The hottest trend in the IT channel and VAR market, according to CMP's ChannelWebNetwork, is the move to managed services and business software. To achieve more than 10-15 percent growth in a market dominated by hardware-oriented VARS, solution providers need to offer solutions and focus on software, states Craig Zarley in "How to Grow Your Business."

A new crop of fast-growth software VARS are popping up and focusing on business applications in the SMB market. CRM is experiencing the biggest growth and adoption amongst solution-oriented VARS, with Microsoft Dynamics taking the charge, and Software-as-a-service vendor Salesforce.com, a formidable challenger, according to Rick Whiting in his analysis of the "VARBusiness 2007 State of Technology Survey: Business Software" in his article "How To Succeed in Business Software.".

"Today it's less about the technology and more about the business processes these applications will enable on a vertical industry basis," said Michael Speyer, a Forrester Research analyst, as quoted in the article by Whiting.

Whiting cites concerns, however, by solution providers surveyed about adopting business software. The high cost of software presents major obstacles, as well as the time and expense of training, "...and the complexities of integrating business applications with other information technology."

In order for the new business software VAR to truly maximize its growth potential, it must focus on its customers' business needs, fine-tuning these applications to their particular business processes. However, for customers to maximize the value of business applications such as CRM or ERP, they must be seamlessly integrated with other applications in the enterprise, including legacy applications, flat files and unstructured data. For solution providers to spend valuable time custom coding these integrations instead of focusing on value-added business consulting is a waste of time and can result in important cost overruns for the VAR.

An independent data and application integration tool is a good solution to help VARS focus on high-margin business-oriented activities.

What is an independent data and application integration tool? It is a tool that is a stand-alone product. Companies such as Oracle, IBM, SAP and Business Objects all have their own data integration tools, but because they are part of the afore-mentioned enterprise software companies their neutrality is compromised.

Partnering with them for data integration purposes can cause channel conflicts with whatever business application the solution provider chooses as its bread and butter.

VARs need to look for integration tools that meet the following criteria: they need to be easy to use, with minimal to no coding; lightweight and easy to install yet robust and scalable with superior performance; have a variety of connectors that include legacy applications such as COBOL or ISAM, flat files, databases, major applications, and can play in a web services or service oriented architecture (SOA) environment; must provide data quality assessment and remediation; the company must provide great pre- and post-sales support; and finally, it must have a low total cost of ownership.

Solution providers should not have to worry about long implementation or installation times, nor promote an integration solution that costs almost as much as the business application that is their life-blood. It must be an enabler, not a project in and of itself.

Data and application integration tools can help VARS and solution providers in a variety of ways.

The most obvious is in the migration of data from legacy applications to new applications. New cutting edge on-demand applications are nothing without data, or rather nothing without clean or accurate data. Data integration tools, with data profiling and remediation capabilities, are key to successful software migration projects because of productivity and speed gains in using a visual GUI-based design tool.

With an increasing number of VARS focusing on CRM technology, and the popularity of CRM as the repository of record for customer data, CRM projects can quickly turn into major integration projects. Users learn to love the user interface of applications such as Salesforce.com, according to Raphael Spinelli, CEO of SalesAware, a Salesforce.com System Integrator in Mexico City.

"Salesforce.com users want to be able to view sales transactions, product availability, and trouble tickets from their Salesforce.com user interface," said Spinelli from his office in Mexico City's swank Polanco district. "We now have to help them integrate with applications such as SAP or homegrown applications," added Spinelli.

SalesAware uses a data integration tool in order to provide quick and easy integrations between Salesforce and other applications, while they focus on the more value-added tasks of helping their customers, such as one of Mexico's largest transportation companies, with business process improvements using Salesforce.com.

While VARs and solution providers are starting to transition to a software and business process improvement model as their strategy for fast growth, there are still some considerations to help make this strategy more productive. Data and application integration tools are often overlooked, and integrators often feel they should be able to do the job themselves. However, custom coded integration projects can become a spaghetti-like, point-to-point, brittle nightmare. VARS and solution providers are much better off partnering with an integration tools vendor to handle the mundane integration tasks, and focus on the important revenue generating activities that provide value to their customers.