The onset of the pandemic has seen many businesses in the Polish SME sector invest increasingly in cloud services, according to new forecasts from AB Group.
The Polish IT equipment distributor found that over 50% of companies offering such services managed to boost their revenues in the last 12 months.
These figures contrast sharply with other growth predictions from research firm Gartner that say the value of the global cloud services market will grow by 20% this year alone to exceed $300bn (£221bn).
“The pandemic has led to growth in both volume and enterprise solutions,” says Zbigniew Mądry, COO and member of the management board at AB S.A. “In the case of the latter, Poland, which noted a 7% growth, was a green island in Europe. This can be attributed mainly to the area of security. Small and medium-sized companies in our market have understood that they need to invest in IT solutions, especially with the current dynamics of the popularity of e-commerce.”
The group says that new customers in the Polish market quickly learned that cloud services are flexible and convenient, due to pricing mechanisms like a subscription-based model, to lower operating costs, respond to market demands, and gain a competitive advantage.
According to data collected by Gartner, the SaaS model accounts for nearly 40% of the value of the entire cloud services market. As far as SaaS solutions are concerned, the most popular application for business customers was Microsoft 365, as well as a variety of other CRM and ERP systems.
Additionally, Gartner said another segment that saw particularly high popularity throughout the entire pandemic was instant messaging and group work coordination applications such as Microsoft Teams.
