IDC study shows Google Cloud Platform helps SMBs accelerate business growth with 222% ROI

Often facing limited time and resources, small and medium businesses (SMBs) increasingly need solutions that can help them accelerate innovation and gain a competitive edge. As a result, many are turning to cloud technologies that can help them spend less time managing infrastructure and more time growing their businesses. But not all public cloud providers are the same when it comes to SMBs, and many of our SMB customers have told us they choose Google Cloud because it’s easy to use and designed to be open, reliable, and innovative with smart analytics and artificial intelligence built-in.

To understand the challenges that SMBs have adopting cloud technologies, we commissioned IDC Research to evaluate how Google Cloud could address their unique needs. Today, we’re sharing the results of this study in The Business Value of Improved Performance and Efficiency with Google Cloud Platform, which describes how SMBs can accelerate business growth while achieving greater cost efficiencies. As part of this study, IDC found that Google Cloud SMB customers can achieve a 222% return on their investment over three years with an average annual benefit of $1.09M per year per organization.

Here’s a closer look at IDC’s findings.

1. Improving IT agility and productivity

IDC’s research found that SMBs often need to react quickly to changes in customer demand and behavior—and that’s especially true in the current global climate. Google Cloud helps SMBs scale up or down to meet demand, so they only need to pay for what they use. In the study, IDC also shared insights on how Google Cloud benefits application development teams through improved infrastructure agility, scalability, flexible capacity, and other platform functionality like autoscaling with Kubernetes Engine to address changing business requirements. IDC ultimately found that seamless access to the resources needed to efficiently build new applications and features on Google Cloud led to 19% higher developer productivity or the equivalent of more than four additional development team members. 

In the case of Google Cloud customer idwall, developers saw productivity improvements of ~30%:

2. Improving business results and performance

SMBs don’t necessarily have the luxury of relying on existing customer relationships or their brand to help maintain and grow their businesses. They must instead be nimble and adaptive to quickly take advantage of business opportunities as they arise and consistently meet customer expectations to stay competitive. IDC found that Google Cloud Platform delivers increased agility, flexibility, and performance, helping SMBs grow their businesses faster. Through the use of leading-edge cloud services such as Google BigQuery, Kubernetes Engine, and AutoML, businesses are able to realize revenue gains of 16% per year per organization or $881,500 annually.

One Google Cloud customer attributed 25% of their growth to Google Cloud Platform:

3. Lowering cost of operations

SMBs often have limited budgets and lean staffing models so it’s important to run IT operations as cost-effectively as possible. Staffing efficiencies can go a long way in helping lower the cost of operations. With Google Cloud Platform, IDC found that SMBs were able to achieve a 41% improvement in overall efficiency across IT teams or the equivalent productivity of almost three IT staff resources. When drilling down on infrastructure costs, IDC calculated that SMBs spend 26% less over three years with Google Cloud Platform with preemptible VM instances, automated patching, Google’s strong customer support team, and serverless offerings contributing to the lower costs.

In the case of Google Cloud customer GESTO, a Brazilian healthtech company, they were able to leverage serverless computing to save ~15%:

Helping SMBs achieve more with the cloud

For a deeper look into IDC’s findings on the benefits of Google Cloud Platform for SMBs, download the whitepaper. For more information on Google Cloud and SMBs, explore our SMB solutions or watch our session packages from Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir specifically tailored for SMBs, including Startup: Introductory, Startup: Advanced, Business Continuity, and Business/Digital Transformation.