While hosting thousands of channel leaders in Nashville at ChannelCon, GTIA released its latest findings on how SMB executives are approaching tech spend this year.
Demand for tech remains high as SMBs focus on how to drive business forward
The annual end-user research provides MSPs and other channel partners with valuable insights into how their SMB customers are evaluating technology in relation to their goals and budgets.
GTIA identified three key trends from its research:
- An increasing awareness of the need for greater alignment between business goals and tech spending, with 65% identifying technology as a “primary factor” in attaining business goals.
- A strong and growing interest in AI adoption among SMBs, with more than 6 in 10 noting a moderate or significant increase in AI spending in 2025.
- A wake-up call about cybersecurity diligence, with only 4 in 10 SMBs surveyed identifying cybersecurity as a strategic tech area they prioritize and spend on in 2025.
The research also asserts that nearly two-thirds of SMBs are set to spend between $25K and $1M on tech this year, with many investing a higher share of revenue on technology than large enterprises.
“Today’s SMBs are prioritizing growth, operational efficiency and increasingly AI,” said Carolyn April, VP of Research and Market Intelligence, GTIA. “And with 80% of SMBs acknowledging they have “some or a lot of room” for improvement with respect to vision and strategy for use of tech, the time is now for IT service professionals to step in and get IT done right.”
“It’s pretty clear, both in the GTIA’s recent report and in surveys we’ve done with our own partners lately, that SMBs want to buy technology, but don’t necessarily know what they want to buy,” Ingram Micro CMO Jen Anaya told us on-site at ChannelCon.
The next era of partner success: managing beyond the tooling
GTIA’s data highlights a trend many MSPs and vendor executives have discussed at ChannelCon: their customers don’t need them for technical support nearly as much as they need them as complete business advisors.
“I don’t think the technology is going to be the most important thing moving forward,” ScalePad CRO Ryan Sigouin told Channel Insider. “MSPs will need to focus on customer success in all approaches and become trusted business advisors.”
Part of this motion will involve partners become more familiar than ever with the needs of their customers, including how they can connect technology to the growth and success of SMBs that might not seem directly tied to buying a certain product or maintaining licenses.
This is an adjustment for many MSPs who still focus predominantly on the technical aspects of the channel, a role many are far more familiar with than the intrinsic value of business development in the SMB world.
As the AI wave has shown, though, customers are more willing than ever to engage with technology without their MSP involved, and as many have said at the event, SaaS and other tech tools are easier to acquire than ever before.
In a world where SMB tech budgets remain robust and tech is no longer mystical, partners will need to reimagine how they deliver high-impact services that customers still find too valuable to lose.
Channel Insider will have more insights from ChannelCon throughout the month of August.