Don't Be Chicken

From his Spartan-chic loft office in Manhattan's garment district, Allen Jerinsky gets ready to hit the road. The Zegna suit and Santoni shoes can stay home for this trip. If he's lucky, he'll get to work in his business-casual clothes.

But if duty calls, Jerinsky knows he'll be in muck boots, coveralls and a fetching paper hat. It's just another day in the life of a solution provider willing to stand knee-deep amid 50,000 clucking chickens or eye-to-wattle with turkeys moving down the processing line.

"We go where we're needed when we're needed," says Jerinsky, COO and technical partner at Thoughtful, an ERP integrator that's also an ISV, consultant and sales-and-marketing partner. "You can't do this job without seeing every part of the process and understanding the business completely."

Jerinsky and Thoughtful's business partner and president, Douglas Kern, are seeing record growth in their business that, for now, is focused largely on migrating agribusinesses such as poultry and swine processors from discrete, proprietary systems to .Net-based integrated solutions. For such success, Jerinsky is headed for a week of work at a mega-turkey processing facility in Southeast Indiana.

Thoughtful has high hopes for the coming year. The New York-based company is part of an overwhelming majority—some 81 percent—of solution providers that expect an increase in revenue in 2007, according to the VARBusiness 2007 State of the Market survey. About 47 percent anticipate that revenue will rise from 5 percent to 14 percent, while 34 percent expect an increase of 15 percent or more. Just 14 percent of VARs surveyed say they see revenue remaining flat, and only 5 percent are expecting a decrease in revenue in the coming year.

Of those feeling good about 2007, many of them will tell you that services will account for the bulk of revenue growth and profit in the coming year. For most, service means getting out of the office, hitting the road, rolling up the sleeves and working with customers in the diverse—often grueling—environments where end users ply their trades.

Those willing to do what Jerinsky does—to travel outside comfortable business locales and trudge gizzard-deep through poultry plants, for example—stand to reap the most rewarding and long-standing engagements in the channel.

"Everybody likes to think they're going to do better next year than the year before," says David Welcher, president of Computing Dynamics, Cedarhurst, N.Y. "Security is important—HIPAA compliance, federal mandates for doctors. Those are real, and they're happening right now. We certainly feel good about our growth next year."

And there's a spike in optimism among smaller VARs; 37percent said they expect revenue to "increase greatly."

"I definitely feel strongly about 2007 for growth," says Christopher L. Smith, owner of Kettle Moraine Web & Consulting Services in Dousman, Wis. "I work with mostly small companies—most with 30 to 50 employees. What they're most concerned about is making sure their business data is secure. There's a great deal of opportunity for solution providers there."

NEXT: Beyond the current need for security.