How to conduct market researching or places to get it?

[Blazon]

A little background on me
I'm a singaporean male, set up a sole proprietary business 2 years ago providing IT services to 3 business clients (friends' referrals) while I continue with my Uni education.

Fast forward today, I am looking to make this into a proper business. Based on what I "feel" and "think", there is a demand from SMEs for outsourced IT services. This is purely based on "me". I used to think market research and survey are useless, but now I realized how important they are. They should be 1 of the first thing to do before moving forward with the business.

I am doing B2B, and looking for a market research firm that has research or survey on the demand and pricing for B2B IT services. Looking forward to advice on how to do or who can I turn to.

Thanks

[livingontheedge]

Check out IDC.

There is a trend towards outsourcing IT functions, including other Administrative and Accounting functions, to Shared Services Centres in the Philippines and Poland. But this is primarily employed (a growing trend) by the bigger corporations - multinationals and financial institutions who typically have a heavy demand for complex IT environment.

[Blazon]

I have checked out IDC. It looks pretty much very spot on for IT marketing research not only for Singapore but worldwide.

Thank you for your recommendation. I will be setting up an account with them to purchase their subscription services. Before I do, does anyone has any experience with them and how much roughly do they cost?

[Strong Eagle]

You will find IDC to be quite expensive relative to the size of your business and revenues.

I'd like to know more about what you consider to be included in "outsourced IT services". And, what target markets you might consider. For example, there is quite a difference between a 5 to 25 employee operation and a 300 employee operation in terms of IT requirements and sophistication.

If you're talking about help desk, then as livingontheedge noted, there are an increasing number of firms offering outsourced call centers. They support both hardware and software issues.

[taxico]

if you know someone who is a university student, they may be able to access certain databases using their school accounts.

you'll have to know what you're looking for (and how to look for it) to make the best of the wealth of information out there.

if you don't have connections, then you'll have to pay for subscriptions...

[Blazon]

My outsources IT services included maintaining, managing and supporting the hardware and software, in short an IT team for them. The target audience are smaller firms (5-30 users).

I don't have much connection much, one of the first steps I am looking at is paying for the subscriptions. And yup, IDC is expensive for my size now!

[Strong Eagle]

My outsources IT services included maintaining, managing and supporting the hardware and software, in short an IT team for them. The target audience are smaller firms (5-30 users).

I don't have much connection much, one of the first steps I am looking at is paying for the subscriptions. And yup, IDC is expensive for my size now!

I hope this works for you, and I think it is really a difficult sell for a small shop. You will want to extract a monthly fee, which the typical small business owner finds excessive... if I were you, I'd make a list of my target clientele and interview or survey them... you'll find out pretty quickly whether you have a viable biz plan.

Instead, the small business owner pays nothing until something breaks, then pays a shitload to get it fixed, without realizing that total IT costs were/would have been the same had she/he just taken a maintenance contract.

I'd target somewhat larger firms, 30 to 100, for the simple reason that they can probably accurately assess the costs of IT outages, and therefore take steps to prevent them, as opposed to the small business that usually doesn't see IT as integral to operations.

[Blazon]

My outsources IT services included maintaining, managing and supporting the hardware and software, in short an IT team for them. The target audience are smaller firms (5-30 users).

I don't have much connection much, one of the first steps I am looking at is paying for the subscriptions. And yup, IDC is expensive for my size now!

I hope this works for you, and I think it is really a difficult sell for a small shop. You will want to extract a monthly fee, which the typical small business owner finds excessive... if I were you, I'd make a list of my target clientele and interview or survey them... you'll find out pretty quickly whether you have a viable biz plan.

Instead, the small business owner pays nothing until something breaks, then pays a shitload to get it fixed, without realizing that total IT costs were/would have been the same had she/he just taken a maintenance contract.

I'd target somewhat larger firms, 30 to 100, for the simple reason that they can probably accurately assess the costs of IT outages, and therefore take steps to prevent them, as opposed to the small business that usually doesn't see IT as integral to operations.

Spot on! That is the problem I am facing currently, I started out wanting to help these group of business owner lower their overall cost but....

Anyway I got a quote from IDC for a IT Black Book that cost me USD$2000 and only Singapore's figures are included inside. Is this the norm pricing? I am second guessing because the sales guy ask me my budget then quote me exactly my budget...