From Acer and Apple to Lenovo and Toshiba -- not to forget HP and Dell -- all the major hardware vendors are scrambling to supply small and midsize companies with the equipment they need. This slideshow looks at each company's approach.
If your business finds itself inundated with calls, e-mails, flyers, and even tweets from salespeople harping the latest and greatest desktops, laptops, servers, printers, storage systems and more -- it's not because your something speical. It's that small and midsize companies have become the 'sweet spot' these days for hardware vendors.
The increased attention is partly due to the economic crunch that's shrinking IT budgets in larger enterprises, and partly due to the fact that the SMB market is expected to recover faster once the economy begins to improve.
According to the International Council of Small Business, more than 500 million new SMBs will be launched in the next five years, and their IT spending growth has outpaced total corporate IT spending worldwide since 2002, according to industry firm IDC, which predicts tech spending among small companies will grow from $510.7 billion in 2008 to $675.1 billion by 2013.
Those market figures have led to a major new emphasis on smaller companies. Up until a few years ago, only a few of the big hardware vendors offered designated 'SMB' specific products. There was no huge emphasis to chase smaller sales when they could cut multi-million-dollar deals with Fortune 500 companies buying top-of-the-line equipments with fat profit margins. But now that those big-ticket purchases have slowed, even the smaller indivduals sales and slimmer margins in the SMB market have become more appealing.
For SMBs themselves, the big benefit is that products marketed to smaller companies are no longer merely stripped-down versions of products originally designed to be sold to big companies. Today's SMB systems are increasingly designed from scratch with SMB needs in mind.
Of course, there are still big differences in how the major vendors deal with SMBs. Here's a quick rundown on what each one is doing, and what to expect in the coming months.
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