It’s good news for CDW Canada and all of its vendor partners as the solution provider learned from a recent poll that more than half of its customers plan on purchasing more technology this year than last.
During its annual BTEX (Business Technology Expo) in Toronto this past June, CDW Canada conducted a poll with conference attendees to gain a better understanding of where their purchasing plans and priorities lie.
Daniel Reio, CDW Canada’s director of marketing, said the poll included responses from small business (1-49 employees), medium business (50-99 employees) and large business (200-499 employees) customers in Canada. One of the questions revealed that 57 per cent of businesses plan to purchase more technology this year when compared to last year.
“Customers are buying more this year compared to last,” Reio said. “At <a href="CDW Canada, we’ve seen growth rates across all of our solution categories when compared to 2009. Customers are more willing to spend money now because they’re starting to realize they can’t push technology away much longer.”
The company asked respondents to rank nine different technology categories to reflect what they felt were extremely, or very important. Severs and storage ranked first at 55 per cent, whereas notebooks and netbooks came in at a close second at 53 per cent and desktops coming in third at 50 per cent. The other categories included software at 49 per cent, networking equipment at 46 per cent, peripherals at 38 per cent, power equipment at 35 per cent, printers at 28 per cent and tablets at 13 per cent.
Reio said one of the primary reasons why CDW Canada’s notebook and netbook categories have done so well this year is a result of Microsoft’s release of the Windows 7 operating system.
With respect to technology trends and solution areas, Reio said there’s a lot of traction around storage, virtualization and storage.
“From a software and hardware perspective, virtualization software and the associated solutions that go along with that will be a focus for us next year,” he said. “I think we’ll also continue to see growth around things like networking, unified communications and security, which is paramount to all of these things.”
No matter what the key market areas are next year, Reio said CDW Canada prides itself on being known as the trusted advisor to its customers through education and engagements with them.
“At CDW Canada, we don’t focus on a particular vendor but instead, we have lots of solutions across lots of vendors and where we bring value is in helping customers find whatever the best fit is for them.”
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
