The Hindu Business Line : ‘IT adoption by SMEs high in India’

Growth trajectory: Mr Rajeev Mittal, Group Director, SMEs, Microsoft India, and Mr Raju Chellam, Vice-President ( Asia-Pacific), AMI-Partners, at a press conference in the Capital on Tuesday. –

Our Bureau

New Delhi, Feb 12 IT spend by the Indian small and medium enterprises grew at 24 per cent and is expected to continue at this rate - the fastest amongst BRIC economies. The share of the domestic firms in IT expenditure stood ahead of Russia at 22.9 per cent, China at 20.4 per cent and Brazil at 19.4 per cent.

According to a Microsoft-Access Markets International Partners ( AMI) report based on 250 companies that were surveyed, Indian SMEs are on a growth trajectory with 60 per cent of PC-using businesses expecting 20 per cent growth and 16 per cent of them expanding their branch operations.

The report cited that 45 per cent of the Indian SMEs had crossed the first wave of building basic infrastructure which included investments in portable PCs or notebooks, equipped with anti-virus and productivity suites. However, the second stage which included deployment of servers, firewalls and other applications had only 10 per cent users in the ‘connectivity phase’, who were using Web sites for transaction purposes.

And only 2 per cent companies are in the third wave of IT adoption which included ERP applications, intranet, managed security solutions. “Companies in this segment are witnessing the highest growth as they have learnt to use and connect IT to maximise their workflow efficiency, save costs and see a greater impact on their bottomline,” said Mr Raju Chellam, Vice-President, AMI Asia-Pacific.

Among the major factors driving IT adoption, 50 per cent were using it to manage growth, 41 per cent found it boosting efficiency and the remaining 39 per cent considered it compelling as it influenced large customers.

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