I was thrilled to see the following article about the important role effective IT support plays in small business growth:

Wanted: small business tech support, good and cheap

I am the CEO of Everon Technology Services, LLC (www.everonit.com) as my “day job”, so I have a big stake in seeing small businesses recognize the advantages of outsourcing their IT management and support to a provider like Everon. Articles like this are encouraging.

I thought it was particularly interesting to see the drivers/pain points that SMBs referred to in the article:

Peesker said among the top 5 drivers for IT investments for SMBs with one to nine employees are: easy to use hardware; easy access to service and support; technology that enables online communication; information security; and data storage and recovery.

For SMBs with 10 to 99 employees, the drivers are: sales and marketing; database management; online communication; data storage and recovery; and tools to communicate with customers.

The top five pain points for SMBs are: bothersome trialware and freeware that come free-installed on machines; dependence on outside companies; frequent server slowdowns and failures; the need to keep PCs optimized for security and productivity; and setting up new systems.