There is no right answer to this question as every SME (small and medium enterprise) is unique and needs something else when it comes to IT vendor. Never think otherwise, you are unique. There are however few factors to consider when evaluating potential IT vendor. I can only describe it from our own experience dealing with SMEs in Singapore – why sometimes we were a good match and sometimes not. 

It’s a question that maybe some SME business owners ask themselves when thinking of automating their business but from my experience they don’t really care. SME business owner does not really care what is the official label “we” IT vendors put on our products or solutions, what matters is if it can do what it’s supposed to do, what they are paying for. And as SME business owner myself I totally understand that.

According to last week's Economist, the United States Air Force are buying 2,200 units of Sony PlayStation 3. The idea is to get a cheap hardware (subsidized by SONY as their actual revenue comes from selling the games), install Linux and have a super-powerful cluster at 10% of the normal cost. I've had a similar idea last year - coming out the economic boom left me with number of spare notebooks and number of customer needing a server but with advancing recession with less and less money for a new one.