Slide Show: 2008 State Of The Market

While 73 percent of solution providers expect to increase revenue by at least 5 percent this year, that's down from 81 percent who felt the same way at this time last year. [READ MORE]

Our Business Growth Survey, earlier this year, found that VARs expecting the fastest growth are focusing on software, and increasingly on managed services, to fuel their business ambitions. [READ MORE]

More than half of the solution providers we spoke with increased the number of active customers they were engaged with this year, with only 11 percent reporting a decrease. [READ MORE]

VARs are learing to run tighter ships -- more VARs expect improved profitability now, than they did one year ago. [READ MORE]

Top product categories where solution provider are looking for new vendors include PCs in Hardware, security tools in Software and wireless solutions in Infrastructure. [READ MORE]

As SaaS becomes more prevalent, expect a new generation of solution providers to emerge, which emphasize expertise in business processes and vertical industries. These new solution providers will focus on configuring SaaS applications to match customers' business processes, according to Darren Bibby, an IDC analyst studying the SaaS market. [READ MORE]

Microsoft was by far the most commonly cited SaaS partner for the channel, followed by Symantec and Citrix. [READ MORE]

Training tops the issues that solution providers are looking to vendor for help on in regards to providing Software as a Service. Close behind: help with identifying key influencers in businesses. [READ MORE]

If the channel were a country, its total revenue would make it about the 20th largest nation in the world economically, about the size of Sweden or Switzerland (in GDP). [READ MORE]

Nearly half of all solution provider revenue is now provided by services, with hardware and software dividing the remainder nearly evenly. [READ MORE]