(22-Feb-10) Market research firms predict that small businesses in the U.S. will start buying computers, peripherals and network gear again this year. While this might be good news for small business technology vendors, there are others who believe there are valid reasons to hold off on IT hardware spending.
Small businesses are still gun shy, and rightly so, says Robert Garmaise, senior vice president of research and strategy at Info-Tech Research Group Inc., a firm that provides IT research and consulting services to small-medium businesses.
“I think it’s very slow, if there’s recovery at all,” Garmaise says. “I’d certainly say that six months ago we were still in free-fall. Companies were cutting back pretty aggressively. Now, they’re trying to keep costs flat or show only marginal increases.”
And that’s probably what they should be doing, he adds. Garmaise has some great ideas about how to achieve this. More on that a bit later.