ISV Business Opportunity for MS Partners

So I had the opportunity to speak at the SMBNation ISV Summit this past week in Seattle.  Harry put on a great event.  Some things I didn't quite realize until I was preparing for my session are the size of the numbers around Small and Medium businesses.  Numbers like 400B on IT spend by this market segment in 2004 world-wide with projected growth of 7%, meaning 428B for 2005, (source is Gartner). 

There are other numbers that matter as well, since on the average a small and medium sized business will typically spend between $1,800 - $50k a year on IT, (source is IDC).  Economics like this say there is a HUGE opportunity in this space, but you have to price your product right.  I'd be willing to guess most small business spend more money a year on telephony than they do on IT and software purchases. 

The other factor to consider is that about 1/3 of those small business do not have time to maintain their IT investment nor do they understand the ROI they will get out of their IT purchase, (source is IDC).  Hence most purchases are made off a gut feeling of the Small Business Owner on the hope they can recoup their investment in a very short time. 

This is where MS can help, with 2 differing programs: the ISV Royalty program and SBS2003.  With both of these programs your cost for our platform is very small and leaves lots of room for you to make money.  Check out the pricing on SBS2003 here and learn more about the ISV Royalty program here.

So I don't want to make the post too long, but I'll continue down this discussion path a bit more.