Allow me to use this space to fill you in on some of the changes you are going to see starting with the March issue of CRN. Instead of commenting on some of the pressing issues of the day, I am going to use this column to address how we plan to enhance our readers' experience.
As some of you may have read online, Everything Channel, CRN's parent company, decided to stop publishing VARBusiness as a stand-alone magazine and integrate its management strategy coverage into CRN. The market dynamics in the business-to-business industry contributed to our decision, but the key driver was our desire to expand the CRN brand to include not only channel insight and product analysis, but strategic information you can use to better run your business. This will begin next month, but I am letting you know now so that you won't be surprised when you find more management-related stories in CRN along with the major research projects that were previously housed in VARBusiness. Those projects include the VAR500, State of the Market and our State of Technology series, among others.
We will now serve the market with one major magazine, one that was founded during the channel's very beginning. CRN stretches around the globe, with international titles in India, Australia and the United Kingdom, to name just a few, and is considered one of the single most influential titles in all of business publishing today. So this move will enhance the quality and quantity of information you receive in every issue, and allow us to continue to innovate.
A great example of our innovation is CRNtech, an extension of the CRN family we launched nearly three years ago to provide our expertise to the technical community. CRNtech was a new publishing model for us as it addressed only a segment of the channel—those interested in technical deep dives. The CRN Test Center will continue to support CRNtech but the staff also will provide more technical content suitable to CRN's broader audience.
We often brag that our readers are in a constant state of change, always adjusting their business models in efforts to better serve their customers. So, over the past few years, we have taken some advice from our audience with an eye on diversifying our business, too.
In addition to CRN, CRNtech and Channelweb, Everything Channel today oversees a vast array of conferences and events for not only solution providers but for IT buyers and even executives in key vertical markets such as health care and public sector. We also are expanding our efforts to serve vendors that need field-sales and marketing services while growing our offerings for solution providers that need help managing demand-generation activities to attract new customers.
So, as you can tell, the changes impacting your favorite magazine are really part of a broader effort impacting the entire channel community.
