PCQUEST SMB Forum 2008

While we are going to press with this issue, we were also amidst running our

regular series of events called the PCQuest SMB Forum. Every three months, we

travel to certain cities and invite key SMBs to this event. Our objective is

pretty simple-to help them understand, along with our partners, how to leverage

the power of IT through seminars and practical on-stage demos. This time,

however, we broadened our focus and also included telecom and funds management.

We partnered with Tata Indicom and State Bank of India to address these two

areas. For IT, our partners were HP, SAP, brother, NetCore, and QuickHeal. In

each city, we try and guage the IT requirements of the SMBs there to understand

their buying patterns. At the time of writing this, we had this data for 5

cities: Baroda, Chandigarh, Noida, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Around 388 delegates

had attended our event in these cities, and most of them were CEOs, proprietors,

directors, and IT heads of SMBs. Interestingly, 30% of the attendees in these

cities planned to purchase PCs in the near future. Next highest were notebooks

and servers at 23 and 21% respectively. This isn't surprising, because basic

hardware is a key requirement for any organization. Broadband and networking

equipment were next in line. Websites trailed at the bottom of the requirements

list, and we are pretty much sure it's because most of them already had their

own websites. The same logic applies to mail servers as well. ERP wasn't on top

of the purchase chart because it's not something for which decisions can be

taken on the spot. It requires a complete requirements analysis, and higher

budgets than other products. Interestingly, the highest demand for ERP came from

Baroda and Kolkata. We didn't have data for Ahmedabad as we were going to press

with this issue.