Recent Articles
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Marketing Chutzpah
One of the most valuable pieces of wisdom solution providers pitching managed services to IT managers should adhere to is to avoid promoting the services as a replacement for IT staff. For obvious reasons. Equally obvious should be the realization that pitching a news release to reporters with the following headline doesn’t make a hell…
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Google Postini Offers Web Security at $36 a Year; AMD Boxes Can’t Handle Windows XP SP3, more…
Google’s Postini group strikes again. Many VARs felt blindsided by the group’s radical price cuts earlier this year. And now the Postini Group has added web security to protect networks, priced at $36 per user per year, according to eWEEK. Google Web Security for Enterprise also enforces IT policies at the user, workgroup or company…
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Victims of Success: VARs Must Go Beyond Basic Virtualization
Blame VMware. Where once VARs had to hard-sell users on virtualization, today the technology is almost universally regarded as beneficial. VMware and other pioneers pushed virtualization into the mainstream claiming it addresses the needs of all customers in all markets. Everyone has too many servers, too little space and is using too much power. The…
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Best Buy Makes Smart Call in Europe
The move by Best Buy to acquire half of the Carphone Warehouse–a European phone retailer–may look like a strange one. After all, the markets are not much better over there, and the mobile phone market is just as saturated; plus, they are rivals already entrenched with big brands in their respective regions. But the move…
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Making Your Marketing Dollars Go 20 Times Further
How can you get the most bang for your marketing dollar? If you are a Hewlett-Packard partner you may get your big chance to maximize your marketing investment this month. The company is bringing back phase 4 of its Co-Marketing program. The program calls for HP partners to contribute money, to which HP adds 15…
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Hey VAR, You Workin` My Side of the Street?
I’m not old enough to be this old school. The truth is, I’ve worked in the technology trade press longer than I’ve done anything else in my life, but I still don’t trust reporters who don’t have a requisite number of car wrecks and house fires and lost kids and city council meetings in their…