SMB Tech Roll-up: Dell Grows with SMB Spending, CRM Gains Ground

By David Roe (@druadh20) Feb 17, 2011

This week in the SMB market, there are strong indications that the market is beginning to show concrete signs of a positive swing, with fiscal figures from Dell that show SMB spending in the space is growing. CRM and social CRM releases from NextCorp and Constant Contact, as well as new upgrades for SMBs from Symantec, show where their priorities lie.

SMBs Bounce for Dell

Anyone wondering about the economic condition of the SMB IT market need only look this week at the financial results for Dell’s (news, site) fiscal year 2010 to see what impact the rebound is having on small businesses.

Overall, for the year, Dell reported US$ 2.64 billion in net income on US$ 61.5 billion in revenue, an 84% and 16% increase, respectively.

Within that, while most of its units were fairly strong, its SMB unit was the star performer, with turnover up 4% in the fourth quarter to US$ 3.7 billion. What this means is, while revenue in its consumer business dropped off, its SMB business unit reached its highest level in two years.

And if that wasn’t convincing enough, figures released during the week show that PC purchases by smaller firms increased by 16.5% over the year.

Looking at purchases globally, last year was the first year that SMB spending in emerging markets surpassed that of mature markets, with growth rates in the US at a small but steady increase of 4.4%.

However, everyone seems to be optimistic about 2011, with manufacturers such as HP (news, site) and Dell unveiling desktop models targeted at the SMB segment at the beginning of 2011.

NextCorp Releases SMB Suite

Moving on to some of this week’s releases, NextCorp announced its SMB Suite, a pre-packaged, integrated cloud solution built on Microsoft’s ERP, CRM and Office productivity technology over the course of the national Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 launch.

The SMB Suite aims to exploit the increasingly rapid move to the cloud by SMBs, sealing NextCorp's position in the organization and presence in the ERP Cloud space.

Introduced in 2004, SMB Suite is a Microsoft-based, subscription-oriented solution for accounting, productivity, collaboration and e-Commerce. As an all-in-one "Cloud Business Engine," it integrates Microsoft Office with ERP, CRM, SharePoint, Live Meeting, email and e-Commerce applications.

Priced between US$ 325 and US$ 375 per user/month, it also enticingly offers customers the possibility of custom pricing, which clearly depends on the level of your deployment from a range of different components.

Constant Contact Adds Social CRM

More in the SMB CRM space this week — this time, the announcement that SMB consultancy Constant Contact has announced the acquisition of Bantam Live, a contact management and social CRM provider owned and operated by privately held Bantam Networks.

Under the terms of the deal, Constant Contact has bought Bantam for a cash purchase price of US$15 million.

Constant Contact is a social CRM platform built on a robust and flexible Ruby on Rails platform. With it, users can create unified repositories of data across all channels, including clicks, email opens, survey responses, event participation and social media interactions.