Michael Vizard

 2009: Periods of Profit It’s no secret that we live in one of the most challenging business climates seen in the last 30 years. That means that success in 2009 is going to be defined by good planning because the margin for error in these economic conditions is near zero. With that in mind, here […]

  In trying times like these, cash is everything As part of its ongoing effort to dramatically simplify doing business with solution providers, IBM is reducing the number of channel programs it support by 70 percent and altering the terms and conditions around each deal to put more cash in the hands of solution providers […]

This may come as a shock to some people in the solution provider community, but there are actually people working within internal IT departments that don’t want to see providers of outsourced IT services succeed.   In terms of news flashes, this ranks right up with the fact that there is gambling going on in […]

In the wake of the tragic terrorist events in Mumbai this past week, leaders of the hospitality industry are starting to ask themselves some uncomfortable questions about security.   The simple truth of that matter is that, short of locking down their entire facilities, there is very little that can be done to prevent terrorists […]

In these tough economic times it’s easy to become a little overly despondent over future prospects. But with the annual Thanksgiving holiday staring us all in the face, now is as good a time as any to give thanks for 12 things should make the channel a more profitable place to work no matter how […]

Everywhere you turn these days, some research organization or another is cutting its spending forecast for 2009. The latest case in point is IDC, which is cutting its forecast for IT spending growth in 2009 from 5.9 percent growth to 2.6 percent growth. Similarly, the folks at Computer Economics, a research company based in Irvine, […]

Now that the new channel chief of IBMhas more than 100 days under his belt in the job, a relatively simple, yet profound, idea has started to take root. Like most channel chiefs, Rich Hume realizes that the whole business relationship between vendors and solution providers is overly complex. Hume attributes much of this complexity […]

It’s widely known that there isn’t always a lot of love between solution providers and telecommunications carriers. After all, carriers frequently abuse their ability to buy network gear in volume to undercut the prices of solution providers, they give solution providers a pittance of a fee for reselling their services and given half a chance […]

Right about now a lot of vendors that declined to create specific channel programs around managed service offerings should be kicking themselves.     As the economy continues to lose steam it is becoming pretty clear that managed services have a lot of counter cyclical economic potential. What creates that potential is the simple fact that […]

What would any Halloween be in the channel without considering some of the things in the channel that go bump in the night. Without further ado, here’s a list of 10 things that tend to scare the average solution provider executive these days: Managed Services: This may be one of the most profitable aspects of […]

Every where you go these days in the channel, you hear the same refrain from the vendors: we’re looking for a better class of partners. What that means is that most of them are not really all that interested in recruiting more partners in volume. Instead, what they really want to do is pick off […]

Everywhere you go these days someone is talking up the merits of cloud computing. But upon closer examination it becomes pretty clear that cloud computing is pretty much little more than a variation of the traditional hosted computing model. Instead of paying for a dedicated set of servers to run an application, the cloud computing […]