Depth And Breadth

For more than half of my 13-plus years at CRN, our editorial research team has tracked on a monthly basis the evolution of systems builders, aka white-box builders. The justification for all of this surveying is simple: more than one-third of the 117,000 individuals on our circulation list are involved in this activity on a regular basis. And that number is growing.

Now that IT spending has slowed considerably, the white-box community is attracting a considerable amount of attention, particularly because of its strong penetration into small businesses. Vendors like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell Computer are eager to overthrow systems builders' popularity with these customers. But the custom-systems phenomenon goes much deeper and is much more high-end than this.

There really are two distinct communities of systems builders,those that provide business desktops at low cost to their customers (with the least expense possible to their own business operations), and those focused on creating highly specialized servers and workstations for specific, often vertical-market, uses. In my opinion, it's a great time to belong to either one of these constituencies.

On the low end (if you really want to call it that), systems builders continue to maintain a serious edge with small businesses because of their ability to offer local service and the specific, vertical-market software so many smaller firms need. Hint: Small businesses are dying for software developed just for them, not some pared-down version of a bloated enterprise application. Because of their local touch, this crowd could find a following as home networking takes off and their business clients look for help with technology integration in their home offices, living rooms, kitchens and so on. Elsewhere, custom servers underlie solutions for medical imaging, voice mail and IP telephony, video editing, security,the list goes on.

Stay tuned for brand-new research on both communities to be released early next month at XChange Tech Builder, held by CMP Media's Technology Solutions Group, which also publishes CRN. And during the same conference, get ready for the third annual Ultimate PC awards demonstrations, which this year will add servers and storage into the mix.