According to a new survey from American Express and CFO Research Services, the majority of CFOs at SMBs are looking for growth opportunities in the next two years. And hardware and cloud offerings were among the most prominent points of interest.

Starting off with a different highlight, SMBs’ growth agendas are biting away chucks of cost control – only 15 percent of respondents said they are looking to control costs to maintain profitability in the next 2 years. That’s about 72 percent less than the 54% who said they’re after cost control for the past two years. Executives however are interested in maintaining and focusing their businesses’ profitability from other aspects as well, including topline growth (2/3 of respondents) and market share capture:

“There has been comparatively little change in the percentage who say they [survey respondents] looked to capture market share from competitors in the past two years (17%) and will do so in the next two years (22%, or 29% more).”

One very notable highlight from the report is that hardware products are the key category in SMBs’ likely purchase behavior for next year, representing 33% followed by advertising, marketing and PR at 29 percent.

The cloud is among the biggest technological enablers of growth for SMBs, and there are several hardware and related cloud services segments which caught analysts’ eyes. Among these are business-oriented and/or enabled tablets including the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook and the newly launched iPad 2. Another key area focus is SaaS, including Box.net – a file hosting and collaboration service targeting the SMB demographic, which raised $48 million in funding about a month ago.

Dell and Juniper are also targeting SMBs with a new team-up to offer security offerings targeting this demographic, and come in addition to a long list of numerous other companies including IBM, Cisco, Oracle, VMware and EMC who offer small to midsized businesses everything from hardware to UC apps to Android desktop virtualization software.