SMB Tech Roll-up: Parallels Aims to Corner US$ 50bn Cloud Market, Twitter Doing Better

By David Roe (@druadh20) Mar 10, 2011

This week, a number of companies have started taking the SMB cloud market seriously, with Parallels launching an aggressive campaign to corner a market that will be worth US$ 50 billion, KnowlegeTree offering Outlook access in the cloud and Motive expanding its partner channel with US Analytics. Twitter also appears to be doing better in this space, but not as well as Facebook.

Parallels Targets Cloud Market

Parallels (news, site) has announced an aggressive move on the SMB cloud market, which, as we have reported previously, is one of the most lucrative markets in the SMB space at the moment.

Announcing the new campaign, recently appointed CEO Birge Steen said he will focus on expanding their cloud offerings for the SMB market and, presumably, the marketing initiative to go with with it.

By 2015, it is estimated that the cloud market for SMBs will be worth in the region of US$ 50 billion up from around US$ 10.6 billion in 2010 and US$ 28.6 billion this year, of which nearly half will be infrastructure services.

In terms of spending, it has also been estimated, in a report released at the Parallels conference in Orlando recently, that companies with fewer than 100 employees make up about 80% of the spending on cloud deployments and services at the moment, making the move to get a jump on that market a smart move indeed.

Currently, while there has been a marked interest in the cloud in the SMB space, most of the big — and we really mean big — companies such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft have been slow in recognizing the potential here, even though they have developed many products for SMBs.

Among the new offerings designed to attract SMBs, Parallels has released Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure to help service providers extend their offerings to SMBs and become more profitable, said Steen.

They will also be offering to carry Microsoft Online services as they stand now and Office 365 when it is finally released later this year.

KnowledgeTree Offers Cloud-based Outlook

And speaking of cloud-based solutions, KnowledgeTree (news, site), which already provides document management software to SMBs in the cloud, has announced the beta release of KnowledgeTree for Outlook, which will also be in the cloud.

This will enable users to store email and attachments in KnowledgeTree’s document vault, as well as gain access to content already stored in the KnowledgeTree content repository from their Outlook account.

This should be a welcome addition to its existing cloud-based Office products, which were only released at the end of last year, and which enable editing and collaboration on documents in the cloud and in Excel, Word and PowerPoint files.

Twitter Doing Better with SMBs

Leaving the cloud aside, it seems that there is more research that shows SMBs are taking to Twitter. According to the latest Local Commerce Monitor-Wave 14 report from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, between Q3 in 2009 and Q4 in 2010, usage has more than doubled to 19%.

While Twitter will undoubtedly be happy about that, it still leaves a large market to be desired and exploited, as almost half of SMBs have made the social media jump, with 48% of them now using Facebook, and a quarter using some other social media network.