Steve Wexler

A new global SMB study from Microsoft shows that IT is definitely a business enabler, helping to drive higher revenues, and that the hosted services segment is growing much more rapidly than the classic channel model. "If they’re a [classic VAR] not thinking about hosted solutions, that’s something they should be doing," says Elliot Curtis, […]

Businesses Get Serious About Social Software Lines Blur Between Social Networking And E-mail E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities. Gartner expects to see steep growth rates for sales of premises and cloud-based social networking services. E-mail won’t disappear, but by 2014, social […]

According to the latest numbers, data deduplication is one of the hottest technology segments, and it’s only going to get hotter, according to a new study from TheInfoPro that found that the majority of large organizations believe deduplication will have the greatest impact on their storage architectures. Providing further evidence of dedupe’s momentum, EMC, a […]

Eighteen months ago HP launched a self-contained portable data center to address customers with limited space and/or budgets looking to expand their IT capabilities. Just add the IT products and services and you had a ready-to-run IT facility in a forty-foot container. This week the company expanded its POD (Performance-Optimized Datacenter) line with a 20-foot […]

Hitachi Data Systems isn’t the first storage vendor (i.e. NetApp and 3Par) to come out with a guarantee, but it is arguably the first to offer to pay customers if they don’t reduce their storage capacity by 50 percent or more by using Hitachi virtualization technologies. There are some qualifiers, says Joe Jose, Senior Product […]

Next week Continuity Software will introduce the latest release of its disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) management solution. RecoverGuard version 5.0 (v5.0) features a number of new capabilities and enhancements in the areas of service level agreement (SLA) management, cluster support, the graphical user interface (GUI), HA/DR risk detection, configuration management database (CMDB) […]

SMB Trends The Channel Needs To Know   No Title SMBs Ready To SpendThere were signs last quarter that SMBs were releasing pent-up Information and Collaboration Technology (ICT) demand and AMI expects they will tentatively transition out of survival mode and focus on opportunities for business expansion.Key priorities include enhancing existing customer relationships, improving business […]

Like most everybody in and around the IT industry I’ve been following the hoopla leading up to this week’s launch of the Apple iPad with great fascination. Would the inventor of the iPod and iPhone and the company that successfully commercialized the graphical user interface and mouse originally invented by Xerox, finally give the tablet […]

Despite its off-and-on-again relationship with the channel, it wasn’t until two years ago that Dell got its first real channel business when it bought EqualLogic, acquiring an iSCSI storage line and a channel-only business model. Celebrating its second anniversary with the company that’s slowly branching out from its direct roots, the EqualLogic business unit has […]

Just over a year ago Cisco  fired a bold shot across the data center market with its Project California initiative and its intent to enter the server market. Following various product announcements and sweeping realignments by competitors like HP and Brocade, Cisco created a new alliance called the Virtual Computing Environment coalition with VMware and […]

The channel could be one of the big winners of the new and improved security portfolio HP is launching, The integrated security services portfolio, called HP Security, Compliance and Continuity Services, brings together more than 90 different security offerings that enable HP to offer security solutions that span from the desktop and printers to the […]

Announced last February, IBM has officially rolled out its Software Value Plus skills initiative, switching from a largely open-source distribution model to a hybrid model, where certain products will only be available to authorized partners. As a carrot, the IBM Software initiative includes: passing on midmarket sales leads valued below $50,000; delivering new cloud computing […]