The small and medium-sized business (SMB) market is growing by leaps and bounds. With more than 67 million companies around the globe with less than 500 employees as of 2006, SMBs are projected to represent a total IT spending of greater than USD 437 billion in 2007—an increase of approximately 8.3 percent over 2006.¹ And the outlook is, this trend is going to continue long into the future. So how can your business capitalize on SMB IT spending?

SMBs, like any enterprise, are faced with the need to increase revenue, improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and boost productivity. The ability to meet these challenges head on is critical to their survival. How can your products or services help? Because you know what SMBs are looking to achieve, you can offer solutions that directly and positively impact their bottom line—and yours. And with the Intel® Software Partner Program’s Small & Medium Business Initiative, you’ve got a host of resources to help you compete more effectively.

As an Intel Software Partner Program member, you have world-class engineering and support in your corner. By taking advantage of business planning, technology, sales, and marketing resources as part of this initiative, you’ll gain access to a world of business-accelerating technologies that are both future-ready and future-proof. With over 90 percent of Intel® technology-based computers and workstations being shipped with multi-core processors in 2007², you have the opportunity to develop and market multi-threaded applications that satisfy a massive and growing demand in the SMB software marketplace.

SMBs are faced with the same challenges that large businesses face—only every challenge for an SMB can equate to business success or failure. That’s why Intel has created programs that help improve business value for companies like yours along every phase of the product life cycle, while helping you to quickly develop and market multi-threaded applications and accelerate time-to-market to fill increasing SMB demands.

Today, SMBs have a growing need for applications that can help them increase their competitive edge by decreasing down-time and increasing overall business efficiency:

• Enhancing network security. With considerable threats to networks on the rise due to malware, virus-attacks, worms and more, entire companies can lose out on days of productivity with a single infected platform event that propagates throughout the network. Finding software solutions to reduce or eliminate threats is key. With software solutions optimized for multi-core, SMBs get built-in protection from malicious attacks that enhance your multi-threaded software solutions.
• Empowering employee collaboration. Because more and more SMBs are competing in the global marketplace, employee efficiency enhancement and collaboration software technologies can help lower costs and increase productivity dramatically. With the power of multi-core technologies, SMBs can run multiple intensive collaboration applications at once without slowing down.
• Lowering costs and increasing ROI. Many SMBs today simply do not have the resources to warrant an IT department or even a full-time staff IT person. Finding a reliable, knowledgeable IT outsourcing option can help SMBs achieve the same benefits that large organizations enjoy on software and hardware technology purchases, network security, and more. By providing software resources optimized for multi-core, you can help SMBs achieve cost-effective performance gains.
• Increasing business management agility. Organizing business operations by utilizing IT infrastructure can help management automate and perform financial and business tasks without being bogged down by lengthy processes. By optimizing your business and financial applications for multi-core, you help SMBs operate and perform with power and agility that keeps them competitive and focused on what really counts—building business.
• Competing globally. Conducting business on the Internet allows companies the world over to conduct business anywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With e-commerce solutions like secure transaction, payment management, and customer relationship management (CRM), SMBs are able to compete on a global scale in new and exciting ways. And with e-commerce solutions optimized for multi-core, SMBs can operate with peace-of-mind built-in that the software technologies they’re utilizing are the most robust in the industry.

Intel is providing expertise and relationships that drive multi-core adoption and thread optimization across a wide range of applications—and leading software companies like yours can harness the unrivaled performance of multi-core to capitalize on a massive and growing demand.

Discover the bottom-line benefits of participating in the Small & Medium Business Initiative with the SMB ROI Calculator today ›

The future of computing and applications rests on multi-core and multithreaded technologies. Threading your applications to harness the unrivaled performance of multi-core technology can dramatically improve both your production time and your time to market while increasing your value to SMBs. The challenge you face in the development cycle, is keeping multiple cores busy to avoid leaving any performance underutilized. Your programs will need to serve up code threads that can be delivered to several cores efficiently and swiftly.

Threaded code has been the basis for a number of applications for some time. Only now are we seeing a real need to take it mainstream as demand for performance-rich and intensive technologies and the computers to run them smoothly hits an all time high. By choosing a threaded programming model based upon explicit threading or compiler-directed threading, you’re taking advantage of parallelism that will maximize the performance of multi-core technology.

By joining the Intel Software Partner Program and participating in the Small & Medium Business Initiative, you're signing on to a collaboration that will take you further in your multi-core development efforts, faster:

• Gain competitive edge with market research and analysis. With competitive insight on technology trends that directly impact your industry and target market, you’ll discover innovative avenues for developing your product for SMBs.
• Access extensive technical resources. With world-class engineering support on your side, you can optimize products for Intel’s latest multi-core platforms faster than ever before.
• Take advantage of sales and marketing support. Increase visibility, grow your customer base and drive sales with extensive business opportunities, enhanced international presence, and the extended reach exclusive to Intel Software Partner Program members.
• Showcase your solution around the globe. When you develop products optimized for Intel architecture and technologies as part of the Small & Medium Business Initiative you can increase your visibility to the world by including your solutions on a global stage through the Intel® Developer Solutions Catalog.
• Align with a brand built on reliability, quality, and revolutionary innovation. By joining the Small & Medium Business Initiative you can take advantage of, and promote your affiliation with a world-class brand built on leading-edge technology.

Optimizing for multi-core platforms with Intel can help you succeed in the SMB software market. Take advantage of the built-in benefits of the Small & Medium Business Initiative today and reach your potential.

Join the Small & Medium Business Initiative today ›
Not yet a Intel Software Partner Program member? Join today! ›

¹ Source: "Worldwide SMB 2007 Top 10 Predictions." IDC #205251. January 2007.
² Source: "Intel® Multi-Core Processors: Making the Move to Quad-Core and Beyond." Intel Corporation. September 2006.