The server market among Bangladesh medium businesses is expected to show a rise in shipments of over 10 percent in 2012, according to a recent study by New York-based Access Markets International Partners Inc. Focusing on ICT usage, AMI has comprehensively surveyed Bangladesh medium and large businesses during the last quarter of 2011 within the cities of Dhaka, Khulna, Chittagong and Rajshahi.

“Bangladesh medium businesses have been gradually overcoming the effects of the economic downturn and are slowly on the path towards recovery,” said Dev Chakravarty, manager of research for AMI-India. “This is evidenced by their demographic trends related to future economic performance and growth. A typical Bangladesh MB anticipates a around a 5 percent rise in revenues next year. In addition, close to half of these MBs anticipate new employee hires and over a quarter are contemplating expansion of their branch office network in the same timeframe. These growth trends have a direct link with technology and connectivity infrastructure needs and consequently lead to greater server adoption.

“This greater server need is further corroborated by the fact that the top application areas of servers among MBs are collaboration-related functionalities such as file sharing, web conferencing, printer sharing,” he added. “Although ERP penetration has just crossed double digits among Bangladesh MBs, there is significant potential for future growth as part of their strategic adoption plans for business process automation like CRM in the immediate future.”

AMI research also indicates among various strategic IT issues in the future, Bangladesh MBs indicate interest in technologies like groupware/ workflow and imaging/ document management.

As a general rule, Bangladesh MBs prefer rack-mounted servers, followed by tower servers. Usage of blade servers is least popular due to high initial cost. This indicates that these MBs are still not fully aware of the multiple advantages of the blade server such as higher computing power, greater space and energy savings according to AMI. It also indicates an opportunity for vendors to educate these companies on the advantages and uses of various server types.