|
Welcome
to the Small Business Survey
This year IMRB surveyed 180 companies across nine cities for
our annual Small Business issue. These companies were distributed
across BFSI, Manufacturing, Chemicals & Pharma, Textiles,
Education, FMCG and Services. About a third of the respondents
were their organisation’s final decision-makers on IT
spending, the CEO in most cases; the rest were key members
of the team. The bulk of the respondents believed that they
were responsible for adding value to the organisation by building
or re-building business processes, as well as by implementing
new technologies to achieve tactical and strategic enterprise
goals.
Hardware
IT
as an enabler
Computerisation continues to grow in small businesses. Small
firms that have already invested in IT are upgrading to keep
up with the rapidly changing technology environment, says
Vinutha V
Networking
Stopping
at the LAN
For the greater part Small Businesses won’t look beyond
a LAN. Wi-Fi and WANs are not a priority yet, finds Shivani
Shinde
Software
Commercial
software continues to lead
While open source software is making its presence felt, Small
Businesses are largely opting for commercial software—be
it Windows or commercial databases, writes Faiz Askari
Enterprise-wide Applications
Automate?
Yes. Implement? Not sure
Small businesses have moved on from accounting solutions to
ERP systems. Shivani Shinde finds that these companies prefer
home-grown enterprise applications to off the shelf ERP packages
Storage
DAS
and tape rule the roost
Small businesses largely prefer DAS for primary storage and
tape for back-up. That said, many have opted for NAS and a
few even for SAN. Disc-to-disc back-up is also becoming popular
as a complement to tape. Megha Banduni reports
Peripherals
DMPs,
colour printers and LCDs find favour
While dot matrix printers dominate the transaction printing
scene, colour usage is on the rise and companies are going
in for LCD flat panels, says Chirasrota Jena
Security
Infrastructure
yes, policy no
Viruses and spam continue to haunt small businesses, but most
of them do not have a full-fledged security policy in place
even though they do have a proper security infrastructure,
says Abhinav Singh
Connectivity
High-speed,
low-cost connectivity
Small Businesses, like their larger cousins, rely on leased
lines backed by dialup or ISDN. DSL is catching on. Inter-office
connectivity is dominated by Gigabit Ethernet, leased links
and fibre. Priya Jain reports
Outsourcing
The
outsourcing game-plan
If outsourcing was the buzzword of the Indian economy for
the last couple of years, today it is IT outsourcing. This
practice has spread from large companies to smaller ones.
By Kusum Makhija
|
