Carolyn April

Did your world come crashing down on Thursday when you tried to tweet something and it failed? I, for one, survived the well-publicized hack attack on Twitter that also apparently slowed or stymied the Facebook Web site. I think most of us made it through the day without real pain from tweet withdrawal, though I […]

Historically, marketing investments have been treated as a near-luxury—or sometimes an afterthought—among a majority of solution providers and resellers. In some respect it’s understandable; most in the business come straight out of the technology expert pool, engineers with an entrepreneurial zeal who over time got fairly accomplished at sales activities. But marketing? That’s remained a […]

Intuit has come a long way from the days of shrink-wrapped QuickBooks. Last October, the personal finance software maker jumped on the software-as-a-service bandwagon with the Intuit Partner Platform, a cloud-based platform that serves up its applications and those from third-party partners to small business customers. The company also unveiled Federated Applications, a native stack […]

The economy is fraying everybody’s nerves, but the tone among IT industry market leaders has gotten slightly nuts of late — especially among the hardware giants. Ever since Cisco Systems announced it was getting into the mainstream server business in June, an almost-maniacal round of corporate one-upmanship has been unleashed that is truly pitting old […]

Recession, what recession? Never one to shy away from shopping, IBM’s Software Group went on a buying spree this week, scooping up analytics provider SPSS to the tune of $1.2 billion and application security testing company Ounce Labs for an undisclosed sum. The willingness to invest during tough economic times is smart business and provides […]

IBM has agreed to plunk down $1.2 billion to acquire SPSS, a maker of predictive analytics software and solutions based in Chicago. IBM says the all-cash deal, still subject to regulatory approval, to acquire SPSS will broaden its existing Information on Demand (IOD) software family and expand its range of analytics capabilities and offerings. The […]

Here’s one of those cautionary tales about social networking: Too much can be WAY too much, even for techno-god Bill Gates. Gates quit Facebook this week. He said he’s been just deluged by invites and messages and can’t spend the time to figure out if these are people he even knows. Sound familiar? We all […]

Dissecting Microsoft’s First Bad Year by Carolyn April No Title Despite a humbling the likes of which it’s never before seen, Microsoft and its channel partners have three reasons for optimism in 2010: The pending product releases, starting in October with Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010. But first, read on as […]

Talk about a wide-open sales opportunity for the channel. A recent online survey designed to measure IT effectiveness at small businesses found that nearly a quarter of respondents scored at grade of “D” or “F.” The IT Effectiveness Index (ITEI) Mid-Year Report 2009, a measurement tool designed and sponsored by a consortium focused on the […]

Microsoft went for blood this week against Sage Software, one of the Redmond, Wash., software giant’s leading rivals in the ERP and business software space. Microsoft called into question the stability of Sage’s channel, citing the shuttering earlier this month of MIS Group, one of Sage’s largest partners for two years’ running. “Microsoft Dynamics offers […]

Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 7 operating system was released to manufacturing on Wednesday, a milestone that signals the formal completion of the engineering development phase. Partners and ISVs can work with the final version, with locked-in code and features, as they build out their own solutions heading toward the general availability launch of the products this […]

Not every unified communications player is, or needs to be, the size and scope of a Cisco or even an Avaya. A Dutch company called StartReady is looking to break into the U.S. market this year with a unified communications appliance that can be dropped into a customer’s environment for a fraction of the cost […]