SME Business News

As the debate continues as to whether Britain is still in recession, there is no doubt that the lion’s share of job creation will come from SMEs.

Piers Linney, chief executive of Outsourcery, which supplies 10,000 SMEs with IT solutions, notes “We have a large customer base of SMEs and we are well aware of the difficulties that many have faced over the last 18 months. In some cases our customers and suppliers or partners have failed, which impacts our business. As we have customers in almost all sectors, we have seen some suffer more than others.

The SME experience of the recession varies greatly depending on the sector, capitalisation, investment and protective actions taken. A number of partners reliant on sales funded by hire purchase agreements were directly impacted by the credit crunch, but even those business models have evolved to recover.

The need to reduce costs and to maximise productivity has been a positive outcome and those customers and business partners that have trimmed their cost base and continued investment, have come through the recession well placed to grow market share. Technology such as cloud computing is providing help to many by doing away with thousands of pounds of costly IT investment in favour of pay-as-you go IT delivered over the cloud for as little as GBP6 a month, enabling many SMEs to continue trading in these tough times.”

Cloud computing technology - where software and hardware is pooled centrally and made available over the internet - is enabling small and medium-sized businesses across the UK to reduce costs and enhance efficiencies.

With the UK looking to SMEs to pull it out of recession, it is critical that this important sector finds ways of not only surviving, but growing. In 2009 as a whole, there were 19,077 company liquidations, up 22.8 percent compared with the previous year, and 134,142 people were declared insolvent, around 1 in every 320 adults, up 25.9 percent from 2008.