China's small and medium-sized enterprises cloud services market potential value of up to 4.1 billion

Cloud computing has been a hot topic for the near term, and this year began to get more and more products and cases. Recently, parallels issued a parallels SMB Cloud Insights Report for China. After an in-depth study of the Chinese cloud market, parellels in the report gives advice on how cloud service providers benefit from the services offered to small and medium-sized enterprises. According to parallels estimates, in the country's efforts to develop the Internet infrastructure, with various scale enterprises continue to recognize the economic and operational benefits of cloud services, the 2011 Chinese Small and medium-sized Enterprises cloud services market contains 4.1 billion yuan (about 640 million U.S. dollars) of huge business opportunities, but also rapid increase.

The parallels SMB Cloud Insights report focuses on the most attractive cloud service types for small and midsize enterprises, detailing the best time for service providers to drive markets and revenue growth in China's host-hosting market. According to the report, the market for the cloud services market for small and medium sized enterprises targeting traditional hosting services in China in 2011, especially hosted infrastructure and Web sites, could reach 4.1 billion yuan (about 640 million US dollars). Among them, the managed infrastructure occupies the largest market share, reaching 3.2 billion yuan (about 500 million U.S. dollars), while the Web site occupies the remaining 900 million yuan (about 140 million U.S. dollars) market share.

According to parallels's survey, in China, many small and medium-sized enterprises in the growing period will abandon the installation of internal dedicated server and desktop applications of the process, directly toward the cloud. As Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises continue to abandon their internal IT investments, parallels expects the new virtual server market to boost the exponential growth of China's cloud infrastructure (IaaS infrastructure, or services). Parallels that the number of companies in China planning to adopt a managed infrastructure is growing, and that it is possible to add about 2 million managed servers in the next few years, based on the size of the existing market.

Other important findings of the parallels SMB Cloud Insights Report Disclosure for the Chinese market include:

Managed Infrastructure

At present, only 17% of China's small and medium-sized enterprises have in-house dedicated servers, far behind most developed countries; many of China's growing SMEs are looking to direct cloud services to save on the cost of building in-house dedicated IT infrastructures. 80% of China's small and medium-sized enterprises that have not yet deployed servers are planning to adopt a managed server for the next three years.

Web site

Currently, only 29% of China's small and medium-sized enterprises own websites, in a more mature hosting market, the ratio is as high as 95%, and 62% of small and medium sized enterprises that have not yet set up websites plan to build their own websites in the next three years, and 25% of the established websites in China are planning to increase the cost of hosting services in the next three years.

Managed Communications and collaboration

Larger small and medium-sized enterprises have a huge demand for organizational and collaborative functions in enterprise mail hosting services; In larger small and medium-sized enterprises, there are 75% plans to increase mail hosting, and 83% of those already in mail-hosted businesses plan to increase the cost of this service.

Other online applications, software as services, SaaS

Many small and medium-sized enterprises have indicated their intention to increase (or begin to pay) almost all types of online applications. They say the types of paid applications they are most willing to buy and plan to increase their spending include online customer relationship management (accounting for 74%) and teleconferencing (64%).

Among the existing online users of small and medium enterprises, the new applications they are most likely to adopt in the next three years include online backup and Storage (31%), e-mail archiving (accounting for 26%), and content management (accounting for 17%).

The parallels report concludes that China's service providers should target the sectors with the highest potential and value of cloud services, and then promote the benefits of cloud services to small and medium-sized enterprises and other customers. This shows that China's cloud services are still in the transition phase, the future market potential is huge.

(Responsible editor: Liu Fen)