Recent Articles
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Intel’s Shirley Turner: Engaging VARs for Solutions
Building bridges is part of Shirley Turner’s job, something she did effectively in 2006 as Intel’s director of North America channel marketing. When it comes time to educate distributors, system builders, integrators and VARs about Intel’s platform products, Turner is the one to call. But of those four groups, her work with VARs can be…
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N-able’s Mike Cullen: Fortifying MSPs
One particular difficulty VARs face in making the switch from reactive, break/fix shops to the proactive, fixed-fee model of managed services is setting their prices. Managed service providers fear pricing themselves out of the market or, worse, charging customers a fixed fee that falls short of their realized costs. “They just don’t know what to…
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HP’s John Thompson: Bringing Stability and Trust to HP’s Channel
At the start of 2006, Hewlett-Packard was recovering from a fratricidal war between the company and its solution providers that had many people wondering whether the company had the will to not only compete with Dell but even survive. But while storms raged all around HP, the one man who stayed calm in the center…
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Cisco’s Edison Peres: Putting Partners on the Profitability Path
Just about every vendor executive today is fond of lecturing solution providers about profitability and the need to evolve their business models, but few companies actually put any skin in the game to help make that happen. That’s what makes Edison Peres, vice president for advanced and core technologies for Cisco Systems, stand out in…
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Taylor Macdonald: Bringing Partners’ Support to the Front Lines
As one of the few executives in the industry who has actually walked a mile in the shoes of a solution provider, Taylor Macdonald not only empathizes with the solution provider partners of Sage Software, but he also comes up with programs to help them deal with the business issues they face. In his role…
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Tech Data Boosts SMB Credit Options
Distributor Tech Data has teamed with IBM Global financing to give VARs better access to large deals for small and midsize businesses without the accompanying cash flow crunch. The program leverages IBM’s Flexible Credit, which IGF (IBM Global Financing) launched in November. IBM wants to give VARs in the United States access to credit lines…
