Leader: SME roadshows are a Gran day out

There can be few among us in the industry not beginning to grow ever so slightly cynical over all the talk we hear about the small to medium enterprise (SME) market. It?s SME this, SME that and SME the other from just about every vendor you care to think of. But as we all know, talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. So the time has come for action.

Figures released last week from research firm Datamonitor predict there will a massive uptake in networking alone among the UK SME market. Figures of about #600 million within five years have been bandied about. This is a substantial proportion of the #4.5 billion that UK Ltd is expected to spend on its networking needs by then.

Even the smallest of companies is likely to has a PC or two in the office, looking after everything from word processing to maintaining sales and purchase ledgers. Hardly surprising then that the next wave of spending is going to be in getting all those PCs talking to each other.

But where are the SMEs? And how does the humble reseller get to them? The Computacenters and Tplcs of this world are unlikely to bend over backwards to win the small pieces of the IT pie that the SME market offers. But at the same time, the resellers that will take on such business don?t always have the marketing information to track it down. And yet the vendors keep telling the channel that it should be making hay while the SME sun shines.

This month saw 3Com running a series of roadshows to give its channel some guidance in this matter, and while I wouldn?t wish to appear to be favouring one company above all others, credit has to be given where it is due. Much of the information given out by 3Com might come across as teaching Granny to suck eggs. But dear old Granny isn?t always in the privileged position of having a marketing department, a market research firm on tap or even a PR agency stacked to the rafters with assorted flunkies who can, at a moment?s notice, dig deep into their accumulated resources to research a particular market sector.

Which is why those vendors who have jumped on the SME bandwagon with gay abandon must realise they have certain responsibilities to their channel. If you give a man a fish you can stop him from going hungry for a day, but teach him to fish for himself and he will never go hungry.