Australia Small and Medium-Sized Business Software Buying Behaviours, 2008

This IDC study shows that the Australian small and medium-sized business (SMB) software market experiences stronger growth than the hardware and services markets. This is mainly due to a higher dynamism of software vendors that constantly offers new and more exciting products at relatively stable prices.

"The strategic importance of software applications and the underlying drivers of adoption in SMBs are fundamentally the same as in the enterprise space. However, finding the right formula is as difficult as meeting the SMB demands prove to be challenging for vendors that are used to providing this level of service to enterprise customers at a premium price. The software-on-demand model may represent the future way of properly providing applications to the SMB market; unfortunately, there is still a lot of education to be done by vendors to convince SMBs to surrender their data," says Jean-Marc Annonier, research manager, IT Spending, IDC Australia.