Steve Hilton

Welcome to our monthly column, Ask Steve. We’re going to tackle small and medium business-focused questions every month. We’ve received some great questions so far and will try to get to all of them. This month we’re going to look at smart phone applications and broadband connectivity. Keep those great questions coming!

Bruce from Birmingham, Ala.: More and more SMB employees are using BlackBerrys and Treos. What are they using them for?

A: Bruce, much like the throngs headed for New York City trains at 5pm, SMB smart phone use is pushing forward. With the productivity benefits of voice-only cellular phones plus email, smart phones offer frantic SMB employees a new level of connectivity outside the office.

According to Yankee Group data, the top applications used by smart phone-centric employees are corporate e-mail, web browsing, business productivity suites (e.g., Microsoft Office), CRM, project management and corporate IM.

One would hope SMB employees access all these applications on their smart phones, but that’s not the case. Corporate e-mail and web browsing is relatively easy on a smart phone, but enabling business productivity suites, CRM, project management and corporate IM applications is thorny. No more than 13% of SMB employees is able to access these types of applications on their smart phones and more often than not SMB adoption rates are low single digits. The most hard-core smart phone users strongly value supply chain management and material requirements planning applications. But none of our SMB survey respondents is able to access SCM or MRP applications on smart phones today.

Employees value the rich applications they use in the office, but making them work in the smart phone environment for SMBs requires a tight coupling of vendor, service provider, ISV and partner. Today we have little more than boxcars with no engines to pull them, and no one wants to don the conductor’s hat. Hopefully the industry will address these issues over the next 12-36 months.

Terry from Burlington, Vt.: I’m a Verizon reseller. What’s the number of SMBs with broadband access?

A: VZ, DSL, SMB: this acronym soup could steam-up anyone’s glasses, not just someone in Northern Vermont in January! Great question, Terry. Let’s go straight to Yankee Group SMB data.

Yankee Group estimates there are 5.3 million broadband connections in the U.S. SMB market. 56% of the broadband connections are DSL, 25% are cable modems, 10% are T-1s (full, fractional or integrated) and 9% are other types of broadband connectivity. Yankee Group expects continued growth in the broadband space, with non-connected and narrowband SMBs making the plunge into the broadband world.

E-mail me at SHilton@yankeegroup.com.