This IDC study draws on the results of IDC's European Vertical Market Survey carried out in April–July 2011 in the top 5 Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K.) covering 1,021 SMBs with 20–499 employees. The focus of this study is on SMBs' adoption and plans for adoption by company size, country, and vertical market of different horizontal IT solutions including storage solutions, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI) and analytics, content management, and unified communications (UC).

"SMBs are maturing in their use of IT solutions, and we expect this trend to continue as their needs increasingly resemble those of large enterprises. In particular, midsize companies will increase their use of more sophisticated solutions such as BI and analytics, while small companies will increase their attention on CRM and on a selection of ERP modules. In addition, across the whole Western European SMB panorama, we will see top investment plans across storage solutions as 2012 will be another year of massive data deluge," said Angela Vacca, manager, IDC European Industry Solutions.