The Internet expenditure of small and medium enterprises (SMEs, or companies with up to 999 employees) in India is expected to rise by around 16 per cent in 2010, says AMI partners.

The overall spending on Internet and website-related products and services by India SMBs totaled USD1.45 billion in 2009. AMI predicts this spending will continue to rise in 2010. In fact, Internet spending shows the highest year-over-year growth among Indian SMBs, when compared to the various ICT products and technologies.

“A majority of Indian SMBs have indeed reached saturation in terms of adopting basic connectivity infrastructure,” said Mr Dev Chakravarty, Assistant Manager - Research, at AMI-Partners, India. “Yet a considerable gap remains in terms of using technologies such as broadband, websites, intranet, e-commerce, etc. It is surprising to find that more than half of PC-owning SMBs in India still do not subscribe to any kind of broadband service. Within the different Internet-access technologies, the most preferred lines by SMBs continue to be DSL and cable modem,” he added.

In the past, digital social media-social networking, blogs, etc. -were being used for the most part by Indian consumers; yet we are seeing that more and more Indian SMBs have also started riding the digital bandwagon in a bid to be on par with their global counterparts. The AMI survey shows that currently as high as nine-in-ten Internet-using SMBs in India use some kind of digital social media for business or professional purposes. Professional social networking sites and general social networking sites are the two most frequently used digital social media.

One in four Indian SMBs have websites. For the most part these websites are hosted on third-party vendors' or service providers' servers. Many India SMBs have shown interest in having their own websites within the next 12 months.