Billions of enterprises to enterprises of billions

Time of small has come , last year apple released its ipod nano which was smallest and sleekest in the family and after that there was much hyped dream of Mr Tata , Tata Nano which shown to the world that small is really disruptive it can bring a paradigm change in the industries and prove that impossible is nothing . There was a time when people used to long for big , today the liking has changed ( If we keep some exceptions like real estate out) and it has been rapidly caught up by Industry biggies , at one side Fijitsu and Apple have come up with the smallest laptop this year on the other side from mobile to hard disk everything is shrinking into a pocket size portable device.Now the question is does small mean that it has some tradeoffs , is it compromising something ? Today in most of the cases answer is no. Small is as powerful as its larger counterpart and whenever small comes into market, it instantly becomes favourite of masses. A very comparable trend has been seen from last couple of years in industry, there is a huge surge in number of small and medium size industries worldwide. These SMEs are emerging as the growth engine of the world economy . In the EU, SMEs comprise approximately 99% of all firms and employ between them about 65 million people. In China there are close to 8 million SMEs and in India the number is 4.5 million.SMEs are also responsible for driving innovation and competition. These are the businesses which later on become some of the largest empires in the world, recall the days when Infosys started with 5 man and a two BHK apartment in Pune and went on to become the second largest software services provider in Asia . At one side where big stalwarts of India Inc are making news worldwide, back home the efforts of the small and medium enterprises are also gaining appreciation and support from all the dimensions.

Great Governance :

Indian government has been closely monitoring the development in SME sector and formulating many supportive policies to boost it further and it has to definitely do this for a sector which employs more then 178 lakh people. For funding SMES financial institutions like Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) , National Small Industries Corporation have been instituted . the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has already issued guidelines to the public sector banks to ensure 20 per cent year-on-year growth in credit to the SME , other banks are also encouraged to provide loans to SMEs .

Advocacy by Non profit associations:

Most of the Industry associations like CII , FICCI , NASSCOM which represent all sections of industry have not only setup a separate wing catering to the SMBs but also started encouraging SMEs by giving away various awards in almost all of the verticals where SMEs are functional. One of the most talked about awards is "Emerging India Award" which is instituted by ICICI in collaboration with CRISIL. Corporation bank has also initiated an ward called National award for mSME which will be focussing on sector wise contribution of mSMEs. As per my understanding the most critical role played by these authorities is by doing advocacy for SMEs with government as well as private organizations specially banks , this helps in bringing attention to the areas of improvement and creating better opportunities for SMEs. It is because of these effortsmany organizations are joining hands with regulatory bodies and trying to come up with solution and funding products for SMEs. Media is also fully supportive of these efforts.

Now IT is easy :

There was a time when arrogance of IT companies was at peek , it was impossible for anyone to realise that any small business can leverage on power of the mighty mainframe or for that matter any state of art computing facility like data centres and storage solutions but today rules of the game have changed . IT companies have suddenly started targeting and building solutions for SMEs not only because they want to help SMEs grow larger but They have also realised this is where their future top and bottom line is. As per the latest Microsoft-AMI Partners report, "the India SMEs are on a firm growth trajectory, with 60 per cent of PC-using businesses expecting 20 per cent growth and 16 per cent planning to add branch offices to expand operations". Some of the classic example of these focussed solutions are storage product by Sun , HP , Toshiba , Network solutions by Cisco , nortel . Another breakthrough in this space is emergence of software as service have given value for the cost put in by SMEs as they only pay for what they use and hence they are not bound to purchase complete packages to use just a small part of it. Now setting up IT infrastructure is possible in very affordable prices for SMEs thanks to the concepts of platform as service and On-Demand delivery model enabling firms to move their entire IT infrastructure management to the ‘multi-tenant system’ shared resources where complete infrastructure can be leased or rented .

Environment :

Whenever entrepreneurial ventures are discussed , we always discuss successes and not failures whereas more then 80% of start-ups never complete their one year of existence . I see this a good sign for other entrepreneurs because they always have fascinating success stories like virgin , FedX , Infoys , Microsoft , Dominos , Air Deccan to follow and no failures which can cause any hesitation in their minds. Visionaries like Dhiru bhai Ambani gave a life to this word "Entrepreneur". Entrepreneurship today is the most respected occupation !

This is the time when SMEs have a perfect balance of opportunities and sources to leverage on those opportunities , at one side globalization is continuously opening new opportunities for industry and on the other technology enablement like ecommerce.

There is no dearth of talent specially when they are sitting in the hub of worlds coast arbitrage centre.It is worth appreciating that everyone is realising that one size does not fit all and hence special nurturing is needed in case of these small but powerful giants. The quest for searching new growth avenues never stops , up to now we are master in putting lower categories up in value chain and so will be done here as well , the concept of micro small and medium enterprises has already caught up the momentum and given various supporting factor there is every possibility for each of these billions of enterprises to become enterprises of billions.