Recent Articles
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Groucho Marx and the Potential Decline of the Channel
The redoubtable Groucho Marx once said that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member. That sarcastic one line kind of sums up the state of recruiting these days in the channel as vendors and solution providers alike continue to be a lot more selective about who they will and won’t…
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AMD Ramps Up Platform Stability Program
Doubling the number of platforms available to partners through its AMD Validated Solutions program, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the addition to its lineup of four platforms based on the new AMD 690G chip set. The AVS program guarantees the stability of a platform for 15 months, meaning no changes to the configurations, driver requirements…
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Redmond Takes Closer Look at Who is Influencing Sales
Looking to eventually reward smaller VARs for their sales influence with Microsoft customers, the software giant this week unveiled a new program called the U.S. Influence Revenue Model. The program is designed to capture data about which of the smaller Microsoft VARs is doing a good job of selling Microsoft products and services. Microsoft doesn’t…
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The Mac’s Stealthy Return into the Enterprise
Believe it or not, prior to the great PC purges of the middle 1990s, the Macintosh was an enterprise computer. It’s the truth. In bygone days, a good number of corporations and academic sites did all their desktop computing on the Mac, purchase orders were cut for thousands of Macs at a time, and Apple…
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How Not to Introduce Your Channel Chief
Adrian who? That pretty much summarizes how channel partners have reacted to Hewlett-Packard’s appointment of Adrian Jones as its new channel chief. And who can blame them? Few partners have ever heard of the man, who comes to HP from storage vendor McData, and HP seemed to go out of its way to keep the…
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Sample RFP: Tablet PCs
While tablet PCs have yet to really take off, Microsoft’s decision to incorporate tablet PC features and functionality into its Windows Vista operating system changes everything. Now, instead of having to manage a separate operating system just for tablet PCs, IT managers will be able to manage just one. Of course, this means nothing if…
