IN recent years, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been topping up IT budgets to increase competitiveness, improve customer service and reduce cost. According to AMR Research, at least 64 per cent of SMBs plan to increase IT budgets by an average of 5.3 per cent in 2008.

However, despite increased IT budgets, the SMB sector hasn't really changed its IT imperatives. Their buying decisions will still be influenced by return-on-investment targets, preference for solutions that are easy to manage and deploy, as well as the need to secure access to applications, information, voice and data anytime, anywhere.

One trend is clearly emerging. This year, SMBs will likely accelerate their adoption of mobility solutions. As the workforce continues to transition into fluid, location-independent status, technologies such as wireless and IP communications solutions that are core to bringing up the benefits of this transition will be most attractive for SMBs.

As the enterprise embraces mobility, security will become a bigger and broader challenge and will therefore remain a key IT investment consideration. SMBs would want to ensure that access to customer information and proprietary data is limited to workers who need such information to perform their jobs. At the same time, they would want to provide remote workers the freedom to access appropriate information without the threat of data theft. SMBs also would like the ability to create 'virtual' perimeters and deeper layers of protection around the core of their business.

Mobility blurs the network perimeter. Nowadays, it is no longer enough for enterprises simply to control access to their building, they must also ensure that only those that are checked, safe, and authorised have access to their system; and that these users' rights to certain services are governed by highly specific policies. For SMBs to truly benefit from multi-layered approach to network access control (NAC), all of those functions must be managed with minimal operational expense.

While having a mobile or location-independent workforce reduces capital expenses, heightened customer intimacy and greater levels of productivity, it still comes at a significant cost. Faced with budget and manpower constraints, SMBs will find the best value in products that are future-proof and have extensible configurations. Good examples of this are products based on open standards that ensure interoperability and support for enhanced and expanded capabilities. It will also help the company prepare for potential office and building relocation without disrupting business continuity.

How do SMBs decide which IT project is most important? Generally, SMBs tend to focus on the areas where they experience the greatest business pains. Today, that need translates to creating an infrastructure that supports diverse workforce needs, from collaboration to telecommuting to simply staying connected in a highly competitive market place where one of the key differentiators is responsiveness to customer and/or market requirements.

Customer service is often reactive, but today it's the degree of proactive customer service that sets businesses apart from the competition. The good news is that these days, the sales cycles for productivity-enhancing network technologies can be dramatically short.

In terms of specific technologies, SMBs are demonstrating great interest in IP telephony as they strive to make their workers more productive. NAC solutions are the next obvious choice, as SMBs must keep their business-critical information safe even as they open their network to remote workers and business partners.

Once SMBs have identified their key pain points, the next step is to find an IT partner that can help them proactively maintain and expand their business. This partner must help them ensure that their IT plans are aligned with the rest of the organisation's goals.

To make IT investments work for SMBs, it is important that they are able to manage two primary costs: acquisition and ownership. The key questions they must ask are: Is our IT system reliable? What investment does it require to continue to run reliably? Can it make people and processes more efficient or successful, or customers happier?

A good IT partner for an SMB is one that will help the company leverage its existing network infrastructure as extensively as possible to help buffer the impact of significant up-front investment. If, for instance, a company is implementing its own IT infrastructure, including a PC environment, the partner could help the company build a voice-ready converged network that supports mobility. The buildout can be done in phases and should require a relatively modest investment to get started.

To SMBs, a trusted technology advisor is priceless because the management time and budget required for an IT initiative will depend on how IT-savvy and sophisticated the business operator is, and how fast the plan will enable the organisation to grow. That is why it is important that the business adviser understands the SMB's business strategy and its unique needs and must be able to offer several solution options and road-map for growth.

The writer is vice-president and general manager, 3Com Asia Pacific

This article was first published in The Business Times on April 28, 2008.