Inside the Mind of the Midmarket IT Executive Slide Show: IT vendors have long recognized the potential value of midmarket customers, and most agree that the best way to reach these customers is through channel partners, VARs, resellers, IT consultants and solution providers. But in order to win over those customers, solution providers and IT consultants must understand how they think, the nature of their pain points and who they listen to. Channel Insider, OnForce Announce Strategic Partnership Channel Insider will work with OnForce in developing new granular market intelligence that provides deeper insight into economic conditions and technology services demands in local markets. SolarWinds Redefines Network Configuration Management Orion NCM 5.0 is a tremendous improvement over the previous product, Cirrus Configuration Manager, providing solution providers with a powerful tool for imposing change management over complex network infrastructures. Managed Services, Hosting Opportunities in Scandinavia : U.S. service providers with offerings such as SAAS, virtualization and managed services ought to seek business in a region pre-disposed to early technology adoption. Avocent Delivers New Kilowatt-Killing Technology New Landesk tools helps to contain energy costs by bringing real time energy measurement to the desktop and the datacenter, while helping companies to reduce their carbon footprint HP Brings Execs to Solution Providers, End Customers Hewlett-Packard this month launched the first official event in its ExeConnect offering - a program designed to bring HP's top executives to meet with HP solution provider channel partners and their customers at partner-requested events. Feds Get Tough on Cybersecurity Weaknesses A new bill approved by a Senate Homeland Security Committee will give federal CIOs more authority and resources to respond to threats and attacks against government IT assets. It will also create a new CIO security council to coordinate government cybersecurity efforts. Oracle, HP Team Up on Data Warehousing Hardware The HP Oracle Database Machine’s Exadata Storage Server supports up to 12TB of raw storage. The alliance-build product will give Oracle a competitive offering to rivals Teradata and Netezza. HP-EDS Fallout: Services Contracts Come Under Review IT consultants should heed the opportunity coming out HP s acquisition of EDS -- customers who are now able to re-evaluate the long term contracts those customers had been locked into. Smaller IT consultants could potentially gain as such contracts get shorter terms and come under more pricing pressure.

Most Profitable (Recession-Proof) Products
The Dow Jones is bleeding billions of dollars, but solution providers can find some shelter with these top 10 recession-proof technologies.  

Channel Insider Mid-Year Outlook Report
Recessionary Pressures
Undercut Resellers
New Channel Insider research finds that economic pressures brought on by the tight credit market and increase energy costs are causing end users to cut back on IT spending. The result is lower sales, revenue and profits for solution providers.

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End-of-Month Sales Scramble Hurts IT
Of course larger companies will frequently wait until the end of the quarter before purchasing the product. This is what they get recommended to do in seminars held by some analyst organizations.
>>Do Your Customers Wait Too Long to Buy?