Hard Facts: May 20, 2002

Between January and April, there were strong increases in the level of spending priority among solution providers in all eight of the hardware and software categories surveyed by CRN. The largest increases were registered in servers, desktops, storage and networking.

For example, small businesses gave storage an overall rating of 3.34 on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 means the category is a top priority for spending and 1 means the category is a low priority. This compares with a figure of 3.04 in the January survey. Within this category, specific areas such as network-attached storage showed particularly strong gains.

Security remains the highest single spending priority for small businesses, as is the case with larger corporate counterparts, rating a 3.61 on a scale of 1 to 5. Subcategories such as VPNs and intrusion detection showed solid gains in the level of spending priority cited by solution providers between January and April.