Market soothsayer Access Markets International (AMI) says small and medium businesses (SMBs) are going to spend $289 million on security software this year.

That'd be 32% more than last year, if AMI read the entrails and runes correctly. According to AMI, medium sized businesses (with 100 to 999 workers) shell out 54% of India's SMB security software expenditure. Small businesses which employ up to 99 people are responsible for the remaining slice of the cake.

Firewalls and intrusion detection are gaining large inroads into large medium businesses (500 to 999 employees). The prophets mentioned that antivirus products aren't growing as fast as they used to, however spyware and spam solutions have scored growth rates of up to 40%. AMI refrained from stating precise figures by market and size, as they want people to shell out for the full report.

AMI did however add that SMBs are looking to unified threat management (UTM), business continuity solutions (BCS) and managed security solutions (MSS) to make things easy. Of all three snazzy-sounding thingies, UTM seems to be the major trend as it offers an all-in-one package and gives the most bang for the buck. Apparently, third party vendors selling security services and products which can monitor networks in real-time for virii and intrusions will have a lot of business opportunity in India.

“Indian SMBs are realizing that having an effective security policy will boost their chances securing a link within global supply chains. That’s because web-enabled activities in day to day business makes an organization highly prone to security threats,' commented AMI analyst Abhilash DB.

DB was, coincidentally, the name of this writer's toy poodle who lived with him from his third to twentieth year on Earth. X