Although a recent press report featuring details on The Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Survey 2004 suggests that 51% of SMEs still regard the PC as the most important shopping item on their annual IT budget, a leading notebook and accessories retailer, The Notebook Company (www.notebook.co.za), says his company is experiencing completely the opposite, with the vast majority of SME businesses looking to laptops, PDAs and wireless connectivity to empower their staff and companies.
Said Christopher Riley, CEO of Pretoria-based The Notebook Company: "It has also already been revealed that the number of laptops sold last year superseded sales of PCs. We, at The Notebook Company, are certainly not seeing the majority of SMEs still regarding PCs as more important than laptops."
A recent press report stated that, according to a poll of 2 919 SMEs, 51% "still rank the PC as the most important item on their IT budget".
"People have been predicting for some time that laptops sales would start out-gunning those of PCs. This does not mean the end of the road for PC sales, it just means that as we move deeper into the digital world companies need to arm their staff with mobile technology. There will always be a need for desktop PCs and for powerful desk-bound file servers, but if the 2004 SME Survey is anything to go by, then the SME marketplace is falling behind the times from a technology point of view. Technology, today, drives the business world. It follows, therefore, that if smaller companies fail to migrate timeously to the latest technology on offer - or at least some of the latest technology - they will start losing out in terms of their ability to compete in the digitally-driven business world.
"It is very possible," said Riley, "that when referring to PCs those people who were polled just included laptops in the same parcel as PCs. I cannot see that the majority - albeit a small majority - of SMEs still rank PC purchases as more important than laptops."
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