Report highlights engineering fears

A Business Advantage Group product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Mar 25, 2002

The traditional fear of a rival undercutting their prices was identified as a major threat to their business by the greatest proportion of resellers during recent research.

The traditional fear of a rival undercutting their prices was identified as a major threat to their business by the greatest proportion of resellers during recent research conducted by The Business Advantage Group.

These findings concerning the views of resellers on the opportunities and threats of the CAD/CAM market came from telephone interviews conducted in January 2001 with 174 of the UK's most active and successful resellers, during the compilation of the UK CAD/CAM Reseller Directory.

Business Advantage has been gathering information on UK CAD/CAM resellers for 10 years.

The research also found that of the other issues identified as most likely to keep resellers awake at night, the various options open to vendors for providing software to customers directly, feature prominently.

Of these options, the facility for customers to purchase via the web is seen as a major threat by the highest proportion of resellers (36%), while the possibility of customers renting via the ASP model was identified by one in five.

Only three resellers identified the economic downturn as a major threat, while 28% were confident enough to state that they saw no major threats to their business in the coming year.

Looking on the bright side, 93% of the sample identified at least one major opportunity for the next twelve months.

Over three-quarters thought that developing new services is the way forward.

Many resellers clearly see limits to what can be achieved in the design solution arena; diversification into new areas was a common theme.

Chris Turner, Managing Director of The Business Advantage Group, observes: "There are widely differing views among VARs on the future of distribution channels.

Over a third of resellers are worried about the short-term effects of customers purchasing directly from vendors; the fact that less concern (28%) is expressed about the subscription option is probably related to Autodesk's decision to offer subscription via it's authorised channel partners.

It's perhaps surprising that one in five feel that the specific ASP subscription option is a threat for the coming year when various studies (including CAD Spaghetti's 'ASP Low Down') have shown that awareness of and positive intentions towards this model are low".

The 2002 UK CAD/CAM Reseller Directory Report and Database is available at a cost of GBP 995 for the full Directory and Report (including an overview of the UK CAD/CAM market) or GBP 250 for just the Report.

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