Recent Articles
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Making Channel Promotions Work Better
For most channel partners, admitting that you compete on price is almost like confessing sin. Most channel “coaches” implore partners to avoid such behavior. The reality is that helping clients take the best advantage of current manufacturer and software provider promotions has long been a competitive advantage for the best integrators in our industry. Licensing…
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Acquisition of Ingram Micro Draws Intense Scrutiny
The IT channel in the United States just got a startling reminder of how truly global the economy has become with the acquisition of Ingram Micro by a $90 billion Chinese conglomerate. The Tianjin Tianhau Investment Co., an arm of HNA Group, a multinational company with interests in a number of shipping companies and an…
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Revenge of the Hyperconverged On-Premise Server
Much of the attraction of public cloud services can be attributed to how comparatively simple it is to spin up and then manage virtual machines. In contrast, much of the management of on-premise systems is downright manual. For that reason, interest in the rise of software-defined data centers is high, even though actual adoption of…
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Making Sense of IT Perceptions and Realities
IT strategy Making Sense of IT Perceptions and Realities Solution providers should not only be aware of what customers perceive as their IT challenges but also understand what their actual operations issues are. Major Business Challenges Top challenges included standardizing and streamlining business processes (34%), too many manual processes (33%) and keeping up with demand…
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Should Solution Providers Have Blogs? It Depends
A lot of companies in the channel wonder if they should have a blog. The question really is not whether they should have a blog. The real questions are as follows: –What are they going to do to drive traffic to the blogs? –How are they going to integrate the blogs into the rest of…
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Channel Growth Rate Remains Slow but Steady
At a time when there’s a lot of uncertainty concerning the global economy, the IT channel can take some comfort in the fact that not only did it grow in 2015, but it’s also expected to grow again this year. Despite a downturn in global IT spending in 2015, for the fourth consecutive year U.S.…
