October 21, 2009 – Indicating that a turnaround in IT spending is imminent, or underway, a recent survey of the channel conducted by Robert W. Baird & Co. shows that VARs are upbeat about fourth quarter prospects. In fact, it’s the most upbeat response that Baird has seen since its Q2 2008 survey.
The results are based on a survey of 47 enterprise resellers with total annual revenue of $8.2 billion and average revenue of $198 million per year.
In terms of Q4 expectations vs. Q3 reality, 32% of the resellers were positive (expecting increased revenues), 54% were neutral, and only 12% were negative re Q4 performance.
Large VARs (more than $100 million in revenues) were much more positive than VARs with less than $100 million in revenues. For example, 47% of the large VARs expect increased revenues in the fourth quarter, 32% were neutral, and only 9% were negative. (The rest said it was too early to tell.)
For perspective, in the third quarter 46% of the VARs were below plan, 39% were on plan, and only 15% were above plan.
Baird also surveyed resellers about which storage technologies were in highest demand. Topping the list were cost-saving technologies such as data deduplication and thin provisioning. And VARs cited Data Domain as the leader in data deduplication, and 3PAR as the leader in thin provisioning
In my next blog, I’ll take a closer look at the channel’s views on specific vendors. In other words, the apparent winners and losers going into 2010.
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VARS need to look at Avere Systems, a new storage medium that offers an exciting new paradigm shift in storage.....focusing on data performance vs. data retention and offering an Operating System with built in HSM-like capabilities which moves data automatically across tiers of storage based on user access and demands without storage administrators having to create policies, manage data etc....and works in a UNIX, LENOX and Windows environment with standard CIFS and NFS.
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