Recent Articles
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Charles Weaver: Managed Services’ Lobbyist
Not too long ago, Charles Weaver was the president of an organization preaching the gospel of the managed services business model on a lonely path to the few souls who would listen. Today that organization, the Managed Services Provider Alliance, boasts more than 300 member companies that now look to the alliance to not only…
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Alternative Technology’s Bill Botti: Bringing the Boutique to the Masses
Bill Botti has always taken distributor Alternative Technology’s name to heart. Since he took over as president seven years ago, Botti has come up with a number of creative ways to offer a distribution alternative to solution providers. For starters, Englewood, Colo., company carries a limited product line card, meticulously chosen with an eye to…
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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…