Quarter of VARs not on revenue target, preliminary report says

A new survey of value added resellers shows the second quarter of this year was a mixed bag in the enterprise storage market. A quarter of respondents said their revenue is below expectations; 47% said they are on target and 31% said they are ahead of their second quarter revenue targets. 

The preliminary results – which involved only 32 VARs — are part of a much larger report to be published by R. W. Baird & Co., Inc. in the next few weeks. The initial findings, however, do give storage-market observers some anecdotal evidence of what is turning out to be a highly dynamic market for 2007.  

In addition to their revenue evaluations, VARs identified their favorite vendors – among which Network Appliance Inc., VMware and Cisco held the lead.  Respondents were more negative about larger storage vendors, including IBM, Dell, Sun, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and Symantec/Veritas.  NetApp retained the lead as storage vendor of preference, while HP was the favored server vendor. 

Fastest growth areas for those polled include server virtualization; 90% of respondents sell virtual products, with VMware being far and away the leader.  VARS also reported increasing confidence in iSCSI; 53% of VARs reporting they see either strong or moderate demand for the IP networked storage technology.  They also listed data deduplication as a strong market area; nearly 60% of resellers said they are offering the technology to their customers and 38% said they will consider it.