Predictions For 2010 From The VAR 500

With 2010 upon us, we asked executives from the top solution providers in North America -- all members of the VAR 500 -- to clue us in on what they thought was the outlook for the new year. Here's what they had to say.

"BlueWater will continue to focus on building technology solutions with business value for the midmarket. Given our charter membership in the VCE alliance of Cisco, EMC & VMware, we will be ramping up our investment in these areas: helping clients develop and implement large-scale virtualization and private cloud solutions. We are expecting technology spending to improve slightly, with our client's emphasis still on reducing TCO, but with an eye toward revenue growth.



"As in any downturn, customer intimacy becomes paramount. In the last 12 months we have made sure that we remained close to our clients -- regardless of their current budgets -- helping them craft strategies and optimize their business. This higher touch model will be one we continue as we've seen tremendous benefits enabling us to continue to grow through 2009 and allowing us to develop long-term, meaningful relationships with our clients."

"Denali is well positioned and very bullish on growth and share gain in 2010. In the down economy, we have made investments in talent, both sales and technical, and in certifications. We have doubled down on our technical bench expertise in specific growth areas and in areas for providing solutions for customer pain points. Denali has a high percentage of revenue generated by engineers in accounts billable for managed services.



It is critical to offer solutions and value that increase performance and profits while at the same time driving cost out of IT. In 2009 and 2010, a key strategy for Denali was to offer our full range of IT consulting services across our entire solution offering.



"We are experts in networking, managed print management, blades and storage. We have established six unique practices to deliver customer value and IT consulting. Denali anticipates major IT consulting growth in public sector, virtualization, VDI, V PRO, security, converged infrastructure, Microsoft Windows 7 and mobility solutions."

"Dimension Data is excited by the opportunities ahead. We are positioned in the sweet spot of IT and communications spend, and the trends that have been driving superior growth in the Dimension Data Group in the past few years have the momentum to continue to drive growth in the medium and longer term. We feel that we can grow in the double digits in FY10. We exited the year in a strong cash position and are investing in new offerings and adding staff.

"We are seeing increased demand for strategic sourcing, collaboration tools, video and virtualization technologies, as well as business process out-tasking -- each of which speaks directly to our strengths.

"Focus still continues on reducing costs and energy consumption, as well as freeing up resources and improving security."

"The principles that have made us successful each year rarely seem to change. Customer intimacy, the blocking and tackling of sales and marketing, and flexible payment options are not fads. They provide true value that never goes out of style. That said, the growing complexity of IT solutions, and the government initiatives that are driving them, is leading us to expand our services and support capabilities to our customers.





"State and local spending will stay soft through mid-calendar-year. In the second half (the beginning of a new fiscal year for state governments), we expect to see a moderate increase. Federal IT spend should increase at modest single-digit levels. Many of the new federal initiatives have made IT a mandatory enabler to doing the business of government. We expect to see civilian IT grow at a faster rate than DoD. Security of information, whether in motion or at rest, will be a primary, non-negotiable requirement of Federal IT projects."

"The coming year should see stabilizing in the marketplace. Growth opportunity will be present and organizations that have fine-tuned their operational efficiencies will benefit the most. While the current market trend is moving in a positive direction, disciplined smart growth is the order of the day. This is the new normal and thinking, 'We can go back to business as usual' is a formula for failure.



"During this current economic climate we positioned ourselves through further investments in our engineering team, our offerings, and our infrastructure. This has resulted in a strengthening of the relationships with our customers. We also believe by ramping up in these areas we've positioned ourselves to take advantage of the more lucrative opportunities. Our customers always know Groupware will answer the call.



"Consolidation and virtualization continue to be key trends in our industry. And we believe it's important to keep an eye on trends sure to affect the channel. For example, 'Cloud Computing' is currently perceived as a potential threat to the channel. But we should take a closer look and see where within 'cloud' there may be opportunities. "

"In the past, economic cycles were more predictable and matched technology planning cycles. Organizations either planned for growth or a downturn. Now, the old rules no longer apply. The 'new normal' is a future that is unpredictable, so organizations need to plan for both simultaneously.



"Our customers need an IT infrastructure that is virtualized, resilient, orchestrated, optimized and modular so that it can quickly adapt to meet organization's changing needs at any given time. In a world where unpredictability is normal, advantage goes to those who anticipate change and capitalize on it.



"In 2010, HP Technology Services will continue to invest in our authorized channel partner programs since our partners play such a critical role in our success. You will see some new innovations in how we make key offerings from our consulting services portfolio available to our authorized channel partners."

"Starpoint Solutions is experiencing a positive change in Q4 of 2009 that we expect to continue in 2010. Our clients are starting to hire more consultants as their budgets are getting approved. Our custom application development group's pipeline is the strongest it's been all year, which indicates that companies are starting to spend money on internal initiatives. That uptick is across all verticals, which is also encouraging. In addition, companies are focusing on infrastructure, security and risk. I expect our Control and Compliance practice, which offers solutions in network, data and security risk, to see more growth in 2010.



"Starpoint's new Control and Compliance offerings have allowed us to help our clients both from an application and a network security risk perspective. Every global company is dealing with risk and security, and having the expertise to work closely with senior management has helped us strengthen relationships with our clients.



"I see companies continuing to look for ways to reduce their costs. Cloud computing and outsourcing managed services are areas that I expect will grow in 2010."

"In the year to come, we will see need for advancement in the area of several key technologies and innovation, specifically, in the following three categories:





"1. Derivative innovation that delivers competitiveness, efficiency, productivity, simplification and incremental improvements in current operations and businesses.



"In 2009, the majority of the focus was on the first category where technology innovation was focused on improving operations. We expect this to continue in 2010. We also expect, however, to see increase in the second and the third category (transformational and disruptive innovation) by companies in 2010.



"2. Transformational or platform innovation that facilitates a swift move to 'visible adjacencies' in terms of emerging technologies as well as markets. That is driven by deeper understanding of customers and markets through analytics, and innovation in this category leverages new means, such as social web or ubiquity, to enable companies to grow in existing markets or in new markets.



"3. Disruptive or breakthrough innovation enables companies to access potentially game-changing or/and new market business models, enabled by co-innovation models and incubation models. Emerging areas include cloud, health and green."

2010 looks very promising for us as the businesses continue to leverage the technologies to optimize their IT infrastructure and also invest for growth, coming out of the 2009's "holding pattern." We are foreseeing improved sales cycles and better return on our investment that we made on various technology practices in 2009. Our aggressive global expansion and investment in training and R&D will continue beyond 2010 to keep our workforce's utilization and productivity high.



"Overall spending will increase across multiple vertical markets as we foresee multi-folded growth for Green IT, SaaS and cloud-based computing through the adoption of desktop virtualization, SOA and open source in 2010. Regulatory compliance and enterprise information growth will tend to drive the legacy modernization, EAI, UC and business intelligence and data warehousing projects in the coming years.

"Bluewolf will have an increased focus on sub-process innovation and will continue to leverage cloud solutions to drive innovation. In addition, we are looking to expand into EMEA in 2010. Our clients have experienced great return on investment (ROI) in working with Bluewolf and investing in technology -- we anticipate that they will continue to invest in 2010.



"In Jan. 2011, salesforce.com will still be an independent company. The market value of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will be down in 2010 (compared with 2009), and the market value for salesforce.com, Google and Netsuite will be up. IT budgets in 2010 will decrease for Fortune 500 companies, compared with 2009 -- and taking into account inflation. Cloud Computing solutions will change the way businesses communicate and produce major productivity gains, for the U.S. economy. Finally, by the end of 2010, IBM's Cloud strategy will be well-articulated and more than marketing. "