State of the Market Methodology

Study participants were recruited from CMP Media's Technology Solutions Group's diverse panel of VARs, who completed a Web-based survey. (CMP is VARBusiness' parent company.) With more than 90,000 North American-based VARs, the recruitment panel houses a complete range of company sizes and specializations to ensure a representative sample of the VAR community. Respondents included traditional VARs, IT consultants, Web integrators, ASPs, ISPs and ISVs.

VARBusiness collaborated with Answers Research to develop a survey that would provide practical data in the areas of partnering, customers, vendor/product relationships, finance, competition and business strategies. Data collection and management were handled by the research vendor. Solution providers were contacted via an e-mail that included an invitation to participate in this year's study and a link to a unique URL housing a copy of the survey.

A total of 1,100 interviews were conducted from the final week of August through the second week of September. Answers Research tabulated the responses and performed a trend analysis of the data. The margin of error was++/- 3.0 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval.