The comparison was evident, walking from the mega stands of the vendor halls into the much smaller booths of the reseller hall, or Planet Reseller, as CeBIT organizers called it.

It was the place to go to buy your memory, to get a laptop bag or chat with some of the distributors. And yet here is where many end users should be heading, for it is the solution providers that have exactly that--the solution to business technology problems.

Instead of segregating the VARs into their own, somewhat sparse hall, it would surely have been better for vendors to have included on their own stands a partner area, or invite two or three select partners to join them on their stand, giving each a certain amount of space in which to set up and display their business solutions. That way, the customers browsing the halls could have seen both partner and vendor together and understood more about how the two work together to provide the entire solution.