Recent Articles
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SAAS: Channel Friend or Foe?
The software-as-a-service model is likely to be tough terrain for solution providers to navigate, according to Gartner. At the market research company’s IT ChannelVision event in Palm Springs, Calif., Oct. 20-24, Ben Pring, research vice president of IT services, said, “The underlying principals of what is going on in the software market are not favorable…
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SMBs Are Sitting Ducks for Cyber-Crime
How’s this for a cyber-crime target: In most industrialized countries, SMBs make up 97 to 99 percent of all companies. Yet most of those small to midsize businesses have tiny IT groups, and most of those IT groups don’t have security expertise—heck, they don’t even have security policies to manage employees’ personal use of work…
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Dell’s Partner Portal Provides VAR Support
Dell told Channel Insider last Wednesday it will roll out a pilot deal registration program and an online partner portal for VARs. The plan emerged after the PC maker received extensive feedback the received from channel partners and customers. Though formal announcements about the Round Rock, Texas, vendor’s channel programs won’t come until the end…
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Microsoft Opens Fire Sale on Partner-Hosted CRM Live
Microsoft is dropping the price 40 percent on its CRM Live hosting for partners who host (and resell) its customer relationship management software, hoping to drive partner demand in a non-partner space. The new price, announced Oct. 23 at Microsoft’s annual Convergence conference, in Copenhagen, is $15 per month per user, dangerously low for competitors,…
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Don’t Be Too Paranoid To Partner
Paranoia. It’s an uncomfortable word and an unwanted trait. And yet the channel is brimming with it. There is paranoia about vendors going direct, there is paranoia about Dell going through the channel, there is paranoia over new technology such as SAAS (software as a service), and, most vitally, there is paranoia of other VARs.…
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Sears, CSC End Outsourcing Suit
Sears Holdings and the Computer Sciences Corp. ended a multi-year IT-outsourcing contract dispute on Oct. 22, with few details released, except perhaps the most meaningful one: Sears is paying CSC. “Sears and CSC have amicably settled their differences on mutually satisfactory terms, with Sears paying an undisclosed amount to CSC,” said the brief statement, issued…
