Power of small business with technology

Anothai Wettyakorn

Indeed, small business - commonly defined as having 25 or fewer employees - is the engine driving nearly every economy on our planet. In the United States, small businesses represent 99.7 per cent of all employers and provide jobs for about half of the country's private-sector employees. In Brazil, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, small businesses represent 98 per cent of the country's 5.5 million companies, accounting for 60 per cent of its jobs.

Despite this pre-eminence, the power of the small business will be even greater in the next decade. As the next billion Internet users come online (one billion are already connected to the Internet worldwide), they'll exploit the potential that this "connected era" holds for their businesses, their families and communities, and ultimately for the global economy.

The International Council for Small Business estimates that more than 500 million new businesses will set up shop over the next five years. Many of these new enterprises will crop up in fast-growing economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries), and others including Israel, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Poland and countries throughout Latin America.

For these businesses to succeed, they'll need information technology. Small- and medium-sized businesses recognise this need. Their IT spending growth has outpaced total corporate IT spending worldwide since 2002, and is expected to do so through 2010, according to analyst firm IDC.

It helps that computer prices have declined steadily and significantly over the past 10 years, IDC says. The average cost of a desktop computer, for example, fell by 60 per cent between 1997 and 2007. Laptops, which the next billion people online are choosing for their first PC, came down in price at nearly the same rate over the same period. Infrastructure computing has also become more affordable, with prices of computer servers that run networks and websites dropping 55 per cent. And in line with Moore's Law, computing power has nearly doubled every 18 months or so as computer prices have fallen.

This all bodes very well for small businesses. Armed with the right technology, they're better able to compete - not only with their peers, but also with larger businesses, all around the world.

This has been the first in a series of two articles.

Anothai Wettyakorn is managing director of Dell Corporation (Thailand).