Small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India will invest close to $500 mln on servers and networking hardware in 2006, with two-thirds of the spending going toward network-related hardware purchases alone. SMBs (companies with 1-999 employees) see investments in servers and connectivity as critical in the tough Indian market; and only 14% of PC-owning SMBs currently deploy a local area network (LAN), AMI Partners says.