Recent Articles
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IT Crunch Factor Has Bite
A lot of technology stories use the word “crunch.” Usually the crunch is a “coming crunch,” as in an expected shortage of IT workers, a financing crunch, or a crunch between user expectations (such as video and television on the Web) and the network’s ability to actually deliver the service. It seems there is a…
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Hammer Storage Pounds Out ‘Disruptive’ 1TB Appliance
Consumer/small-office storage vendor Hammer Storage on March 22 introduced a new appliance resembling a microwave oven that provides 1TB of data storage—for a retail price of $499. The appliance, called Myshare 1TB, is the first release in a new product line now being developed by Hammer, a division of Bell Microproducts. Myshare comes with two…
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SMBs Eye Managed Services
In some ways, computers were once the bane of Kelly Hood’s professional existence. In the office at Parrish Services, a Manassas, Va., plumbing, electrical, and heat and air-conditioning outfit, she was the first stop for employees with tech complaints, typically of the unanswerable variety—a computer kept locking up, a program wasn’t running correctly, a worker…
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Altiris and vPro to Reduce Management Pain
The Altiris Manageability Toolkit 6.0 for Intel vPro Technology should significantly reduce IT management costs in large organizations. Intel’s vPro technology, enabled by the company’s Core 2 Duo processors, allows management software such as Altiris’ to provide serverlike control over desktop systems. Leveraging vPro, the Altiris Manageability Toolkit 6.0 provides device discovery, hardware and software…
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Putting an End to Cronyism
One of the issues solution providers often have with vendors is that the local regional sales managers for any given vendor are essentially a force unto themselves, with almost absolute power concerning which partners get invited to participate in deals discovered by the vendor. On the other hand, one of the issues vendors have with…
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Channel Trends for 2007
North American vendors have had a very tumultuous relationship with the channel over the past decade. Some years the channel is the “preferred choice” for vendors in their growth initiatives and sales activities while other years selling direct takes priority. But one thing that doesn’t change is vendors’ ongoing process of redefining the indirect channel’s…
