IDC European Vertical Markets releases a report which defines the clusters that best describe the Western European SMB environment.
This study highlights four groups of homogeneous SMBs based on common IT deployment and propensity to invest in their IT future:
- The laggards (16%) have a basic infrastructure and limited willingness to invest in the near term.
- Wait-and-see companies (36%) have a solid deployment of IT but prefer to wait until technology is mature and widely present in the market before engaging in other significant IT investments.
- IT-oriented companies (21%) have a solid IT deployment and a high propensity to invest further.
- The fast followers (16%) cluster despite a lower-than-average adoption of IT is the most keen to close the technology gap with early adopters.
This IDC study is based on the results of IDC's European vertical markets survey, carried out in 2009 in the top five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K.) among 1193 SMBs with 20–499 employees.
The sample, representative of the Western European SMB marketplace, was segmented into four clusters through a k-means cluster analysis, which allowed putting together companies with similar characteristics in terms of their current IT engagement and IT propensity.