John Hazard

There are few in the channel who pay regular attention to what Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke has to say. Fewer still follow the activities of the U.S. House and Senate committees hashing and rehashing the U.S. tax code. John Callies does. As general manager of IBM Global Finance, Big Blue’s finance and lending arm, […]

One particular difficulty VARs face in making the switch from reactive, break/fix shops to the proactive, fixed-fee model of managed services is setting their prices. Managed service providers fear pricing themselves out of the market or, worse, charging customers a fixed fee that falls short of their realized costs. “They just don’t know what to […]

CompUSA announced Nov. 30 it had achieved Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status, the same day it became the only retail outlet to sell the software maker’s most important products to small and midsize businesses. The certification grants the retail chain access to partner resources. CompUSA Management is also now the only retail outlet able to […]

Eight hundred vendors are now sending products to market through two-tier channels, up from 600 just three years ago, according to the Global Technology Distribution Council. Distributor Track, a data service provided by NPD Group, followed 800 vendors using member distributors in 2006, during which time those distributors logged record sales and transaction figures not […]

This year at its annual gathering of Hewlett-Packard partners, Avnet invited Robert A. Carroll, chief information officer of Apollo Group, parent company of online education institute Phoenix University, to talk about his IT priorities in 2007. When he came to his last slide, titled “What we care about,” Carroll told the 240 partners and staff […]

Distributor Avnet Technology Solutions has expanded its Consolidation Impact Analysis program for Hewlett-Packard VARs to include storage environments. Avnet expects CIA for Storage to drive new HP storage sales by delivering a thorough assessment of a user’s environment and TCO (total cost of ownership), company officials said Nov. 28 at Acceleration ’06, Avnet’s annual convention […]

Distributor Avnet Technology Solutions is helping SAS, one if its ISV Alliance Program partners, bring its business intelligence software to market on Hewlett-Packard hardware through HP VARs. Avnet will supply and support a bundle of SAS’ Enterprise BI Server (a suite of business intelligence software), HP Integrity servers and an assembly of third-party software for […]

Distributor Ingram Micro’s vice president of market development worldwide, Bob Stegner, announced Nov. 29 that he will exit the company after the new year. Stegner, 53, said he is leaving the company effective Jan. 5 because he is “tired” of the hectic schedule and travel, according to one source. There was no word yet from […]

When Bluewolf Group unwrapped an on-demand Salesforce.com implementation at the New York Times Co. earlier this year, it was already weeks ahead of the schedule an on-premises solution would have required. But the real work was just beginning. Bluewolf immediately plugged in 700 of the Times’ sales representatives to the Salesforce Enterprise Edition Customer Relationship […]

Robert G. Parsons first realized he needed some guidance on where his business was headed when he began hiring young sales representatives a few months ago to push the products and services of his company, Automated Office Solutions, a VAR in Evansville, Ohio. The firm had seen a dip in profitability proportional to the dip […]

Early users of CompTIA’s Reseller Transformation Roadmap Beta version, released in August, have said the process leaves to much of the shepherding and policing of progress to the VARs themselves. The roadmap, a Web-based program and guide to help resellers first assess the state of their business, such as what areas are profitable or unprofitable […]

Microsoft is expecting PC repair shops and VARs in the low end of the channel to promote use of its Office Live business application suite to SOHOs and small to midsized businesses without servers. The Redmond, Wash., software company released Office Live from beta Nov. 15 with three available editions: Office Live Basic, a free, […]