Carolyn April

Looking to make business intelligence and analytics more accessible to everyday users, SAP this week rolled out SAP Business Objects BI on Demand, a software-as-a-service amalgam of its existing BI solutions sporting a simplified workflow and tools. The new SaaS offering is targeted at the underserved “casual user,” according to Marge Breya, executive vice president […]

Longtime channel veteran Stephen DiFranco has resigned from Lenovo and is expected to be named channel chief for Hewlett-Packard imminently, filling the vacancy left by Adrian Jones last November, according to sources in the HP partner community. HP officials refused comment on the DiFranco hiring, but Lenovo did confirm the former vice president and general […]

Speaking Out The Channels Take on Latest Vendor Program Trends   No Title Can I Be Direct With You?In 2009, the channel was already growing wary that major technology vendors were funneling more of their business through their direct sales forces. 38 percent of those surveyed cited this back-to-the-future move to direct sales as the […]

Every year, Channel Insider conducts a Market Pulse survey that gauges the state of the industry through the eyes of the channel. We ask questions that look back over the year just ended – oh, and what a fun year 2009 was right? – and solicit predictions and projections for the year ahead. Some of […]

No Title In the Channel Insider 2010 Market Pulse Survey, we asked solution providers which vendors they thought would go out of business or be acquired in 2009. The results may shock you – or they may not. While never a true measure of which firms will see their fates altered this year, the solution […]

Endangered Species Tech Vendors That Might Not Survive 2010 In the Channel Insider 2010 Market Pulse Survey, we asked solution providers which vendors they thought would go out of business or be acquired in 2009. The results may shock you – or they may not. While never a true measure of which firms will see […]

It appears that the game-changing shift toward software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing business models claimed a high-profile victim on Monday. SAP’s CEO Leo Apothekar resigned from his post, weighed down by the enterprise software company’s annual financial loss and the failure to deliver an online version of its business software ahead of […]

Oracle and SAP may be archrivals in the business applications business, but they have toed very similar lines — and reputations — when it has come to the channel over the years. Both companies are built upon legacy enterprise heritages served by massive – and massively aggressive — direct sales forces. Both have been knocked […]

Last month Cisco rolled out a three-year, zero-percent financing offer for its partners to dangle in front of SMB customers and spur buyer demand. Now it’s HP’s turn. This week, HP unveiled a host of financing and lease incentives also aimed at SMB customers and which partners can use to incent purchases. “As demands shift […]

While Oracle made it clear last week that it is placing its bets on a much more direct-sales go-to-market strategy in the wake of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems,  rival SAP is moving in quite the opposite direction. Long-known for its enterprise-focused direct-sales machine, SAP over the last couple of years has been ratcheting up […]

CA named a new CEO this week. William McCracken will replace John Swainson, who retired as CA’s CEO at the close of 2009 after five years at the helm. McCracken had been serving as executive vice chairman at CA during the five-month period after Swainson announced his impending retirement last September and the CEO search […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was in rare form this week, when he held court before hundreds of Oracle and Sun customers, partners, analysts and media, fielding questions about the now-closed acquisition of Sun—and whatever else was on his mind. Read on for some of the choicest comments. On selling the whole enchilada—chips to applications: “The […]