SMEs should adopt IT to achiever higher growth: Microsoft

Calling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) critical for job creation and economic growth, Microsoft India today said such businesses in the country should adopt information technology (IT) in a big way to achieve more revenue growth.
"Indian SMEs are not adopting IT and lack of its adoption is impeding their growth," Microsoft India General Manager (SMS&P) Meetul Patel said here.
Quoting a report of management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, he said that SMEs that adopted IT created more new jobs and drove more revenue growth over the past three years compared to SMEs using little technology.
The report highlighted if more SMEs in India adopted the latest IT tools there was a potential for SME revenue to grow by USD 56 billion and create 1.1 million new jobs.

Patel said IT-enabled SMEs saw their revenue growing by 15 percentage points faster than those that used less technology in their businesses.
The latest wave of technological advancement, such as cloud services, brings tremendous potential for far-reaching innovation and business growth for SMEs to achieve accelerated growth rates, he added.

Patel further said, "SMEs are a critical growth engine for jobs and economies today. The need for investment in hardware, software, and technical expertise was previously a large barrier for SMEs in India to benefit from IT.
"Today, the availability of services being delivered through pay-as-you-use cloud computing is enabling SMEs to substantially reduce upfront investments in server and networking infrastructure and direct capital to other areas that can drive growth."

Patel said SMEs like startups and mature ones are increasingly leveraging cloud solutions to access advanced enterprise-grade IT infrastructure.
"This is enabling SMEs to increase their top-line revenue by allowing them to focus on the market instead of the back-end IT infrastructure. We are witnessing Indian businesses are increasingly embracing cloud services just like consumers embraced mobile phones over landline phones," said Patel.