Laurie McCabe’s Blog: How Other SMBs Are Spending On Mobile Technology
The major finding of this report from Laurie McCabe’s firm, the SMB Group is that SMB spending on mobile technology will increase at a rate of 17% for the next few years. Does that mean you need to crank up your own spending to keep pace?
“As part of the recently completed SMB Group study ‘2010 Small and Medium Business Mobile Solutions Study,’
we performed a detailed analysis of U.S. small and medium business (SMB) spending on mobile devices, applications, and services. As explained in this study, SMBs (1-999 employees) spent approximately $26.1B on mobile solutions and services in 2010—an amount forecast to increase annual at a rate of 17 percent for the next few years, with some segments growing much faster than the others.
As indicated on Figure 1, voice and data services gobble up the biggest part of SMBs’ mobile budgets (69%), followed by mobile application (12%) spending, mobile devices (11%), and mobile device/application management (8%). In the U.S., mobile service providers typically subsidize mobile device costs as part of their two-year mobile service contract subscriptions, resulting in the lower spending for mobile devices–which would cost two to three times more if they weren’t subsidized.”