Michael Vizard

There’s a lot of discontent these days with the state of the channel that largely stems from some of the very core economic theories that the channel is based on. The root of the problem that many companies have with the channel as it currently exists is that channel chiefs routinely struggle with the number […]

As many solution providers continue to evolve into cloud service providers many of the server vendor relationships that many of them built their businesses on are being reevaluated. The primary reason this is happening is that if customers are buying a service they generally don’t care much about the specific IT infrastructure that enables it. […]

An interesting phenomenon is starting to take shape in the managed services category that has some long term implications for resellers in the channel. Managed service providers (MSPs) are increasingly partnering with software vendors to deliver more products as a service. For instance, instead of the customer buying backup and recovery software, the customer relies […]

While there may not be much profit in reselling mobile computing devices, the opportunities associated with reselling mobile computing applications is a whole different matter. As organizations of all sizes become more comfortable with mobile computing devices they are starting to look for applications that leverage a near ubiquitous form of computing that requires very […]

For more than a decade now solution providers have been told they should embrace managed services as a way to ensure ongoing profitability in an age where profit margins associated with reselling products are razor thin. Now comes an age of cloud computing where many systems are being consolidated in the cloud. Many of those […]

From the perspective of cloud service providers VMware may be faulted for being a little late to the cloud computing party. But if current momentum is any indication of things to come, the size of the VMware cloud ecosystem is expanding faster than any other. According to Matthew Lodge, senior director for cloud services for […]

Sales management in the channel is more mysterious art than science. But as predictive analytics software continues to evolve additional light will soon be shone into one of the darkest corners of the channel. IBM recently moved to acquire a provider of an analytics application that has been specifically developed to address the challenges associated […]

There is no shortage of virtual machine platforms these days, but from a market perspective the dominant three are VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. What’s still a little unclear at this point is to what degree are solution providers going to need to support all three platforms. In general, the Citrix Xen platform tends to be […]

There’s a lot of interest in changing the way organizations work these days. A lot of this effort is an outgrowth of a “consumerization of IT” phenomenon that is allowing end users to increasingly define not only how they want to work, but what tools they want to use. On one level this is incredibly […]

Given all the noise that has been generated about customer relationship management (CRM) software over the years, solution providers in the channel could be forgiven for assuming the CRM market is pretty well saturated by now. In reality, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin says that 60 percent of organizations today don’t have a CRM in place […]

Every time there is a major disruption in computing models the impact on business models in the channel is profound. The ongoing shift to cloud computing is no exception. At this point it’s not really a question of whether solution providers will be participating in the cloud, but rather finding the least disruptive approach to […]

The history of opportunity for solution providers in the channel is very closely tied to bottlenecks. Almost any time there is an impedance mismatch between storage, servers and the network it creates a limited IT resource that needs to be optimized. Today the resource that is most limited is the wide area network (WAN). While […]