Digital Intelligence: Technology adoption will deliver growth for West Midlands SMEs

EFFICIENT use of new technology will be vital if SMEs in the West Midlands are to continue with successful growth strategies, technology giant Microsoft has said.

It said with more and more businesses interacting digitally then firms needed to embrace the benefits successful technology adoption could deliver if the region was to remain competitive.

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Chris Rothwell, Microsoft’s Channel Development Group Manager – SME Business, said the company wanted to work with as many SMEs as possible in order to help them develop successive growth strategies.

“People expect to interact digitally these days. We have to empower users to operate in different ways,” he said.

“Enterprise Nation stresses that every business is a digital business because that’s how firms expect to interact these days.”

He said the technology available to SMEs had grown considerably over the past five years but many firms could still be confused by it.

“Our Cloud services enable people to do far more. We want to help people understand what is available and help them be more productive whatever their business may be,” he added.

“What we want to do is to empower businesses in order to make that happen.”
The company is working closely within the region to try and ensure as many firms get the message as possible.

“The Cloud will continue to grow rapidly in the SME sector. We want to find more customers we can help to secure more business,” he said.

Nigel Crockford, of Managed Enterprise Technologies in Birmingham, is one of those who agrees there has been a shift in the way people did business due to technology.

“The Cloud is the big train coming down the track and we should all make sure we climb aboard,” he said.

Nick Davies, founder and CEO of neighbourly.com, said his business looked at company engagement and as such analysed vast quantities of data. Reliable technology was therefore a must and so he had utilised the help of Microsoft.

“We are capturing more data than most people can handle. What we are finding is that there is an increasingly collaborate approach to information sharing,” he said.

“Microsoft brings confidence to businesses.”