This year, I reported my predictions for IT services trends, rather than take a stab in the dark. Actually, I usually DO report most of my blogs. In any case, I contributed a story to Tech Target early this month, outlining 10 trends for 2010. This will also be the basis of a presentation that I’m giving early next month in Tampa for the service group within CompTIA.

Anyway, here are the things that I believe will be top of mind, based on my reporting in late November and December 2009:

1. Businesses will finally be ready to spend on client technology because they can’t delay some of their upgrades any longer. This will be great for desktop virtualization and thin clients, which inspire debates about the value of desktops and notebooks.
2. Disaster recovery will actually start to building a following among smaller businesses, because server virtualization sets the stage for solutions that aren’t tied to any particular hardware.
3. Windows 7 will get solution providers in the door.
4. Businesses will continue to invest in videoconferencing.
5. Security and compliance concerns will motivate document management technology sales.
6. Cloud computing won’t drive a lot of sales, but it will drive a lot of sales dialogues.
7. Identity management will finally get some legitimate attention (because cloud computing makes it much more palatable and logical).
8. WiMax and other broadband wireless options for connectivity will become viable, if expensive, options.
9. The green IT mantra will be revived, not reviled.
10. Server virtualization will get even more mainstream.

What’s your biggest prediction for 2010? Talk to me — but only if you’re prepared to have me write about what you say. Kidding… Seriously, let’s talk. Ping me at heather@heatherclancy. And be sure to add me to your Twitter feed. I’m @HeathClancy.

BLOG UPDATED 7:44 P.M. EST (DEC. 18) TO REFLECT REQUESTED CLARIFICATIONS BY MICROSOFT

Just spoke with Julie Bennani, general manager of the Microsoft Partner Network, for the company’s Worldwide Partner Group about changes the developer is making to its customer satisfaction research process and how it relates to attaining a Gold partner designation.

For starters, customer satisfaction surveys are now a mandatory part of becoming a Microsoft Gold partner.

The changes are part of the company’s evolution of the current program into the Microsoft Partner Network.

Surveys can be sent under a number of different auspices. For example, they could be sent out jointly (identified as a project being conducted by Microsoft AND Specific Partner) or they could be sent out just branded with the Specific Partner’s name. A third-party research company will monitor which businesses and organizations are being surveyed on behalf of partners, so that they don’t get survey-weary.

Another change is that surveys are more random in the past. There is no “minimum” level of satisfaction that is required in terms of customer satisfaction ONLY that the partner complete 10 surveys for EACH area where they hold to receive a Microsoft Gold designation. So, they need 10 surveys for Security, 10 surveys for Unified Communications and so on. A particular business could be surveyed about more than one different area.

Bennani says the idea behind keeping the surveys more random is that the partner and Microsoft will receive a truer reading of customer satisfaction across a given partner’s customer base. When a partner is responsible for meeting a certain customer satisfaction level, they might be tempted to game the results a little bit by providing the research firm with a list of their “best” customers. Now, the only real requirement is that the customers are ACTIVE: That they have worked with the Microsoft partner in the 12 months prior to a given survey date.

Partners that submit to this process will receive their scores, specific comments and an analysis of how they perform against similar partners. They can also add their own custom questions. What’s more, if they are really ambitious, partners can actually run surveys on a quarterly basis to keep better tabs on how they are doing.

On the face of it, I like the idea of making customer satisfaction process part of how high a tier a partner can attain in a vendor’s channel program. Although I personally think more attention should be paid to how a partner actually does, I guess that will sort of take care of itself. I mean, how willing would YOU be to fill out a survey if someone had done a really bad job. Maybe there become degrees of Gold-ness, with Gold partners holding a higher customer satisfaction score entitled to more field benefits or more attention from partner account managers.

I also like the fact that satisfaction is being more ingrained into the partner consciousness AND that the survey process forces ongoing activity. Satisfaction is more likely to reflect a long-term relationship, rather than a one-off tactical success story.

Now that customer satisfaction surveys as a partner measurement tool have been in place for roughly seven or eight years now across the channel (not just at Microsoft), I’m betting we’ll see some more adjustments in the year to come from other vendors.

Chances are, at least some of the people who read this blog work for what could be classified as “emerging” technology vendors. If so AND you are going to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January, you could be eligible for their contest to locate “the most innovative technology product for 2010.”

The Global CES Innovative Technology Contest is being sponsored by Global Marketing Partners, which is essentially what you would call a channel matchmaker: It helps new vendors find the appropriate distribution partners for their products AND it helps VARs and solution providers find new products that might fit their solution portfolios. The prize is $20,000-worth of channel marketing to support your channel launch AND guaranteed distribution placement.

Entries for the contest are being accepted up until Dec. 28, 2009. The company plans to feature the 10 finalists during CES on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2010, at the Startup Debut event. Here’s the link to the contest application. And here’s the link to information about Startup Debut.

Good luck!

Few resellers have the marketing funds to support ongoing customer research, but CDW more than makes up for this with hits regular bi-monthly and annual polls of IT decision makers.

The third year-in-review edition of the CDW IT Monitor shows that budgets are likely to start flowing again in 2010 — but mainly on technology projects that help the entire organization get a better handle on costs. In fact, the CDW research shows that roughly one-half of the survey respondents are focusing on cost management as their company’s top business priority, with improving customer satisfaction next, followed by increasing market share.

The survey included 1,043 IT decision makers who were interview between Sept. 15, 2009, and Sept. 23, 2009.

As far as top IT priorities, here’s the breakdown in descending order:

• Information security (44 percent)
• Energy efficient/”green” IT (29 percent)
• Mobility/mobile devices (29 percent)
• Virtualization (25 percent)
• Remote conferencing (21 percent)
• Social media applications (14 percent)
• Cloud computing (14 percent)
• Web 2.0 (12 percent)

Quietly, perhaps TOO quietly, Taiwanese hardware maker Acer claimed the No. 2 position in the worldwide PC market this week — at least for the third quarter and at least according to research firm iSuppli. Actually, there was earlier news to this effect in October, but this is another validation.

There is one fundamental factor for Acer’s rise, which bears close attention as the economy attempts to pick itself up out of this wretched recession: its success with netbooks.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in buying a netbook for yourself, this form factor is really interesting for two reasons:

1. They allow people who never before could have had their OWN notebook or PC to have access to computing power. Just last night, I was over at a friend’s house. They already own two PCs and are thinking about a netbook for under the Christmas tree so that all three of their kids can be working/playing at once. When I think about the possibilities for education, I get really choked up. And this is just the U.S. market: imagine where these things are having an impact globally.
2. Netbooks and thin clients in general are starting to get the attention of IT solution providers who have long been out of the client hardware business. I had lunch with a serious server VAR in New Jersey just before Thanksgiving. He now views thin clients as a very logical extension to his existing integration business, whereas just a year ago, this wouldn’t have really been a consideration.

I’ve been hearing about managed print services since before I left my post at CRN back in the middle of 2007, but I think the next 12 months will bring a breakthrough for this sector of the IT infrastructure.

Since I like to look ahead of me rather than behind me (the view is better), I thought I would update this blog from now until the end of the year with observations about things that are likely to dominate dialogues during the next 12 months. I have no particular order for these random bursts of opinion, other than the fact that it may have risen to the top of my notes and (therefore) my writing list.

First up is managed print services (MPS), not to be confused with managed service providers (MSPs).

I know many journalists like to make fun of the printer market, because for the longest time it was so decidely unsexy. But this is one of those topics that will seduce everyone next year.

The fact is, printers are sort of like the last mile in your IT infrastructure. IT departments and managers have been focused on driving costs out of their data centers or their desktop maintenance line items. But printers have kind of escaped this same scrutiny, partly because the procurement of them has been so decentralized in the past. Admit it, it’s a status symbol to have your OWN printer snugged away in your office.

Actually, not anymore.

What with the corporate sustainability movement and widespread corporate cost-cutting, printer contracts and all the related workflow applications associated with them — think archiving, collaboration applications, enterprise content management — these is an area RIPE for services.

If you’re in the printer business, you already know this of course. But if you are not, maybe it’s time to start considering how your own product might fit into the managed print mix. Or, whether or not there’s a managed service opportunity that could be built around your technology.

Here’s more information on managed print services strategy from an article I posted on TechTarget’s ChannelMarker blog.

I imbibe pretty much every research report that I can get my hands on these days, especially those pertaining to strategy in social media.

There’s a great piece from Forrester Research, from about one year ago actually, that I find really useful in helping think through the potential impact that a social media strategy could have when it comes to business-to-business relationships. The report is called “Making Social Media Work in B2B marketing,” and I suggest that channel managers consider this information not just from the point of view of the ultimate end-user customer but in how you should use social media to engage channel partners more meaningfully than may be possible through existing partner portals or partner relationship management systems.

From Forrester’s point of view, these are the objectives that should guide any B2B social media marketing plan:

• Listening: Sort of like live market research in which you can generate new ideas, prioritize programs that are already in place (or that you’re planning), send up trial balloons about new concepts you are considering or ask out-right for feedback.
• Talking: Create buzz for events, get in front of market influencers.
• Energizing: Share successes or encourage people to attend events.
• Spreading: Share best practices, gather contributions for customization or workflow, figure out appropriate service levels.
• Supporting: Create ways to help teach partners and other constituents; alternatively, create peer-to-peer discussion forums where questions and issues can be addressed quickly.
• Embracing: More formal outreach, such as online training or co-development that will help build skills around your products or services and make people feel good about wanting to use them or represent them.

Of course, you may choose to focus on just one of these elements, depending on your priorities. But rather than getting all hung up on whether to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or whatever other tool springs to mind, think first of where you need the most help when it comes to the things listed above and then make your decision.

Read a thought-provoking article the other day about why applying the same exact return-on-investment (ROI) equation to every single program you introduce or marketing campaign you launch is just a dumb idea.

I mused about that article here in my new Business Brains blog (over on the CBS Interactive Smartplanet Web site), so I won’t repeat everything here. But I did want to make a couple of additional comments about this topic that I feel have specific relevance for high-tech vendor channel managers.

I guess you could view these suggestions as simplistic reminders about how to hold firm when someone from your bean-counting department challenges your budget or suggests that hiring one or two direct sales people could “easily” cover the job handled by your partners in a given region. Here’s what you could counter with:

• Channel partners are worth their weight in gold in terms of the local, customer relationships they bring to the table. From an ROI perspective, this reduces your company’s overall marketing and demand-generation costs. And don’t forget the ultimate intangible: the value of credibility/trust. How many of your direct sales team executives serve on a local chamber of commerce in their region?
• Channel partners get paid by you when you both make a sale. Period. Can your bean-counter say the same of people on your payroll? Nope.
• Channel partners provide invaluable independent feedback, not just on anything that’s wrong with your product or technology but about why something isn’t working from a branding or branding standpoint. You could describe them as a perpetual focus group. One, again, that you pay when they sell your product.
• Channel partners bring valuable third-party alliances to the table: often, the collaborative nature of these partnerships (such as when a VAR teams up with the developer of a healthcare application) will make or break a deal. No partnership, no deal.

I’ll bet many of you with fiscal years that start in the middle of the summer are in deep into the process of justifying your channel investments as I write this. Hopefully just one of these simple arguments directs you to the data and evidence that will help you defend your position.

I have always followed the channel programs of Autodesk pretty closely, partly because in my mind the company has led the software industry for many years in figuring out the best way to work with REAL VARs. That is, companies that sold solutions specifically focused on the CAD and design markets for which they had a unique business differentiation. Right now, the Autodesk channel includes about 1,900 such companies.

Plus, honestly, it’s pretty impressive that this is a company that is able to award silver anniversary honors to some of its channel members, not just employees. For the second year in a row, mind you. (More on that in a moment.)

I caught up last month with Steve Blum, senior vice president of the Americas for Autodesk, about how the company’s channel organization is helping partner principals manager their businesses right now. Blum hopes that by keeping close to key resellers now, they’ll be better-positioned to ride the up-turn more successfully. Incidently, that means Autodesk is recruiting partners, even though both they and these new resellers know that it might take longer to get up and running with a practice in the current economy.

This also includes, by the way, a lot of training for the Autodesk channel managers so that they can understand the concerns of a smaller business. “We should not be in the position of telling a partner what they have to do,” Blum says. “We merely share ideas that we’ve seen work in the past.”

Here are a couple of specific programs, though, that might be of interest to the partners that Autodesk is wooing, as well as any existing partners that might want to deepen their relationship. These might seem like very common sense ideas, but you’d be surprised at how few vendors support ideas like these in practice:

• The Path-to-Volume program: Autodesk has a very disciplined approach for figuring out when to take a product to the channel, and how. Every new application and acquisition is running through this lifecycle assessment to figure out how it should be layered into the program.
• Autodesk is also one of the few vendors to reward its partners with Solutions Incentives, meaning they get certain considerations for vertical and industry sales. Partners also can get Loyalty Incentives for driving long-term customer engagement and loyalty. (Which, in turn, drives long-term partner engagement and loyalty.) And they can earn Key Incentives for driving business in new products and technologies OR for getting an account to start thinking vertical. Last year, partners were able to grow their 3D sales by 25 percent using a combination of these incentives.
• Autodesk’s deal registration program (called the Autodesk Customer Engagement process) has helped some partners increase their margins by 20 percent.
• Over the past year, Autodesk has given out more than $10 million in “growth funds,” based on business plan submissions. (This is in addition to more traditional things like cooperative marketing funds.)
• The vendor also is pushing additional financing options, especially those that help resellers avoid having to carry product sales in a time when credit is hard to find for small businesses.
• And, harkening back to a long-time policy, Autodesk earlier this month introduced something called the Autodesk Assistance Program. The company has long seeded universities with its software, which has helped position its applications as critical business applications for professionals in the architecture and engineering professions after they enter the workforce. Under the new program, the company is free software and certification seminars to both students as well as unemployed architects, engineers and designers. Here’s a YouTube video with more information about the program.

Now, back to those Autodesk Silver Anniversary awards. Last month, at its annual One Team Conference, Autodesk recognized four resellers that have been representing the company’s software for 25 years. They include:

CAD MicroSolutions (A design automation solution provider in Toronto)

Hagerman & Co. (A consulting company based out of Fort Wayne, Idaho, that handles not just CAD/CAM but also sells 3D printers)

Industrial Technology (A Riviera Beach, Fla., reseller that focuses on manufacturing solutions.)

Le Groupe BusCom (A Montreal-based architecture and engineering expert.)

In case you are wondering what makes these relationships work, there are some slidecasts that Autodesk created with several of these partners. Here are those links, too:

Hagerman & Co.

Le Groupe BusCom

CADMicroSolutions