VARs and system integrators today face unprecedented business challenges: declining margins, increasing competitive complexity, and growing customer expectations combine to make it more difficult than ever to grow and sustain a successful business. The only way to address all of these issues simultaneously is to constantly strive for operational excellence. By synchronizing sales activity with product availability, finance and sourcing operations, VARs can reduce costs, improve customer service and shape their business to meet changing market conditions.

The key to this level of coordination is the timely and efficient sharing of useful information. Unfortunately, the systems required for broad process automation have been considered out-of-reach for most resellers due to their high cost and complexity. However, by making minimal investments in information technology, even local businesses can dramatically improve their performance in many ways.

• Increase sales effectiveness by putting all detailed product and pricing information at the salesperson's fingertips during the course of a negotiation - enabling "one call closing"
• Improve customer service by providing detailed and accurate product availability and order status information on the phone or over the internet
• Refine internal operations and eliminate mistakes with a single internal customer record that is the shared source for all quotes, invoices and receipts.
• Enrich online sales with complete, detailed and up-to-date product information — presented in a professional-looking searchable online catalog
• Cement customer relationships by providing VIP accounts with their own private web "storefronts", reflecting their unique pricing agreements and giving visibility to their order history and status
• Streamline inventory management with immediate visibility to trends in daily orders
• Maximize sourcing effectiveness by giving the buyer visibility to specific order requirements as they come in — giving them insight to select the most profitable sourcing alternative.

ChannelOnline enables VARs to achieve these goals in a cost-effective way. With a hosted application, VARs can achieve all of these benefits with minimal up-front investment and implementation time, and none of the risk and complexity of managing an in-house technology solution. Literally thousands of VAR professionals in the U.S. have already put ChannelOnline — designed specifically for VAR businesses — to use in their everyday business. Now smaller VARs can have the best of both worlds: the expertise and personal service of serving a focused marketplace, plus the efficiency of state-of-the-art internal operations previously only enjoyed by businesses of a much larger size.

Vision: To be the Preeminent Work Environment Used by More Global VAR Sales and Purchasing Professionals

With the launch of ChannelOnline 4.0, we continue to make significant progress to fulfill our vision to be the world's preeminent work environment for VAR professionals — streamlining complex business processes associated with supplier management, quoting, procurement, e-commerce, configuration and back-office integration. Subsequent releases will be enhanced with new features and functionality that meets the needs of our demanding customer base. And, we'll continue forming alliances with new industry distributors, suppliers and manufacturers to create synergistic marketing relationships that benefit the reseller community we service.