3 Tech Upgrades to Empower Your SMB to Compete Like a Big Dog in 2025

As a small or midsized company, you’re always on the lookout for opportunities to compete with larger businesses. The right technology followed by new tech upgrades can be the key to leveling the playing field.

In fact, a strong technology infrastructure can serve as a powerful equalizer for small and midsized businesses (SMBs), giving them the means to deliver products, services, customer experiences and employee experiences that stand out against those of better-resourced, more entrenched competitors.

However, many SMBs have faced challenges accessing advanced technology due to cost and complexity. This can leave them without the enterprise-grade IT solutions they need to differentiate themselves, their products and services, and fulfill their competitive aspirations.

No longer. The democratization of technology platforms and capabilities once reserved for larger, deeper-pocketed companies has made enterprise-grade IT infrastructure (much of it housed in the cloud) accessible to and affordable for those running smaller business operations. Now, with wisely chosen IT investments to support operational efficiency, business intelligence and engagement with employees and customers, SMBs can keep pace and even surpass much larger competitors in terms of the quality and value of the products, services and experiences they provide. So instead of getting overshadowed, overlooked or overtaken, they can project an outsized presence in the markets in which they compete.

Based on my work supporting small- and medium-sized businesses as they modernize their IT infrastructure, here are three technologies that are proving particularly impactful for them operationally and competitively:

1. MODERN CONTACT CENTER. By 2025, 30% of SMBs will house at least half their core workloads in the cloud, according to Amazon Web Services. A key element they can leverage is the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). This cloud-based system can transform your customer service by enabling personalized interactions through various channels like text, voice, and email, without losing context.

Too often, SMBs lean on outdated, expensive contact center systems and processes that tend to translate into stale, subpar customer journeys, hurting sales and customer loyalty. More modern contact center options are cost-effective, easy to implement and scalable to meet evolving needs. They should also integrate seamlessly with other business tools, helping you deliver exceptional customer experiences without breaking the bank.

2. UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS. The logical complement to a contact center solution in the cloud is UCaaS, short for unified communications as a service. This cloud-based solution functions as a company’s internal communications hub for employee and team interaction. It combines all communications channels and functions, including presence, chat, SMS text, video, audio and web conferencing, along with mobile apps and other productivity-enhancing features, helping employees do their jobs without having to bounce from platform to platform and app to app.

UCaaS also impacts the customer-facing side of the business, enabling service and support teams to deliver consistently smooth, rich customer interactions and timely, positive resolutions via customers’ preferred channels.

What’s great about UCaaS is it’s well suited to businesses who have employees in more than one location (including those working from home), giving teams access to all the capabilities they need to be productive and collaborative, no matter where they are working. Not to mention, these platforms come with an added layer of security, including end-to-end encryption of chats, messages and meetings, along with multifactor authentication.

The result is a sophisticated communications platform that’s the equal of solutions used by much larger enterprises, and that’s budget-friendly, straightforward to implement and scalable to the needs of an SMB.

3. BUSINESS-GRADE INTERNET. Every business needs dependable internet to maintain business operations. Internet connectivity is the foundation to supporting the smart devices, business apps and online systems that are prevalent across today’s companies and its’ customers. No business, regardless of size, can afford unreliable or slow internet service.

A fiber internet connection eliminates those issues. With its resilient, stable connectivity, it offers the speed and capacity to support video content, cloud-based collaboration tools and point-of-sale (POS) systems. Frustrating and off-putting internet disruptions can quickly sour customers, prospects and employees. Fiber is reliable, secure and scalable — instead of requiring expensive rewiring of your system, you just upgrade bandwidth as your needs grow.

Amid the ongoing democratization of business technologies, these are the kinds of sophisticated capabilities that can put smaller businesses on equal footing to compete with much larger enterprises — without the enterprise-level price tag.