1) What is Small Business

Small Businesses are private corporations, sole proprietorships and partnerships. The term “Small Business” defines by different organizations in the context of number of employees. Generally it is mentioned, businesses ranging from less than 10 employees to thousand employees are mainly categorised as small to mid- sized companies otherwise they are termed as SMBs. According to other methods, Small businesses can also be categorised as assets, sales, liabilities, purchases, net profit and others. These companies range from a very small store to e-commerce businesses.

In 2006, more than 18,000 small businesses possessing more than 500 employees constitute half of total employees engaged in all small businesses. SMBs want to lead themselves so they are focusing on ways of cutting the costs and expansion of their capabilities. There are various ways and among this, one way is that they are moving their important functions to cloud. Recently a study was conducted which predicted and showed the value $32 billion of the U.S. SMB Market in 2016 which is almost 20% growth rate occurred on year to year basis and also showed increase of 25% in the adoption of the total global cloud services.

2) Small businesses in terms of web hosting

Use of Web hosting is becoming very popular among large size businesses. Small size companies are also having their websites in order to improve their competitive position and to host them; they are also using hosting services of various web hosting companies.

Usage of the cloud services and products of infrastructure by SMBs is expected to become almost double for next few years and reason behind this that these SMBs become more user friendly with concept of cloud and do not face in using same. Now SMBs are looking for cloud service companies as now they are moving several applications of business to cloud. SMBs are small size companies thus they operate more efficiently and focus on their main business, outsource functions of technology and in this context they prefer the established organizations.

3) Emerging small business /SMB Demand Is a Golden Opportunity for Resellers

Resellers are having a great opportunity; they can open new stream of revenue and expand their relationship with the existing customers. VARs, MSPs, SIs want to expand their portfolio to use cloud services and for same they are required to increase their revenue and improve their relationships with SMBs. Demand is rising very fast within SMB market for different kinds of cloud services;

• (IAAS) Infrastructure as a service – From the study, it is known that safety, IaaS server backup and services related to database is used by 40% of SMBs. Those are in the need of a robust database find web hosting solutions which are flexible via a reasonable and convenient way so as to store large amount of data in offsite without considering the issue of maintenance of server. In SMBs market, there are some rapidly growing sectors such as Security services, anti-malware, anti-spyware, anti- virus and e-mail safety solutions.
• (SAAS) Software as a service Apps – Social media platform used by number of SMBs as a tool of marketing and access productivity apps such as Dropbox on regular basis. SMB’s feel more comfortable with cloud services, they started to embrace platforms of CRM such as Salesforce.com and other solutions related to business intelligence. These tools are accessed via laptops and desktops in office and also on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

4) Hosted Communications and Collaboration Solutions

Cloud services are used by SMBs for increasing capabilities of communication and for consolidating the infrastructure for more efficiency and for integration on one platform. E-mail and hosted private branch exchange (PBX) phone services are included in the applications but Unified Communications-as-a-Service solutions attract the market towards themselves. It delivers audio / video conferencing, telephone, messaging, presence technology, and email more over an IP network.