CRN Research: Six Technologies For Growth

Since last November, CRN has been surveying solution providers on a monthly basis to determine which products and technologies they plan to sell, resell or recommend to their business customers. Three categories have seen particularly sharp increases in their percentages over the past six months.

The first of these is wireless Internet. The percentage of VARs selling, reselling or recommending this technology has jumped to 48 percent in June from 40 percent in December. The June figure is the highest yet recorded by CRN for this category, and the increase over the past six months was the largest among any of the 21 products and technologies CRN surveys.

LAN/WAN systems is not only a regular on the top 10 list of technologies solution providers are selling, reselling or recommending, but the percentage of solution providers selling them has increased to 60 percent from 53 percent over the past six months.

Together, these categories represent one of the cutting-edge advances in technology that could pay off big for solution providers and their customers. Wi-Fi technology is now a reality for notebooks, and major companies are making plans to install wilreless services, including McDonalds, which plans to install such services in 75 of its San Francisco Bay area restaurants.

Handheld and Tablet PCs might be the most surprising of the six categories cited, but 36 percent of solution providers surveyed in June said they plan to sell, resell or recommend these products, up from 29 percent as recently as March. While the introduction of Tablet PCs created little initial stir in the channel, mobile computing is a nevertheless growing priority for businesses, and more solution providers are positioning themselves to take advantage of what could end up being a new source of revenue and profit growth.

Solution providers also have high expectations for peripherals in the second half of this year. The percentage of them selling, reselling or recommending peripherals has moved up to 48 percent in June from 42 percent in December, and overall expectations for sales growth have reached their highest level in more than a year.

Far from being mundane, however, this result, along with other CRN research data showing that notebooks are growing faster than desktops as a priority for business technology spending, suggests that a new hardware upgrading cycle may finally be on the horizon and bodes well for a general revival in spending in the second half of the year.

VPN and e-business are two other technologies that have seen a bump in their percentages of increased interest among solution providers.

VPN has seen its percentage surge in the second quarter of this year, jumping to 44 percent in June from 33 percent in March, good enough for seventh place on the top 10 list of technologies that VARs are selling, reselling or recommending to their business customers.

That's not surprising, given the ever-present need for businesses to secure their technology systems, and goes hand in hand with the growth of wireless Internet. Recent CRN research data, for example, shows that a solid majority of wireless solution providers would still feel the need to add VPN to 802.11g standard products, even though they also believe this standard represents a major advance in wireless security.

E-business solutions also continue to gain ground among VARs, cited by 36 percent of solution providers last month--the highest figure CRN has recorded for this category so far. In a previous newsletter, I cited the growth of e-commerce as a business technology spending priority, and this solution provider-based data lends further credence to the notion that e-commerce is once again becoming a viable category for sales growth after several years in disrepute.

John Roberts is CRN's director of research. He can be reached at [email protected].