34% of small companies live without servers

Of all European business with less than 100 employees, a mere 15% don't have even 1 server. Especially the ones with less than 25 employees contribute to this percentage.

  1 -   25 employees 34% without servers
25 - 100 employees   4% without servers

A shocking 2 out of 3 of alle European companies have experienced outage due to an overheated server. And 1 in 10 say it happens regurarely.

And as is told many times before, the SMB market is a early adopter of cloud functionality. So what's stopping them from taking a server in the cloud?

Part of the answer lies in the statistics. A huge inbalance exists between the number of companies and their company size. It may be assumed that from the percentages above the vast majority of the companies in the 1 - 12 group are the smaller ones (1 - 5). Image a small company with 2 or 3 employees; what would be their buying reason for a server. Hardly any compared to the cost (one time and monthly for management and maintenance), I guess.

Action step: build a case for such small companies where they benefit from a cloud server.

Another reason is the lack of cloud knowledge and cloud expertise in the smaller companies. It seems that the more cloud knowledge the easier cloud is used. Half of the smaller companies claim to have no cloud knowledge.

Action step: how do I educate my current customers on the cloud?

When selling to smaller companies, keep in mind that owners make the final buying decision.

Numbers are taken from a European research by Vanson Bourne for Dell and Intel.