Recent Articles
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Direct Is Not Religion, Says Dell
It’s a pretty amazing thing when Michael Dell begins circulating an internal company memo that encourages employees to rethink the company’s strategy to the point where Dell may even embrace the channel. For those of you who didn’t get the memo, Michael Dell told his company’s employees that the direct sales model is not a…
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Whither Microsoft’s ‘Big Bang’?
The April 25 release of a feature-complete Windows Server “Longhorn” beta is a monumental milestone for Microsoft, perhaps more important than the launch of Windows Vista. As the nucleus of Microsoft’s enterprise product strategy, Longhorn will likely pull deployments of other products, including Vista. However, uncertainty about the release of the first Vista service pack…
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6 Habits of Top I.T. Groups: A Consultant’s List
Advanced I.T. organizations make “aggressive” use of technologies that support a service-oriented mindset and are devoting more time to implementing industry best practices, according to research from Ovum Summit. The Boston-based consulting firm interviewed 300 technology managers and identified six things that the most effective technology departments do, starting with making sure their I.T. projects…
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IBM Takes Web 2.0 to Partners
Looking to bring the benefits of Web 2.0 and social networking to the commercial side, IBM is rolling out its own entry, Lotus Connections. The Armonk, N.Y., company announced the program and other social networking initiatives for its partners at its Partner World Summit in St. Louis April 30. Described by IBM as embodying the…
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Eclipse of Reason: Sun’s Channel Misstep
Sun’s pricing debacle in April points to a weakness in the structural setup of a good number of IT vendors, even those commonly perceived as “channel friendly.” The weakness results from lack of communication between a vendor’s channel-focused employees and those who work on the direct side of the business. Unless the vendor does 100…
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Sun Cuts In Partners
Four days after it initiated a sales promotion that offered deep discounts directly to customers on some of its major products, Sun Microsystems is making changes to the program to quell cries of channel conflict from partners. VARs told Sun that the promotion was undermining deals they had underway with customers, the company said in…
