Do You Have Good Plans Under Development?

Companies doing software work tend to focus on four main areas of opportunity: industry or vertical markets, the departmental needs of corporations, both vertical and departmental work and general business needs. They are either sniffing out budgets or creating new ones based on their technical skills. This group of software-savvy solution providers seems to be focusing on developing apps for customer service, finance or sales within the areas I just described. Those are the big opportunities inside the customer base, solution providers tell us.

The opportunities in finance and sales should surprise you about as much as Donald Trump naming another business after himself. But it seems no matter what survey we conduct, customer service continues to rank highly as a major area of opportunity for IT investment. For example, large businesses told us in our recent State of Enterprise Spending study that their customer-service initiatives will be a major area of IT investment this year. Clearly, those dollars are at work today.

Our study gets even more interesting when you ask solution providers about the platform vendors they are partnering with and whether they are part of their official partner programs. Support for Microsoft's products are the highest, followed by IBM, Oracle, MySQL, Red Hat and Sun. Yet only 40 percent feel compelled to join their partner programs. Instead, most solution providers seem content supporting a vendor's wares or doing development on the platform or even referring business to the vendor. Midsize solution providers, however, are most apt to join a software vendor's partner program, but not everyone understands the benefits of doing so, our study reveals. Look on our Web site in the coming weeks for more about the app-dev study. And on Aug. 9, we will publish a special issue dedicated to app-dev opportunities. But one last thought: When we probed about Linux, one-third of the respondents said they have been developing apps for the Linux platform since the beginning of 2004, while nearly half expect to do so in the coming six months.

Distribution giant ingram micro's recent management reorganization leaves a litany of questions unanswered. Following a sweeping change in its pricing strategy, the company lost its top sales executive. It is awkward no matter how you spin it. The loss of Pat Collins, senior group vice president of sales and marketing, is a blow to the company, particularly because it had invested time in Collins to make the difficult transition from the packaged-goods industry to IT distribution. And he was really coming into his own. But after the recent departure of his boss and ally, Ingram president Michael Grainger, few expected Collins to stick around.

Ingram has named a sales successor to Collins--Pat Capparelli of Purolator Courier--but did not name an executive to oversee marketing. Capparelli was handpicked by Ingram co-president Kevin Murai to run sales; he will work from the company's Buffalo, N.Y., facilities, where Ingram maintains a large workforce.

VARBusiness readers vote with their eyeballs when it comes to our Web site. In tracking the most popular stories over the past several weeks, we found the most-read were the top technologies states are buying, CompuCom's sale to venture capital firm Platinum Equity, our State of the States project and our recent cover story on offshore outsourcing.

What was your favorite online story? Let me know at [email protected].