SMBs get wrong Voip and Wifi "message"

The usual Total Cost of Ownership arguments that resonate with large enterprise CIOs who have the luxury of capital expenditure budgets often fall on deaf ears with small and medium business (SMB) customers who must pay for new equipment out of current sales revenue, says a new study from ABI. Selling this group cutting-edge technology such as voice-over-Wi-Fi or 802.11n can be complicated.

“Since large enterprises were the early adopters of Wi-Fi, it is the SMB market that offers the greatest potential for WLAN equipment manufacturers due to the number of greenfield opportunities still left to be plowed,” says ABI Research vice president Stan Schatt. “Channel partners shoulder the burden when it comes to selling products and servicing these customers, and getting the right message to this group can be tricky since their level of technical expertise falls well below that found in large enterprise IT departments.”

An ABI Research survey of 500 SMBs questioned them on the channels from which they like to purchase new and additional WLAN products, their current state of technology and the applications they are running, their interest in new products such as 802.11n, and the security measures they have implemented.

Schatt comments on the results: “The survey showed that there are several very distinct market segments involved, with very different buying and usage patterns. Companies with 100 to 999 employees behave much more like large enterprises, while smaller firms behave very much like consumers, purchasing their WLAN equipment primarily through retail channels. The applications being run by larger companies make a better case for cutting-edge technology such as 802.11n, and they are much more likely to take WLAN security seriously.”