Today, we released our 2nd quarter report on the State of the Services Industry. This report details the geographic and category hot spots where VARs and solution providers can find the greatest volume, margin and growth. Key findings include:

- Fastest growing categories: Consumer Electronics, Point of Sale and VoIP showed the greatest quarter-over-quarter growth. We attribute this to the continued adoption of these technologies in stores, hotels, restaurants and schools across the US. Those IT service firms who have truly national coverage are bidding on, and winning, more rollout projects than ever.

- Highest priced categories: VoIP / Telephony topped this list, as it did in Q1. What’s more, VoIP is getting even more expensive than it was in Q1, relative to other categories. In Q1, VoIP was 50% more expensive than the average IT category; in Q2, it was 95% more expensive than the average. If you’re a VAR or solution provider and you’re not offering services in VoIP / Telephony, you’re leaving margin dollars on the table.

- Highest volume cities: This list of top IT service markets was similar to Q1, with Houston taking over the top spot. New York, Chicago, Las Vegas and Miami rounded out the list. The fastest risers on this list included Phoenix, Charlotte, Birmingham and Cincinnati. The biggest fallers included Orlando, Richmond, as well as Boston and Irvin, which fell out of the top 25 altogether.

Based upon the overwhelming feedback we received from our Q1 report, we’re planning to issue this report quarterly. If you have questions about the findings of this report, or want to ask us another research-related question about the IT services industry, just drop me a note.

Stay tuned for the Q3 report when we’ll break Consumer Electronics out separately from IT.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 12:39 am and is filed under Marketplace Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.