The small and medium-sized business (SMB) market is witnessing a growing emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity, with telecom service providers increasingly focusing on small office/home office (SOHO) businesses as the next key target.
As AI and cybersecurity solutions gain traction, service providers are expanding their reach beyond mature markets, particularly in regions like Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific, seeking high-growth opportunities, says GlobalData.
Telecoms service providers are rolling out AI and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solutions to SMBs, as well as the enterprise market. This is also true when it comes to cybersecurity solutions, with constant product enhancements and innovations to help protect businesses from both external and internal threats.
Robert Pritchard, principal analyst: enterprise technology and services at GlobalData, says: “For the foreseeable future, AI and cybersecurity will continue to get the greatest amount of attention and create the most market noise. This is inevitable as they represent considerable opportunities and threats for businesses of all sizes.”
GlobalData analysis also noted that targeting the SMB market is also extending geographically beyond ‘mature’ markets, as service providers look for long-term growth from faster growing opportunities across the Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific regions.
Pritchard adds: “SMBs are the engine of economic growth globally. This explains why attention has expanded to new geographies where the potential for growth is huge, especially when compared to so-called mature markets that tend to be highly competitive and where businesses already have a wide choice of service providers.”
GlobalData now sees the SOHO market as a future key battleground. As predicted, this follows an almost universal shift in focus onto the SMB market over the last two years.
Pritchard concludes: “SOHOs present a whole new set of problems – both organizationally and in terms of products, propositions, and channels to market. But they offer the same fundamental attraction as SMBs – they tend to be more ‘sticky’ (i.e., lower churn rates), they represent a very substantial overall market opportunity in revenue terms, and they will – like all other segments – increasingly need value-added, high-margin services like cybersecurity and AI.”