By Ari Rabban, CEO, Phone.com

Small and medium-sized business (SMB) spending on cloud solutions will grow almost 20 percent annually through 2018, http://idcdocserv.com/995" rel="nofollow - IDC predicts . If your business doesn’t use hosted communications and IT services, here are five reasons why it should:

1 - Significantly lower costs compared to on-premise systems. The initial savings are in the form of CapEx because hosted services free businesses from the five-, six- or seven-figure upfront cost of hardware and software. The long-term savings are in the form of OpEx because small businesses don’t have to dedicate staff to managing that infrastructure. Another bottom-line benefit is that their staff now can focus on both their company’s core competencies and revenue-generating tasks.

Low or no upfront costs also enable small businesses to take advantage of telecom and IT solutions that they otherwise couldn’t afford. As a result, cloud services help level the playing field between small businesses and their larger rivals.

2 - Fast access to patches, upgrades and innovations.Small businesses typically have small IT staffs, when they have them at all. Either way, implementing patches and upgrades often gets pushed to the back burner. That creates problems such as security risks in the case of patches and lost productivity because an upgrade isn’t in place to eliminate bugs or add features. With hosted solutions, the provider automatically pushes out patches and upgrades.

Also, providers of hosted telecom and IT services often make their latest and greatest products available to their cloud customers six months or more before they’re released to customers with premise-based systems. That gives cloud customers a competitive advantage.

3 - An extensive, growing selection of services and prices. Hosted offerings no longer are limited to PBXes and basic IT services such as storage and backup. In fact, it’s getting difficult to find a business application – even highly specialized ones – that isn’t now available on a hosted basis. If you passed on cloud services because what you needed wasn’t available, it’s worth taking a fresh look.

Continued on  http://www.smbnow.com/articles/five-reasons-why-smb-future-is-cloudy" rel="nofollow - SMBNow.com Five Reasons Why the Future of Most SMBs is Cloudy