Emerging-Business Key to Success: Right Technology at the Right Price

Anothai Wettyakorn

Indeed, small business—commonly defined as comprising 25 or fewer employees—is the engine driving nearly every economy on our planet. In the United States, small businesses represent 99.7 percent of all employers and provide jobs for about half of the country's private-sector employees. In Brazil, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, small businesses represent 98 percent of the country's 5.5 million companies, accounting for 60 percent of its jobs.

The International Council for Small Business estimates that more than 500 million new businesses will set up shop over the next five years. For these businesses to succeed, they'll need information technology. Small and medium businesses recognize this, and their IT spending growth has outpaced total corporate IT spending worldwide since 2002, and is expected to do so through 2010, according to analyst firm IDC.

It helps that computer prices have declined steadily and significantly over the past 10 years, according to IDC. The average cost of a desktop computer, for example, dropped 60 percent between 1997 and 2007.

This all bodes very well for small businesses. Armed with the right technology, they're better able to compete not only with their peers, but to contend even with larger businesses, all around the world.

But providing technology to small businesses, both in the developed and developing economies, never has been about low price alone. It's about providing the right technology and services at the right price.

Firstly, many of these customers are starting with a clean slate. Today's entrepreneurs want to build their businesses using the latest, most efficient standard technologies.

Second, we have to recognize the value that standards-based technology offers to customers and continue to develop innovative new products and services based on those standards. Data-storage systems using Internet-protocol technology (known as "iSCSI storage") are a great example of this.

Above all, we have to listen. The only way to understand and deliver on the specific needs of customers is to have regular conversations with them. That's particularly true in serving the different, growing requirements of small businesses in emerging countries.  The suppliers that earn the trust and spending of these customers will be those who listen, grasp the nuances of customer needs, and address those requirements with tailored solutions.