Channel biz in good health, says survey

The European IT market is in a confident, bullish mood with sales growth predicted to be strong and revenue expected to rise.

These were the highlights of the findings in this year's European Technology survey (ETech 2007), which was published by IT Europa yesterday.

Over 70 per cent of channel distributors and resellers said they were confident about their business prospects for the 2007 financial year.

More than two thirds of European channel organisations expressed optimism about the likelihood of revenue, orders, and profit increases.

There were interesting variations by sector, region, and brand with the likes of Cisco, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and HP looking particularly strong.

Eastern Europe also responded well in the survey with 77.7 per cent predicting a "significant growth in sales".

The most "bullish" sector was found to be ISVs and system integrators with at least half predicting "substantial increases in profit".

"Overall, the ETech 2007 survey shows a maturing industry in pretty good health", IT Europa managing director Alan Norman said.

"It also underlines the strength of the software and services sectors and the importance of brands, with most of the leading vendors achieving strong rankings. There are though some marked contrasts in perception by geography and type of channel and some interesting variations in market drivers and financial factors which both vendors and service providers would do well to take account of in rolling out their marketing programmes."

Nearly 20,000 directors from the leading 8,000 channel organisations, including hardware, telecoms, software, and peripheral vendors from 35 European countries took part in the survey, which IT Europa described as the largest of its kind ever conducted. ®