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AMI-Partners Releases U.S. SMB Partner Competencies Assessment Report

By Raju Shanbhag
TMCnet Contributor

In its new report titled, “U.S. SMB Partner Competencies Assessment,” AMI-Partners focuses on various channel partner competencies that make players in cloud services market indispensable and highly profitable.

Detailing about five major competencies, the report turns the spotlight on the partners that have proactively invested in developing their skill sets, knowledge and expertise. The competencies include unified communication and collaboration, business analytics, business process management, mobility and infrastructure alignment. Only 20 percent are currently proficient in two or more of the high-value competencies, among the 72,000 partners in the U.S. who focus on the SMB segment, the report stated.

“High-value competency (HVC) partners drive 3 times the market opportunity compared to other SMB partners,” says Avinash Arun, Director of SMB Channels at AMI-Partners, “and the margins they derive from these key solutions are about 25 percent higher than other partners.” A critical distinguishing factor of HVC partners is their commitment to the cloud. HVC partners are also 3 times as likely to already be experiencing success in the cloud, from a business and financial perspective.”

In high-value industries, including financial services and healthcare, HVC partners tend to work with SMBs. Helping them drive operational efficiencies, enhance productivity and reduce IT complexity, the breadth of product offerings, coupled with vertical specialization, allows these partners to cater to a more sophisticated SMB clientele. Some of the key solutions offered by HVC partners include business intelligence, CRM, unified communications, virtualization, IaaS and mobility applications, the company stated in a press release.

Recently, the company revealed that nearly 3.5 million SMBs in the United States are currently using smart phones and 700,000 are using tablet PCs. The company also forecasted that within the next year the number of SMBs owning these devices will increase significantly to 40 percent and 85 percent, respectively. This tremendous growth is due to the success of Apple’s (News - Alert) iPhone, iPad and other Android devices which have also spawned a greater demand for more specialized, business-focused mobile apps.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Summit, collocated with TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. The Cloud Communications Summit will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. To register, click here.