Recent Articles
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FOR ESP: Channel from Mars, Clients from Venus
It’s fascinating to conduct tandem studies where we ask the same questions of two different but related groups. That’s what we did with "Emerging Technologies: Channel versus CIOs," asking solution providers and (separately) their customers about adoption and use of emerging technologies. Tandem studies provide real insight into the differing worldviews of tightly-connected groups. And…
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Keep Pace with the Times
Judging by numbers alone, it looks as though the solution provider community became less relevant to IT vendors in 2007. If true, that would be shocking and scary. In 2007 allsigns pointed to strong indirect channel relationships. Vendors spent lots of money engaging and enabling solution provider partners, and the partners under went vast training.…
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No Guarantee of Success for Microsoft’s Hyper-V Virtualization
With the release to manufacturing of Hyper-V, Microsoft is hoping that Windows Server 2008 users will see the product as the de facto virtualization product for the enterprise. What’s more, Microsoft is looking to use Hyper-V as a catalyst for the expanded adoption of Windows Server 2008. While those accomplishments may be lofty goals, one…
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Cisco Partners to Enable Branch Offices with Virtualization
Looking to help partners take Cisco’s virtualized networking environment from its big customers down into their branch offices to enable applications from Microsoft Office Communications Server to Cisco’s Telepresence, Cisco has updated its WAAS offering, introduced new Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services, and announced a handful of other updates. "We are bringing…
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Top Software Vendor ISV Partner Programs Rated
While Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com each offer a channel program for ISV partners, not all programs are the alike, and partners should evaluate each carefully to find the best fit before they allocate their scarce resources to one or the other. A new study from Forrester Research called Choosing an ISV Partner Program…
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The Silver Lining Behind Rising Fuel Prices
Convincing customers to part with dollars to fund new IT projects is never easy, but every now and again there is a confluence of real world events that makes it a whole lot easier. Right now, two technologies that are coming as close as possible to selling themselves are unified communications and online file transfer…