New CRN.com Coming

If you are one of CRN's dedicated print readers, you can see that we here at CRN have been doing a lot of thinking about how we provide you with the information you need to keep on top of what's happening in the technology industry and the IT channel.

LARRY HOOPER Can be reached via e-mail at lrhooper@cmp.com.

Rest assured, that thinking hasn't stopped with paper and ink. In our extensive research of how you seek, find and eventually use information to help you run your business, we learned that you come to crn.com in a different mindset from when you read CRN magazine.

With that research in hand, we have set out to design your online experience around what you, our readers, want. We know crn.com readers come to the site for the very latest news, and we will continue to deliver that, but you told us that you want more.

To provide that, I have been charged with leading the effort to combine the online efforts of CRN and our sister magazine, VARBusiness, under the ChannelWeb banner.

What that means for you is simple: The new ChannelWeb will combine the all-day, everyday news power of crn.com and the reviews and technical primers of the new CRNtech with the strategic research and business-driven features of VARBusiness and GovernmentVAR, all in an enhanced community-centric platform designed to allow users to communicate with each other. And more.

Launching March 5, the new ChannelWeb also will add tools to help VARs and solution providers grow their businesses in today's increasingly competitive IT market. Two tools available at launch will connect CMP Channel Group's audience with the IT end-user audience of CMP Technology's Business Technology Group, the publisher of InformationWeek and Network Computing magazines, among others.

ChannelWeb's solution provider readers also will have access to the CMP Channel Group lead generator tool, which allows VARs to send marketing e-mails to a targeted, localized list of IT end-user readers of InformationWeek and Network Computing. The group's solution provider locator lets those same IT end users find a solution provider from among the readers of CRN, VARBusiness and ChannelWeb.

In the coming weeks before the new site launches, I will use this space to keep you up to date on what we are doing, and I will be seeking your feedback. Here's to a new era.

Want to be one of the first to try the new ChannelWeb? Send e-mail to lrhooper@cmp.com with ChannelWeb 3.0 in the subject line.