SMB investments in cloud based email and productivity suites such as Office 365 are expected to triple by 2019, a new report says.
In “Migrating SMB Customers to Office 365: How Channel Partners can Leverage Migration Tools to Win in the Cloud,” research firm Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. suggests that the market will grow from $1.9 billion in 2014 to $6.5 billion in 2019, at a compound annual growth Rate of 28 per cent.
“Office 365 is expected to lead this growth as 16 per cent of U.S. SBs (firms with 1-99 employees) and 32 per cent of MBs (firms with 100-999 employees) plan to begin using Office 365 within the next year,” AMI said in a statement. “SMBs traditionally lack the in-house expertise necessary to complete potentially tedious and time consuming migrations and are looking to channel partners to provide support.”
The report named several solutions that the channel can use, including tools created by BitTitan, Microsoft and SkyKick, all of whom have been featured on CDN.
While BitTitan offers both Office 365 and Dropbox data migration, Skykick’s Office migration is advertised as hands-free.
According to AMI, 84 per cent of partners surveyed said customers were likely or very likely to purchase additional cloud services after a successful migration project.
It therefore provides a “sensible starting point for SMBs,” the company said. “Office 365 migrations present an opportunity to make a favorable impression on customers; failing to do so means losing the customer to a competitor and losing the opportunity to accrue additional streams of revenue.”