SMB - Small and Medium-sized Businesses

9 September 2020

updated at: 6 November 2026

The market segment of small and medium-sized businesses.

The term is used mainly in B2B in general and in IT in particular. It comes from the classification of the key organization segments that B2B companies target:

public sector;

enterprise sector;

small and medium-sized business sector (SMB).Business process management

Here is the main difference between SMB companies and, say, enterprise or public-sector organizations.

Large companies tend to favor a more or less tailored approach to solving their problems. In the SMB segment, despite clear differences between small and mid-size companies, the solutions offered and bought are largely standardized.

SMBs usually have tighter IT resources (budget and staff) than other segments. Because of their size, they have different IT requirements and often face IT challenges that differ from those of large enterprises. IT systems for the SMB segment are typically designed for companies with a few dozen users. At the same time, because such systems are more affordable, companies that have clearly outgrown the segment often choose them as well. This eventually becomes an obstacle to the steady digitalization of a business that has outgrown the SMB category.