Monday Morning Impact – February 26

Report: SMB Spending to Exceed $600 Billion This Year

A new update to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Small and Medium Business Spending Guide forecasts total IT spending by small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to be nearly $602 billion in 2018, an increase of 4.9% over 2017. With a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7% for the 2016-2021 forecast period, spending by businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees on IT hardware, software, and services, including business services, is expected to reach $684 billion in 2021.

According to the report, hardware, software, and IT services will each account for around 30% of total SMB spending in 2018 with business services delivering the remainder. While hardware is currently the largest category of spending, IDC expects it to be overtaken by software in 2019 and IT services in 2021. Software will experience the fastest spending growth over the 2016-2021 forecast with a CAGR of 7.5%, followed by business services with a CAGR of 6.6%.

“SMBs around the world are increasingly interested in investing in resources to improve employee productivity and improve their competitive positions,” said Ray Boggs, vice president, SMB Research at IDC. “While SMBs, especially smaller ones, have immediate tactical needs to sharpen performance, they are also looking to coordinate resources in a meaningful way. For many this will be an important step in their digital transformation.”

Devices will be the largest category of technology spending in 2018 with SMBs allocating $115 billion to personal computing devices, peripherals, and mobile phones. Applications will be the second largest spending category at $99 billion, led by investments in enterprise resource management (ERM), content applications, and customer relationship management (CRM).

On a geographic basis, the United States will be the largest market with SMB IT spending expected to total $186 billion in 2018. China will be the second largest country with $56 billion in SMB IT spending forecast for this year, followed by Germany ($37 billion), the UK ($36 billion), and Japan ($35 billion).

IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Small and Medium Business Spending Guide provides detail on small and midsize business IT spending across 40 technology categories in nine geographic regions and 53 countries.

Channel Impact^®
The data provides some clear directions on channel revenue opportunities in a market segment most heavily served through indirect sales.

Xerox Rolls New MPS Essentials Suite to Channel

Xerox announced availability of a unified bundle of core Managed Print Services for the company’s channel partners. Xerox’s new MPS Essentials Suite is a package of tools for providing secure authentication, mobile print functionality, advanced scanning capabilities and productivity-enhancing apps to streamline MPS deployments. Components include a cloud-based solution designed to enable secure mobility, advanced scanning capabilities, a 40-language translation service, and a Scan-to-Cloud email app. A specialized support application provides status updates on service and supply requests, reducing calls to partner help desks.

“By combining our extensive lineup of managed print, mobility, scanning and productivity solutions into one package, Xerox partners can provide their customers with the tools they need to maximize flexibility and efficiency in the fast-paced digital world,” said Ted Dezvane, senior vice president, Managed Document Services, Xerox. “At Xerox, we’re committed to providing our partners and their clients with a 360 approach that takes the complexity out of documents, devices and data.”

Customers who are currently using Xerox ConnectKey-enabled devices can now purchase the MPS Essentials Suite through Xerox’s network of MPS Accredited Channel Partners in the United States. The offer is available only in the United States at this time.

Channel Impact^®
In an era when profit margins are more critical than ever, offerings such as this one can support that objective through enhanced efficiencies.

Study: MSSPs Overwhelmed by False Positive Security Alerts

Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), a Dallas based company with a classification platform for security events, has published new research that reveals managed security services providers are wasting resources processing useless security alerts. The survey also found that incident responders often cope with this problem by either reducing the sensitivity of security equipment or ignoring alerts altogether.

According to the report, 44% of respondents report a 50% or higher false-positive rate. Nearly 45% of respondents investigate 10 or more alerts each day. And 64% state that, on average, it takes 10 minutes or more to investigate each alert.

“This research shows that MSSPs are still on the receiving end of an oppressive number of daily security alerts, forcing many analysts and incident responders to spend hours – in some cases, more than five – each day investigating them, many of which turn out to be false-positives,” said Alin Srivastava, president of ATA. “Devoting so much time to benign alerts severely compromises security effectiveness, as analysts are distracted from acting on actual threats and incidents.”

When asked what they do if their SOC has too many alerts for analysts to process, 67% of respondents say they tune specific alerting features or thresholds to reduce the volume of alerts.

ATA polled nearly 50 MSSPs to evaluate the state of incident response within their security operations centers.

Channel Impact^®
Companies are finding themselves in a difficult situation, faced with either ignoring potentially valid alerts or expanding staff size beyond their available budgets. Channel partners who can enhance efficiency are well positioned in this environment.