EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Solution providers' overall near-term sales expectations fell back in February following four straight months of increases.
The falloff was broadly based, with software particularly hard-hit after a strong gain in January. Data warehousing, supply-chain management, application development and integration tools, accounting software and CRM saw sharp declines in sales expectations, as did hardware.
The notebooks category was a bright spot, however, with sales expectations reaching their highest level since CRN began collecting data on that segment more than six years ago. Antivirus still leads with the greatest expectation for sales growth.
Midsize companies have become slightly more optimistic about their spending plans over the next 12 months. In this customer segment, solution providers are likely to find solid sales opportunities in Internet-related areas such as security, Web services, wireless, intranet development and supply-chain management. Hardware and software categories offering strong opportunities for the channel include desktop PCs, application/database development, servers, networking hardware and networking software.
Other monthly channel research highlights included the following:
• Custom systems regained market share compared with last month, when the category's share growth stabilized after sharp December declines.
• Fujitsu and Acer are making their presence felt. Fujitsu appears to be coming on strong in the Unix server category. And Acer is stepping up in the notebook arena, where it's now within sight of Toshiba and custom systems for fourth place, behind Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo.
• The list of the top 10 products and technologies that VARs plan to sell or recommend to SMB clients over next three months showed little change. But with the addition of antispam, the list has become even more dominated by three areas: security, networking and PC hardware.
DOWNLOAD CRN's LATEST RESEARCH
To download the full March 2006 channel business research report in PDF form, click on the following link:
• March 2006 Channel Research Report
To download reports on CRN's latest research in specific technology categories, click on the following links:
• Hardware
• Software
• Security
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