Digitalization Drives Era of Growth for Small and Medium Businesses in India

Capterra India, the world’s leading software reviews and selection platform, recently released the results of its “Digitalisation of Indian SMEs survey”, a new study capturing the voice of small and medium businesses in India. The findings point to transformation in the SME sector driven by the shifting landscape of the new digital economy, the vast influence of technology, and the ever-increasing influence of SaaS on businesses.

Capterra India conducted the study with a total of 435 respondents (including group of managers, senior managers, or CEOs/founders) out of which 341 work for SMEs, and 94 work for enterprises —companies having more than 250 employees. These respondents, hereon known as decision makers, belong to companies that have a digitalisation strategy in place or have implemented one in the past, thus providing a relevant, comprehensive, and wide-ranging insight into the concept of digitalisation for small and medium businesses.

Commenting on the survey, Sukanya Awasthi, Content Analyst for Capterra India and Digitalisation of Indian SMEs survey, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a shift in consumer sentiment and behavior across the world. Technologies such as blockchain, IoT, 5G, cloud computing, AI and Data Science have changed the global economy and being a cornerstone of this economic development, SMEs have also realized the need to digitalise their business models. With this newly launched study by Capterra, we aim to provide businesses with a comprehensive overview of how the SME landscape is changing with the emerging SaaS technology, and some of the trends which might impact the industry in the future.”

Key Highlights of the study

• 40% started their digitalisation process in the last 1-3 years: 88% of companies started their digitalisation efforts within the last 5 years, while a proportion of that subset of respondents stated that their companies started to digitalise processes after the onset of COVID-19.
• 88% of respondents say their firm has a digitalisation strategy in place: Majority of the decision-makers in a company are actively involved in the decisions pertaining to the digitalisation of processes and attach a significant level of importance to digitalisation within the company.

• Companies plan to digitalise accounting and marketing processes next: 43% of the respondents say that they will focus on Accounting and 42% of the respondents say that they will focus on Marketing next to digitalise the processes.

To view the full findings of the Digitalisation of Indian SMEs survey: