Carolyn April

An article in today’s New York Times raises an interesting question about the virtualization market: While we know virtualization software represents paradigm-changing technology, will it in the end constitute a successful business to be in? The question pops up as VMware gets set to kick off its VMworld conference in San Francisco this week, flush […]

Cisco Tuesday officially launches its revamped Managed Services Channel Program to feature several changes that the company hopes will boost participation by its partners. The primary change to the program addresses a serious barrier to entry problem Cisco has grappled with since the program’s first incarnation. Cisco is doing away with the previous requirement that […]

Salesforce.com on Wednesday threw a stake in the ground to demonstrate that its cloud computing platform offers a viable profitability engine for its partners. The software-as-a-service pioneer launched a new reseller partner program that allows consulting VAR partners to resell Salesforce.com’s Force.com enterprise cloud computing platform. The company is looking for partners to resell the […]

Star Wars Big Time Vendor Rivalries This one’s been kicking up for some time now, beginning years’ back when several prominent Microsoft executives defected to Google when it was still a young upstart. The battle royale takes place on several fronts, most publicly in the search market where Google owns 65 percent market share. Microsoft’s […]

Vendor-based incentives have long been an integral part of the channel business model. The recession, however, has caused many vendors to rethink how they reward and incent partners, resulting in reductions in front-end discounts and rebates to more stringent requirements for the use of such resources as marketing development funds. These actions are a cost-cutting […]

At the risk of being profane, I’ve got a story to tell. My 11-year-old daughter has been begging to get a netbook – even saving her own money, gasp – to accompany her as she enters sixth grade in just another week. It’s been a summer-long quest. In a fit of spontaneous generosity last week, […]

Smart solution providers don’t sit on their heels waiting for customers to tell them what they need, because oftentimes customers don’t know or can’t know. As the trusted advisor, it’s your job to understand your customer’s business so that you can make the right recommendations. Education and outreach are key too, especially when major new […]

Bill Simpson hasn’t wasted time this summer. In May, Simpson joined Littleton, Mass.-based Akorri as vice president of worldwide sales, just a few weeks after Oracle acquired Simpson’s then-employer Virtual Iron. A month or so later, Oracle cut loose Virtual Iron’s sales and marketing staff and extinguished reseller agreements to sell new Virtual Iron licenses, […]

With the official launch of Windows 7 coming in just less than two months, ISVs, custom developers and Microsoft solution providers are scrambling to test their applications on the new platform and make sure every glitch is gone, bug is squashed and line of code is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Traditionally, developers […]

Green computing is good for the planet, but that message alone will not convince end customers that they need to buy into green technologies and services. No, the most compelling argument is purely business-driven: Will this virtualization solution cut down on the number of servers I need and reduce my power consumption and utility costs? […]

Over the last year, technology vendors with a prominent channel presence have tried to implement ways to help their partners weather the economic recession, either with advice and training or more tangibles such as financing and credit. Cisco’s no different. The networking leader put into place a number of programs and initiatives to keep its […]

Joe Gleinser at GCS Technologies in Austin, Texas, speaks for many in the solution provider community when he praises what he’s seeing in the forthcoming Windows 7, and he makes a compelling business case for his end customers to upgrade – ASAP. Check out the blog entry, “Why Windows 7?” for Gleinser’s laundry list of […]