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.