IDC study finds SMBs can get 222% ROI from GCP

IDC Research has conducted a study recently and 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 organisation. The study titled The Business Value of Improved Performance and Efficiency with Google Cloud Platform describes how SMBs can accelerate business growth while achieving greater cost efficiencies. 

IDC’s research found that SMBs often need to react quickly to changes in customer demand and behaviour 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. 

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 realise revenue gains of 16% per year per organisation or $881,500 annually.

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.

For a deeper look into IDC’s findings on the benefits of Google Cloud Platform for SMBs, download the whitepaper.