What CIOs Want from the Channel Headlines Event

If ever it was the best of times and the worst of times for solution providers, it’s now.

An exclusive survey of CIOs by Channel Insider and its sister publication CIO Insight will reveal at the Ziff-Davis Enterprise Channel Summit in Dallas Feb. 7 that while application services are the most used services provided by solution providers, the fast-growing areas that CIOs expect to rely on from service providers are security and disaster recovery.

This might give the average solution provider cause for joy, but another data point from this survey that will surely give solution providers cause for concern in equal positive and negative measures is that two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed said their companies are actively looking for new IT services partners.  That suggests that there is both a lot of new opportunities in terms of emerging technologies that they need help with and a lot of dissatisfaction with their existing IT services companies.

The study also finds that on average customers are relying on anywhere from three to four resellers and have three to four strategic IT advisors. This number is up along with users’ interest in managed services because they simply can’t find enough IT talent to service their needs.

Details of the full study will be published Feb. 7, but we’d encourage you to come to the event in Dallas to hear the results for yourself. While there you will also get to spend some quality time with the channel chiefs from Dell, Cisco, Kaseya and IBM. And of course, some of the best-known editors in the channel, including yours truly, Sara Driscoll, Pedro Pereira and Frank Ohlhorst, and best-known consultants, including Tiffani Bova, Ross Brown, Diane Krakora, Jeffrey Kaplan, Michael O’Neil and Allan Adler will all be there. So if you can make it, feel free to saddle up to any one of them for a chat about all things channel.