Recent Articles
-
Hosted Apps Pick Up Steam
With major it players such as Cisco Systems and Google hard at work building productivity application beachheads on the Web, now is a good time for enterprises to evaluate the benefits of and drawbacks to deploying hosted office tools such as e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, documents, spreadsheets and databases in their infrastructure. Cisco, which picked…
-
Partnering Pays
VARs that work together make more money. That’s according to a new survey of members of the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners, conducted by market research firm IDC, that looked at partner-to-partner collaborations and found a key trend among VARs growing revenue—they collaborate. “There’s a whole body of research around network theory, and Metcalfe’s…
-
VARs, It’s Time to Modernize
It seems just about every week I get a pitch in my inbox for a new or improved tool to help VARs and integrators do their business better. This is worthy of notice because it wasn’t too long ago that channel companies by and large were suffering from the cobbler’s children syndrome. While they were…
-
Ingram Micro Buys Consumer Electronics Player
Ingram Micro signed a $96 million deal to acquire part of DBL Distributing Inc., a U.S. consumer electronics distributor. The IT technology distribution giant said the acquisition marked another step forward in its consumer electronics strategy and another sign the space between consumer and commercial technologies is thinning. “This strategy positions Ingram Micro at the…
-
The Great IT Management Paradox
Probably the single biggest challenge facing our industry today is that such a large percentage of customers’ IT budgets is taken up by the shear act of maintaining the systems they already have. This situation usually results in scenarios where the amount of money the customer has on hand to acquire new products and technologies,…
-
IBM, Nortel to Offer VOIP Apps for Small Businesses
Nortel and IBM are teaming up to launch an integrated suite of voice over IP and multimedia applications running on IBM’s System i server, which is popular with small and midsize enterprises. The integrated offering will turn System i servers into IP PBXes capable of supporting a mix of IP telephony applications and collaboration applications…
