How To Invest Wisely

With such uncertainty in the market, it becomes difficult to know where to place your bets for the future. Our first-ever certification study this week may help you chart the correct course.

KELLEY DAMORE Can be reached at (781) 839-1272 or via e-mail at kdamore@cmp.com.

We tackled this project with one thing in mind: return on investment (ROI). What certifications give you, the reader, the best return on investment for the future. We spoke to hundreds of solution providers, both large and small, and asked them what they could charge and what sort of margins they could glean by having particular certifications. The results, starting on page 32, are very interesting.

For smaller solution providers, security,particularly Check Point certification,topped the list as giving VARs the largest and fastest ROI. For larger solution providers, Compaq and Oracle ranked highest. Other results from the study: Vendor certifications give VARs a much better ROI than vendor-neutral certifications. And the more specific the certification, the better.

Making decisions on who, where and how to invest is tough. You've got a number of considerations and even more obstacles. Take the Cisco certifications, for instance. Cisco forces solution providers to specialize in particular technologies. What areas do you focus on? If you invest and specialize too quickly and the market doesn't take off, where does that leave you?

At the same time, you've got the traditional channel-friendly companies such as Microsoft, Compaq and others competing in the trenches for services business. Do you continue to work with these vendors? Do you look at Sun or Linux certifications?

And what if you decide to support a new channel player such as EMC? Will it shift its strategy? This week's news story on page 3 about EMC's strategic alliance with Dell shows the pitfalls of aligning with a company with such deep direct-sales roots.

The goal of this study is to help you make the right and most profitable certification investments in the future. The landscape could not be more competitive, and you need to be armed with as much information as possible.

What certifications are you looking at? I can be reached at kdamore@cmp.com.