Cloud and Analytics Gain Traction Among Mid-sized American Firms

Blue chip companies are not alone in embracing cloud and analytics. Increasingly mid-sized firms in America are using these offerings as a vehicle to cut cost and improve marketing and sales, according to 2015 Deloitte Growth Enterprise Services (DGES) survey.

Nearly half of the survey respondents indicated that their company’s leadership views technology as a “critical” differentiator and key to growth. Nearly 80 percent of midsized firms appear to have been using business analytics this year, compared to 65 percent last year.

In the survey, nearly two third of respondents have said that their company’s technology spend is higher than last year (compared to 58 percent in 2014), while 30 percent indicated their technology spend is more than 5 percent of revenue, up from just 19 percent in 2014.

Interestingly, they are seeing analytics (47 percent) and Cloud applications (43 percent) as technologies with the highest potential to produce the greatest productivity gains. Not all midsized firms have embraced the shift to cloud computing. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they see hosting their own systems as the most preferred IT model.

But what is certain is that they are increasingly finding Cloud the right tool to cut costs on IT investment. Some analysts say it was expected because a midsized company can find it easy to train staff to use cloud-based applications required to run the business instead of employing engineers to install and maintain IT systems.

In the survey, 42 percent said they are in the process of deploying cloud-based systems, and 21 percent said they have successfully moved into Cloud. Sixty percent said they are using analytics for sales and customer management, while 49 percent said they had implemented marketing analytics applications.

Many companies still seem to be clueless as to how they will bolster their network and protect themselves from cyber attacks. Some executives have stated that information security will have a huge impact on their business in the years to come.