CRN Research: Channel Opportunities Growing Stronger In The Midmarket

Within the midmarket, defined by CRN as companies with between 100 and 999 employees, all of the 11 Internet-related and eight hardware/software categories regularly surveyed by CRN are seeing significantly higher levels of interest from midsize-company executives compared with a year ago.

Security, Web services, Intranet development and application/database development are the Internet-related categories midsize-company executives said they think are the most important as far as spending plans are concerned. On a scale of 1-5, where five means spending is a "high priority" and one means spending is a "low priority," security was rated at 3.94, while Web services came in at 3.55.

But the biggest year-over-year increases in spending importance are coming in areas such as voice-over-IP, wireless, CRM and online payment systems. Voice-over-IP, for example, realized an 18.2 percent increase in its relative importance as a spending priority in the August 2003 survey compared with August 2002. For CRM and wireless, the figures were 18.1 percent and 13.4 percent, respectively.

The fact that e-commerce categories are among those growing fastest in importance is not surprising. CRN first observed increased business interest in e-commerce earlier this year, as companies with existing e-commerce or Web-based infrastructures worked to maximize their investments in reality-based applications that are relatively simple and inexpensive.

Solution providers continue to key in on these growing opportunities: The percentage selling, reselling or recommending e-commerce solutions reached 34 percent in August, up from 29 percent In March and 19 percent in November 2002.

Hardware and software are also seeing strong year-over-year increases in their relative importance as midsize-company spending priorities.

Networking hardware offers particularly strong opportunities for the channel. Not only is this category rated highest in absolute terms as a spending priority (3.66 on the 1-5 scale described above), but its relative spending importance has increased more than 13 percent in the past year, according to survey data.

Desktops, peripherals, storage and PC servers round out the top five categories in terms of importance as spending priorities. But notebooks is the area that has seen the biggest year-over-year increase, up 14.2 percent in August 2003 compared with August 2002. CRN believes this result reflects new technologies, such as wireless capabilities, being incorporated into notebooks, and their growing role in the PC replacement cycle.

John Roberts is CRN' s Director of Editorial Research. He can be reached at [email protected]