Michael Vizard

The fundamental challenge solution providers in the channel face as it relates to cloud computing is that many of the bread and butter applications that their business is built around are the ones that are heading for cloud. A recent survey of 3,000 small-to-medium business (SMB) organizations with between two to 250 employees  conducted by […]

On the one hand the acquisition of Wyse Technology by Dell can be simply seen as a move to fill out a portfolio products in the data center that complement other recent Dell acquisitions such as Compellent, Force 10 Networks and SonicWall. After all, the thin client and desktop virtualization technologies that Wyse sells are […]

Excelling at anything, especially when it comes to IT, is often a matter of discipline. Without a consistent, structured approach to managing IT costs inevitably rise. Worse yet, it becomes next to impossible to automate the delivery of IT services across multiple customers. And as every managed service provider (MSP) should know by now, custom […]

Rather than compete against commercial vendors many “white box” manufacturers shifted their focus to custom systems. As opposed to selling PCs and servers directly against Dell and Hewlett-Packard, they determined it was more profitable to build systems for specific vertical application areas such as healthcare. Of course, that’s a business that commercial vendors also covet, […]

There’s a war on for control over the future of unified communications. On one side there is the telecommunications community that tends to view unified communications as an extension of the PBX. Then we have Web-based entities that tend to view unified communications as a variation of a Web 2.0 application. And finally, there are […]

There are a small number of fairly well-known companies that got their starts in Russia, including Parallels and Kaspersky Lab. Now The Skolkovo Foundation wants to help create even more by setting up shop in the U.S. to find business partners that will help take products that are being developed by 30 Russian start-up companies […]

There are very few things in the channel that are either all bad or all good and Special Incentive Investment Funds, otherwise known as SPIFFs, are no exception. The best thing about a SPIFF is that it gives sales people incentives to sell something. Like it or not, most sales activity is coin operated and […]

It’s tough to add any meaningful value when all your company really does is facilitate a transaction between customers and the vendors they want to do business with. Given the fairly limited set of services needed to support those transactions and the thin margins usually associated with reselling most products, solution providers need to start […]

Cloud computing is changing the relationship between vendors and the channel is many ways. But none is more profound then when a vendor decides to not only build their own cloud, but also try to build its own channel ecosystem around that cloud. Of all the cloud initiatives in the market today one of the […]

While unified communications is an area that has held much promise for the channel, turning that potential in major new business opportunities has been something of a challenge. Not only is there a lot of internal customer politics to navigate as teams of IT and telecommunications people battle for control of unified communications, customers are […]

One of the major customer benefits associated with moving application workloads to either a public cloud or managed hosting environment is that it turns IT into an operating expense that makes their balance sheets look a lot better to investors. But over the next couple of years there are new accounting rules that may soon […]

More than a few IT organizations have made the plunge into desktop virtualization only to discover that this latest IT cure can easily wind up being worse than the disease. The issues that many of solution providers wind up confronting range from the fact that the costs associated with implementing certain types of desktop virtualization […]