Recent Articles
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SAAS or On-Premise E-mail: Which is Best?
No application has succeeded in superseding e-mail as the killer app of modern business. While few people think of e-mail as being a business-enabling tool, few people would want to run their business without persistent access to digital messages from employees, contractors, suppliers, partners and—most of all—customers. Microsoft Exchange has long held the dominant title…
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Cisco’s Daunting SMB Challenge
Cisco Systems, the IT networking giant, continues to expand and strive to dominate new markets. In this case, the market isn’t new, but the degree of financial investment and product portfolio is. The company has had a “commercial” products division for years with products and partnerships aimed at the SMB market. Historically, SMB really meant…
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Delivering on the Managed Services Promise
In four years of writing about managed services, I have often pondered what fulfillment of the promise of this business model will look like. Today managed services get a lot of good press. You could say the model has been elevated to messianic levels as a kind of savior for a channel that faces declining…
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Dell Sets Channel Program Team, Plans Global Initiatives
Dell’s corporate reorganization around customer segments will standardize channel organization tools and infrastructure for Dell globally, looking to pull from best practices in each of the company’s regions. For example, Dell’s North American direct sales and channel deal registration have been operated on the Salesforce.com platform, but the European operations have used a tool that…
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Good Enough Considering
As the recession took root, I started thinking about how economic downturns were really turning points in value propositions. As industries fall, new ones rise to take their place and spur the next epoch in propriety. The tech industry is one of those rare verticals that will never really go away, since it reinvents itself…
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FileMaker Resuscitates Database Market with Pro 10
There was a time when the PC market was filled with database vendors pitching their various products. Names like Dbase, FoxPro, Paradox and Clarion were all the rage when it came to relational databases, simply because those products helped to legitimize the PC for business use. Most of those vendors have faded into the past,…
