Here we go again. I can't remember how many years ago it was that I gave a talk to a major Enterprise software supplier's customers (and a couple of its executives - two of them, that becomes important a little later) on the nature of the small to medium enterprise (SME, or if you use the other acronym with Business rather than Enterprise, SMB). My conclusion was that there's basically no such thing.
Let me explain. Every time I'm at a party (not often, I don't get invited out much) and mention to people that I write about business and use examples of real people doing real things, many of them start to 'network' and tell me what they do and who they work for. I've been in journalism for 20 years now - OK, guess how many people have ever told me 'I work in a small business/SME/SMB'.
Answer: One. In twenty years. I've always imagined he worked in the Adult Entertainment industry somehow and just didn't want to say.
The rest don't perceive themselves like that. They're lawyers, they're retailers, they're web consultancies, they're whatever they want to be but they are not, repeat not, generic SMEs.
This has serious implications for anyone wanting to support these businesses in an IT sense. This week I've been writing about a travel operator, based on the Web, for the Sunday Telegraph (a newspaper in the UK). He has 70 staff, 20 of whom are offshore and 20 more of whom are dedicated to IT. They have developed some standards for the travel industry. A few weeks ago I spoke to a lawyer for the same newspaper. Again they had 70 members of staff, but for most of them using Microsoft Word and Excel was as far as their technical skills went (this isn't a criticism, they had other specialisms naturally).
And the people selling technology to these people will bracket them both into 'SME' - same amount of users, same amount of computers, done. Except of course they share nothing in common in terms of IT requirement.
This is why yet another attempt by Sun - and a few others of whom I'm aware - to address this market is likely to fall down. Sun is among the companies that keeps doing this, SAP is another - it's simple, their classic Enterprise market is falling away or fully serviced already so they have to go somewhere.
I said earlier that the fact that there were two staffers (as distinct from customers) at my talk a few years ago was important. I'll now tell you why. On the evaluation sheet at the end, 55 people responded and gave me four stars out of five. No, hang on, 53 people gave me four stars. Two gave me one star, and I haven't been invited back.
I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. It just looks to me like a lot of the customers agreed with me, whereas the manufacturer didn't.*
*I should clarify that I have no idea whether the same people are currently employed by the manufacturer in question, nor whether they actually hold this sort of seminar any more - if they don't, this would be another good reason not to invite me back!