramatically during the first part of the year. The companies are spending that money on hardware and cloud services, but aren’t hiring many additional IT staffers.

ZDNet’s Heather Clancy reported, “The hiring outlook among small businesses may be pretty grim this year, but small and midsize companies are increasing the amount of money they are spending on technology — especially on tablet computers, according to new data compiled by Spiceworks. The organization’s latest State of SMB IT survey suggest that budgets rose 19 percent during the first half of 2013, which is the biggest increase demonstrated in the past three years. Budgets are estimated at an average of $192,000 this year, up from the $162,000 that the survey respondents were predicting at the end of 2012.”

Nathan Eddy with eWeek added, “Hardware purchases accounted for the largest share of SMB IT budgets at 39 percent, followed by software at 30 percent, IT services at 19 percent and cloud/hosted services at 12 percent. Tablet devices showed the largest six-month increase with 42 percent of those surveyed planning to purchase new devices this year, up from 38 percent in the second half of 2012.”

In the report, Spiceworks also noted, “Usage of cloud services in SMBs is forecasted to increase from 60% to 66% in the next six months.”

And in a statement, Spicworks’ Kathryn Pribish said, “SMBs account for half of all IT spending worldwide, so the results of this survey bode well for technology vendors developing the latest SMB products and services.”