The number of enterprise software purchase influencers in the US channel will double to 47,000 companies in 2001, a market research firm claims.

As product margins and average selling prices (ASPs) slip, it becomes less attractive to jump through ever-increasing financial hoops to obtain and retain channel accreditation. Lack of accreditation in turn makes it more difficult to resell product. So increasing numbers of systems integrators are junking product sales in favour of recommending software to their clients.

This presents software vendors with a headache: how to reach so many companies? Clearly, the traditional product sale channel programme is not the way to reach these influencers. So every major software vendor is considering introducing new schemes to bring these companies on board, Reality Research says.

Reality Research is a unit of CMP and it bases its conclusions on interviews with 400 systems integrators in the US. ®