challenging year, with small and medium businesses beset by issues such as load shedding, rising fuel prices, geopolitical conflict, rand volatility and political instability. With fears of a global economic slowdown in 2023, business owners and leaders should probably not expect the year to be any easier.
For such businesses, digital tech and the cloud are not a second thought. They are deeply embedded in how the business operates. For the most digitally mature SMBs, cloud-based as-a-service offerings are not just a way to pay for technology using opex rather than capex — they are a way to achieve the flexibility they need to win in a competitive and fast-changing environment.
The value that the channel can offer to SMBs lies in creating solutions for their challenges and enablers for their opportunities. The technology building blocks should preferably disappear behind the scenes. This is an exciting and fast-growing market, which is why everyone from banks to telcos to big tech platforms are creating cloud-based solutions for SMBs.