It's fair to note that the recently released study, The Small Business Transition to Hosted Technology: Cost vs. Benefits was sponsored by The Planet, a hosting company.
Despite that caveat, the study has interesting results. The bottom line is that SMBs get more bang for their buck—a lot more—when they have someone else run their IT infrastructure.

The study, which was conducted by BizTechReports, queried participants from 17 vertical industries. The company found that SMBs that outsourced are more satisfied than those who keep things in house, make more money, realize more benefits from their IT investments and, in general, seem to have a better time of it.

Intuitively, that's not difficult to accept. The world of modern IT is so complex and time consuming that an SMBs is unlikely to have the staff expertise to keep up with enterprises, which can dedicate resources to IT issues. The study's authors make the point that the emergence of e-commerce is accentuating the benefits of outsourcing, since what a site must do and the precautions it must take grow when the company actually is selling things on the site.

Among the most interesting findings were that companies that outsource spend considerably less percentage-wise of their annual revenues on IT infrastructure, companies that outsource are more likely to engage in e-commerce, those that outsource believe that it plays an important role in keeping them competitive and those that outsource report fewer security and reliability problems.

Carl Weinschenk is the Editorial Director of SmartBiz.