Recent Articles
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Channel Programs Need to Be Designed for Solution Providers, Not Vendors
In age where product margins are increasingly razor thin, solution providers live and die by the value added services they provide. In that context, the products they are selling are a means to an end. But in order to deliver higher value services, solution providers have to create and deliver combination of products that enable…
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Cisco Preps Agent Model for WebEx
Cisco is gearing up to create a channel program to support its recently acquired WebEx business unit in the channel. The nature of WebEx, which provides collaboration software as an online service, will require Cisco to create an agent program to compensate partners that resell the service, said Edison Peres, Cisco vice president and chief…
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New Study Finds Channel Transforming Rapidly
An increasingly sophisticated approach to running their businesses seems to be taking hold among solution providers in the channel. According to an exclusive Solution Provider Business Practice survey of 273 solution providers conducted jointly by Ziff Davis Enterprise, publishers of Channel Insider and eWEEK, and the Crimson Consulting Group, which advises vendors on how to…
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In Search of Borderless Channels
The relationship between solution providers and the vendor community has always been a double-edged sword. Solution providers make their living from the simple fact that anything that has any real value to a customer requires the combination of multiple products from different vendors. But at the same time, the fact that vendors are not very…
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Let’s Keep Talking
As the government building campus of Beltrami County in northern Minnesota grew in recent years, so did the county’s IT and communications needs. So, three years ago, the county embarked on an ambitious modernization project, calling on solution provider Morris Electronics for the work. Morris Electronics, of Morris, Minn., tapped partners such as Tech Data…
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A Virtual World, for Real
Before the dot-com revolution came to a screeching halt, many IT company valuations hit the stratosphere. In some cases, even what were essentially virtual companies with no prospect of ever turning a profit could send investors swooning. You got the sense some folks believed all you really needed was a great idea, no matter how…
