Despite dire economic times, solution providers say they still expect customers to continue to buy laptops, more in the second half of the year than the first half--and Hewlett-Packard laptops more than any other--with the end user's brand preference and a vendors' ability to achieve targets as the most important factors, according to new research by the Institute for Partner Education & Development (IPED).
According to IPED's new Affinity Index, HP had the most share in terms of the dollar value of proposals written by VARs in the first half of the year, as well as the value of proposals closed in the first half and those expected to close in the second half of the year. But VARs' affinity for HP doesn't stop with market share. In the SMB laptop category, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor achieved the highest Affinity Index score, which accumulates scores for 15 different factors. each factor weighed by importance by solution providers.
The following slides illustrate some results in the notebook category. ChannelWeb will provide further findings in other product categories throughout December.
