John Hazard

No one likes hearing from telemarketers during dinner and hearing from them at work isn’t any better, especially when the call’s from someone who should know better, VARs told Ingram Micro on March 14 during a regional chapter meeting at the distributor’s VTN conference in Nashville. “I don’t like getting calls from the ‘special promotions […]

Inacom Information Systems set out to solve its own business problem by driving out the inefficiencies in its service provider practice. It ended up completing what is perhaps the first customized, hosted version of Microsoft CRM. Inatrac, a tracking, reporting and management tool, is designed for use by VARs to drive profitability in their service […]

A Microsoft SMB executive claims the company is standing by its SMB plan to make CompUSA a spear point in driving SMB demand. The pair announced on March 12 yet another exclusive deal to link CompUSA SMB sales to Microsoft’s SBSC (Small Business Specialist) partners working with local stores. CompUSA’s own small business sales team […]

Buell Duncan, IBM’s popular ISV ambassador, left IBM’s software channel group for a bigger, broader position at Big Blue. Duncan, previously general manager of ISV and developer relations for IBM Software Group, was recently named vice president of worldwide marketing for the group, a company spokesman said. In his new role, Duncan is responsible for […]

Tech Data reported March 8 that its profit rose 22 percent in the fourth quarter. There are no doubt many reasons for this — its European realignments are finally paying off, the market grew over all and business process changes like a new SAP system are coming online. But Tech Data’s CEO, Robert Dutkowsky, attributes […]

Microsoft isn’t talking yet about how it plans to market System Center Essentials 2007 to managed service providers and won’t even acknowledge that it will, but some already working with Microsoft Operations Manager and SCE betas say it could best all other MSP platforms and own the vendor market. SCE installed at a customer site […]

Hewlett-Packard announced its new channel chief, Adrian Jones, on March 2, and since then there seems to be but one response from the channel: “Who is Adrian Jones?” Jones, 40, comes from a much smaller company with a much different channel—storage vendor McDATA. But no matter, partners reached for comment seem to have a significant […]

AMD has had trouble keeping supply in the channel for more than a year now, and this quarter it’s going to affect the bottom line. The No. 2 chip maker warned Wall Street early March 5 that the company would likely miss its first-quarter revenue forecast due to shrinking profits. Hector Ruiz, AMD’s CEO, later […]

Attendance and attention at IBM PartnerWorld keynotes should improve this year after Channel execs made the call to move the show from Las Vegas to St. Louis. Channel execs said they made the call to move the show after partners expressed some waning interest in a fourth consecutive PW in Sin City. And the city […]

IBM is after perhaps the smallest partners it has ever had, making a cheaper, “lighter” version of the open-source WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and DB2 Express-C, the no-license-fee database. The offering is made to order for VARs and ISVs that can’t afford and never needed the robustness of the typical IBM gear, but that […]

CA dipped its toe in the same pool Microsoft and Salesforce.com have been wading in—software distribution. The former Computer Associates, and former software maker-only, is letting several other software vendors swim to market in its stream, the OnSite PC Protection program, a platform for delivery, previously, of CA security products to small VARs and PC […]

Twenty-six hundred partners have downloaded 4,200 copies of Microsoft’s Business & Technology Assessment Toolkit since it debuted four weeks ago, Microsoft boasts. Partners have downloaded 20,000 copies of the old and new versions since August, and they are increasing deal sizes according to statements made by partners on the software maker’s site. “We insisted on […]