The Canadian B2B indirect software market grew 12 per cent year-over-year, according to research firm The NPD Group.
This outpaced the indirect hardware growth by five per cent, the company reported in its latest findings last week, adding cloud infrastructure and platform as a service software experienced the strongest growth in the last year at 45 per cent.
Small value-added resellers played a big part in contributing to that growth, according to Ali Naqvi, director of IT retail and commercial businesses for The NPD Group Canada.
“Traditionally, growth of software within the cloud infrastructure and platform as a service segment has mainly been attributed to large resellers; however, the small VAR segment was the second fastest growing category with a 20 per cent increase year over year. This suggests that the SMB market is also embracing enterprise-grade solutions,” said Naqvi. “With continued SMB growth, we anticipate increased involvement of distributors in connecting leading-edge solutions to the resellers who serve the market.”
The storage and data protection segment wasn’t far behind with 40 per cent growth, followed by business applications with 16 per cent growth.
The latest statistics came from NPD Group’s recently launched Canadian B2B Software and Cloud Tracking Service. Announced last week, NPD Group said the new service includes distributor sales-out information for B2B software, covering a range of business applications sold on a standalone basis, as a service or sold with hardware. The tracker also follows the delivery of cloud computing resources delivered through cloud platform services. Categories covered in this service include security, storage, and data protection, business applications, database and app development, IT operations, networking, cloud infrastructure and platform-as-a-service.