Methodology: VARBusiness Application Development Survey

The application-development survey's objectives included an assessment of technology trends, the nature of vendor-partner relationships with the platform players, identification of opportunities for solution providers regarding custom-application development, integration work, as well as open-source technologies and commercial software business prospects.

VARBusiness developed the application-development survey instrument. The survey was then conducted on the Web during the fourth week of May 2004 with the help of InsightExpress, an online market research firm. In addition, VARBusiness partnered with ARC Research, a Cranford, N.J.-based business-intelligence and market research firm, for data processing, questionnaire review and the analysis portion of this study.

Qualifying survey participants were randomly selected from VARBusiness' circulation list of 75,000 individuals involved in the software and application-development arena. A total of 472 solution providers completed this survey, yielding a margin of error +/- 4.5 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval. The respondent mix of IT managers included executive management, corporate management and technical management. Responding reseller firms, based on their business activities, included traditional total solutions VARs, IT consultants, custom and proprietary software solution developers, independent software developers, ISVs, service providers, ASPs, MSPs, ISPs, SSPs, xSPs and others.