How do SMEs manage?

Data management has a long history within large enterprises. This is because they've long since realised that the data that they capture day to day can be used to provide insight into what their customers actually do with their products and services, and help to plan new and better ways to serve existing clients and attract new customers.

Or to put it another way - marketing.

OK - nothing new there - everyone's doing that aren't they?

But what about Small and Medium Sized enterprises? Data Management tools, methods, software, etc. all seem to be exclusively aimed at large enterprises, largely because the software is often very expensive, or it requires an army of developers and project managers. This pushes sophisticated data management out of the reach of most SMEs.

So what?

Well, people like Gartner and IBM estimate that information stored is doubling every 18 months or so (OK, so maybe IBM have a vested interest in saying that) so it won't be long before SME's face real problems coping with these volumes. For SME's to remain competitive, they're going to have to catch up with the big boys pretty fast, or find that their edge could be blunted by issues like data quality creep or systems that seem to conflict with rather than complement each other.

So what's out there to help?

Some vendors are starting to realise that there is a need. Vendors that traditionally serve SMEs for data management tools have often lacked the investment poured into the enterprise class technologies that are funded by the large bills payed by blue chip companies for the best technology. Consequently, there's not been a great deal to shout about for SMEs.

But that's changing. The enterprise vendors like IBM, Informatica and Ab Initio are now looking to draw in more clients in the 'Medium' part of SME. And new entrants to the market like Expressor are targetting everyone from Mom and Pop businesses to the very largest corporations. Even so, many of these tools require experts to apply them, and while they are all capable of using templates to get you started quickly, very few of them come with templates out of the box.

There's is therefore lot of potential opportunity for systems integrators (SI) to apply their skills in this market. But they can’t expect SME’s to handover wads of cash to develp these templates on site. SIs will have to come to the party with well formed, well targeted, robust offerings that can help SMEs drastically reduce risk, time to market, delivery and operational costs

Having worked in very large businesses for the last 17 years, the question I still have is: at what point will SMEs realize that they have problems managing their data, and then how easily can they deal with these problems with their traditional approaches?