Michael Vizard

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano called on its partners worldwide to participate in the company’s Smarter Planet initiative during the launch of a new Business Partner Leadership Agenda series of online events. Intended as a replacement for this year’s PartnerWorld live events, the new series is part of an overall effort to reach out to channel […]

The biggest battle in the history of the channel harkens back to the way Microsoft essentially destroyed Lotus Development Corp., by first bundling productivity applications together in Microsoft Office and then tightly coupling its Microsoft Outlook client with the Microsoft Exchange messaging platform. The first move essentially eliminated the viability of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet […]

Making the Most of Storage Demand In this Changing Channels podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, the senior vice president of marketing for Nexsan Technologies, Robert Woolery, talks about how solution providers can profit from rising demand for storage solutions even in these lean economic times. Host: Mike Vizard Length: 00:17:15  Subscribe to this podcast Web […]

One of the major new trends in enterprise computing that solution providers have to tread carefully is the push to lower the total cost of computing in the data center by converging network, server and storage technologies. On paper, the whole concept is pretty compelling. By creating a new generation of systems, vendors are allowing […]

For the last 25 years the classic Type A personality sales person has figured prominently in just about every significant deal involving IT. They may not always have known a whole lot about IT, but usually they were proficient at establishing relationships and gaining the confidence of customers. But at the economy has turned, selling […]

One of the biggest challenges that any solution provider is going to have to deal with in a down economy is the pressure on pricing. It’s hard enough to find a customer who wants to buy any new product, and when they do you can bet that they will push back hard on pricing. We’re […]

The two biggest issues with managed services for most solution providers is the cost of creating the service and then dealing with the process by which the multitude of devices in the customer environments actually become managed. While there has been no shortage of managed services platforms to use as a service, the issue that […]

One of things that most solution providers routinely offer potential new customers is a security assessment. The basic idea is that it’s a great way to get your foot in the door so you can discover what the customer actually needs versus just blindly trying to sell products. And best of all, after the assessment […]

Now that the initial surprise of the planned acquisition of Sun by Oracle is starting to wear off, the time might be at hand to take a look at some of the more serious channel conflicts associated with this merger. Oracle has already signaled its intent to stay in the hardware business once the merger […]

With the election of the most technology-savvy president in history, the government sector has quickly become one of the most exciting places to work if you’re a solution provider. Traditionally, the government sector was hampered by conflicting policies that made it a difficult place for a solution provider to thrive. Worse yet, government agencies are […]

Even before the economy turned sharply downward, selling servers had become a tough proposition thanks largely to the advent of virtualization. Every where you turn these days, customers are focused on getting more out of their existing assets so that means the order of the day is to increase the utilization rates of servers that typically […]

Now that the economy has tanked and everybody can see the value of selling IT as an operational expense, it seems like every vendor out there is trying to jump into the managed services pool. For the most part that can be seen as a positive development. But the thing that solution providers should remember […]