24% of IT Spending in 2006 goes to …

I was leafing through a copy of Entrepreneur magazine yesterday at a client’s lobby, when the above statistic caught my eye: 24% of all IT spending in 2006 is going to be made by SME businesses.

That’s a pretty significant number, and it made me wonder what sorts of IT might be the beneficiary of that budget?

I have to admit, while we’ve been on the topic of Antispam, SaaS, Security SaaS, … I would not be at all surprised if that is precisely where a large chunk of this money goes. Here are some other contenders that I have recently written about, largely focused on the Very Small of the SME:

PayCycle: ADP for the Very Small
Way Systems: Mobile Payment Terminals

Besides these, there will be some vertical-specific software, so companies with products and channels into SME will win, example: Autodesk, Adobe, Solidworks, some businesses of Cadence and Mentor Graphics (PCB, for example).

Of the horizontals, the two obvious ones would be Salesforce.com and Webex, which brings to attention Microsoft’s failure to really make good on the SME opportunity. They have products in multiple areas catering to the SME, acquired via Placeware in Web Conferencing and Collaboration, Great Plains in CRM, and now Sybari in Antispam services. Could it be that in 2006, Microsoft stock will finally show some movement due to unexpected performance in these nonperforming areas?

And Cisco is the other languishing stock that many of us have held onto, which could also benefit from this SME budget deployment.

What else do you see?