2011 CRN Fast50 to be revealed 1st December

This Thursday at Sydney's Sheraton On The Park hotel CRN will reveal the much anticipated CRN Fast50 list for 2011.

It's the culmination of many months of number crunching and analysis, both of the winners and the general market trends impacting the wider industry.

Those fortunate enough to have made the cut along with our esteemed industry sponsors will be the first to learn which companies scored the top gongs this year.

Meanwhile, we thought we'd ofter you sneak peak at some of our key findings.

- We saw the proportion of revenues derived from both traditional IT services as well as managed services increase, with the latter growing from 9 percent to over 12 percent of the total revenues.

- Top executives are getting younger. One out of five CRN Fast50 execs were aged under 30 compared to just over one in 10 last year.

- Preferred vendors shifted. Perhaps reflecting HP’s troubled times since the beginning of the Leo Apotheker experiment, the tech giant fell to second place as the most important vendor for this year’s CRN Fast50, pipped by Microsoft.

- Reflecting the inexorable trend towards cloud computing and virtualisation we saw resellers attribute higher importance to the likes of VMware and Citrix. Also notable was Dell making it into the top list of vendors.

- We also saw evidence of the two-speed economy with the number of CRN Fast50 companies from New South Wales and Victoria falling slightly while more companies popped up from Western Australia and Queensland.

All 50 resellers will be flown to Sydney for our annual gala dinner and awards night, which this year includes the following sponsors: Allied Telesis, Avnet, BigAir, Dicker Data, Distribution Central, D-Link, EMC, Express Data, IBM, Infraserve, Ingram Micro, Lenovo, McAfee, NEC, NetComm, Sophos, Synnex, Telstra Business, VisiInc and VMWare.

We will reveal the full list of winners throughout the night on Thursday the 1st December. Stay tuned!