Recent Articles
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Distribution Comes of Age in the Cloud
As a vehicle through which IT products have been acquired and ultimately delivered to end customers, distributors have long played a pivotal role in the channel. With the rise of cloud computing, the way IT products are consumed is fundamentally changing. Those changes, however, are not so much eliminating the need for distributors as much…
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Ingram to Acquire Odin Service Automation Platform
Ingram Micro to Acquire Odin Service Automation Platform Ingram Micro will acquire certain assets from Parallels Holdings Ltd., a provider of commercial cloud management platform technologies, connectors, billing systems and professional services. Under the terms of the transaction, Ingram Micro will acquire the Parallels Odin Service Automation platform along with associated cloud management technologies, intellectual property…
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Channel Marketing Requires Pleasant Persistence
“I threw $10,000 out on that last marketing event,” complained one VAR owner to another. “I got absolutely nothing out of it.” The other VAR owner looked at him and asked, “What was your last marketing activity before this event?” The first owner thought for a moment. “About a year ago, we sent out a…
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New Ways to Solve Channel Management Complexities
By Michael Kerman OK, I’ll admit it—I love trees. This summer, I went camping for the first time in years. I forgot how much I love the sight of the tree canopy against the blue sky, providing deep shade even at midday, and the giant cedar towering over tiny saplings, each trying to become the…
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The Coming of the Hybrid Cloud
For all intents and purposes, applications and IT infrastructure dominated the first two phases of cloud computing. Arguably, the first cloud applications were software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps that evolved into platforms. Then came infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), that over the last 10 years transformed how IT organizations think about servers, storage…
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The Changing Landscape of IT Distribution
In the beginning, there were aggregators, and manufacturers who saw that buying could be consolidated said, “This is good.” This was long before the emergence of the cloud and other modern-day products and services that would reshape the distribution landscape. Back in the 1980s, the early days of the IBM PC, Compaq, Apple and other…
