High-tech Industry Talks Up Channel Operations at Dreamforce 2010

Dreamforce 2010 lived up to its billing as the cloud computing event of the year! Many of Zyme’s customers, including Avaya, Dell, and Symantec were featured speakers at sessions ranging from Driving Sales Through Partner Networks, to PRM, Pipeline Analytics, and Integrating Selling & Quoting with Salesforce CRM. It was great to hear Zoe Petersen from Avaya talk about Zyme’s role in powering their channel operations with high-quality channel data.

We were proud to be a sponsor of Dreamforce, and showcase ChannelView’s ability to bring management visibility into the channel sales process. We’re also thrilled to have ChannelView featured in Salesforce.com’s “30 Apps in 30 Days” roundup!

Here’s an interesting quote from NETGEAR on why they chose ChannelView: “ChannelView will help our sales and marketing teams make better business decisions with readily available channel data, while maximizing our IT investments. Zyme was able to set up, test, and deploy ChannelView in a matter of weeks, with minimal requirements from our IT resources.” — Vice-President IT at NETGEAR Inc. Read more about ChannelView here.

TCI Insights: Technology Sales in EMEA Retail Up 2% for Holiday 2010 Season

Tech Channel Index (TCI) reported that EMEA retail sales of technology products were up slightly more than 2% for the November/December holiday period. Interestingly, the US Black Friday shopping trend seems to be spreading to Europe as many retailers introduced the concept of Black Friday by offering products on discount during the festive season.

In the chart below, TCI data shows that European retail sales grew in the black Friday week (11/27) by 12 % on YOY basis. Inventory levels were significantly lower than historical averages for the holiday period, possibly indicating reluctance to risk overstocking goods.

Visit the TCI Momentum Index for an up-to-date weekly history of channel sales volume globally or regionally. Additionally, get ongoing channel updates by following TCI on Twitter at #ZymeTCI

Planning for Growth – What’s Next for the Trillion-Dollar High-Tech Industry?

At the International CES event last month in Las Vegas, CEA announced that worldwide sales of high-tech & consumer electronics products were projected to be within shouting distance of $1 trillion in 2011. Technology companies are thinking hard about how to manage this growth efficiently and invest in appropriate operational excellence initiatives. Based on a survey of COOs, an Accenture report on the Future of High-Tech and Electronics indicates three strategic imperatives to help achieve effective operations in this upcoming growth phase:

• Charting new growth trajectories

• Organizing for worldwide innovation

• Leveraging the broader ecosystem

While innovation and growth have always been at the top for CXOs, it is interesting to see that the importance of alliances, channel partners and suppliers is seen as an area of investment. For example, best-in-class technology companies leverage their channel partner networks to differentiate themselves, improve speed-to-market, identify new opportunities that they may not have uncovered on their own, and improve visibility to end customers. It’s no surprise that at a recent quarterly business review, a Zyme customer remarked how a granular view of channel activity worldwide has given them an important market advantage.

TCI Insights: Unrest in Middle East Affects Technology Sales

Recent social and political events across the Middle East have dominated international news coverage. However, the impacts of unrest on commerce in the region – let alone their effects on technology sales – haven’t been as widely covered. To shed some light on the impact of unrest on the Middle East’s technology channel, we’ve tapped into the Tech Channel Index database, Zyme’s resource for spotting aggregated trends in all corners of the worldwide channel for technology sales.

As the chart below clearly shows, channel sell-through in the Middle East region * has experienced a marked slowdown in January – a trend first appearing in the week of January 15th. After adjusting for normal seasonality trends, Middle East sell-through fell by over 30% from Jan 8th to Feb 5th.

 

For most global technology companies, the Middle East is still a relatively small end market. While it differs significantly by company, our aggregated data shows the Middle East region as about 3% of global channel sales and 10% of EMEA sales so the impact of this drop is limited on a global scale.

Click here to read the complete press release. Visit the TCI Momentum Index for an up-to-date weekly history of channel sales volume globally or regionally. Additionally, get ongoing channel updates by following TCI on Twitter at #ZymeTCI

* Middle East Region defined as: Turkey, UAE, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, & Jordan