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The Indian SMB sector has become as one of the fastest growing industries in the country over the past couple of decades. Fast adoption of Cloud technology has come with the promise of serious transformation in the past few years. Consider this: according to a report by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium enterprises, the Indian SME sector employs more than 80 million people across 36 million units, and contributes over 45 per cent to manufacturing and over 40 per cent to the Indian export sector. This contributes a good chunk of 8 percent to India GDP.

I cannot deny that the Small and medium businesses have played a key role in providing new job opportunities, helping in the progress of rural areas while competing with global players entering India looking at the growth of cloud adoption. This band has a serious and direct economic impact guaranteeing better and fairer distribution of wealth and income in the country.

That being said, there are challenges that are in the way of the SMB champions. And this is where IT distributers and channel partners come in.

Challenges within the sector

The important thing to keep in mind is that it has taken some good partnership efforts both from the people of India and the government to help in the growth of the sector. The biggest problems so far is the need of immediate correction and care, which again, through collaborative efforts and strategic deployment of the right tech we should be able to tackle.

Unlike urban Tier 1 cities, where it is easy to facilitate finance and credit instruments, enterprises based out rural cities find it significantly more difficult to get these instruments. The recent rise in online shopping and a complete digital IT market emerging is a clear indicator of the next biggest challenge that needs immediate attention - Lack of infrastructure, with a big focus on providing digital tools, solutions and competent protection still needs a lot of work.

More opportunities for partners

According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18% in 2017 to $246.8 billion. Nearly 70 percent of the companies we spoke to have either adopted or have adoption of enterprise cloud in their roadmap. This can be seen as a huge opportunity for partners to transform their own businesses and help their customers in the adoption of cloud services. However, there is also the lack of understanding about new technologies in the industry and this is restricting organisations to go for cloud adoption. IT decision makers find it difficult to build a business case around such technologies.

This is in fact a great opportunity for the cloud-savvy partners. If they can reset their way of doing business, Cloud adoption & migration offer great prospect to the channel for their inherent strength is their customer reach. According to a the research firm Zinnov, spending on cloud services, that is expected to cross $10 billion by 2020 in the country is driven by factors like investments to set up local data centres and a rapidly growing developer ecosystem in the country. Goes without saying that India continues to be a growing market for cloud technology adoption with focus on public cloud due to easy access and cost effectiveness.

Market Drivers: Collaboration is key

The major change makers through cloud adoption are healthcare, banking & financial services besides manufacturing, telecom and insurance adoption. Investments in local data centres, cloud spending in both in public and private, with focus on SaaS followed by Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service accounting for almost $1. Billion by 2020.

India has seen an increase in interest among large IT major to cater to the specific needs of the SMB segment. The main idea has been to tap the revenue opportunity from this segment which can have significant top line impact. While the enterprise ecosystem is showing significant demand due to its maturity, the SMB space combined with the vibrant start-up landscape and active participation by the government is indeed bound to increase public cloud consumption moving forward.

Thus the call for the moment is to invite companies for continues collaboration to make investments in innovative go to market partnerships to solve real world problems and strategize with data driven insights to tap this opportunity. Getting the right technology to the right people will be a very important step in that direction.