Recent Articles
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FCC Adds VOIP to Universal Service Fund
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on June 21 approved two changes in Universal Service Fund charges for carriers. The first was to change the “Safe Harbor” percentage for wireless carriers from 28.5 percent to 37.1 percent. The second was to require VOIP (voice over IP) carriers to contribute to the USF with a “Safe Harbor”…
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HP to Boost Channel Spending, Raise Margins
Hewlett-Packard this year is increasing channel incentives by more than 50 percent on some strategic product lines and bumping its channel spending by 20 percent, executives revealed June 20 at HP’s Americas Partner Conference in Las Vegas. The increased incentives, available for the second half of the fiscal year, apply to the industry-standard server business—including…
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IBM’s Contract Process Goes Paperless
Managing the paperwork involved in closing IT sales costs channel partners time and money, especially if the deal involves a behemoth such as IBM. With that in mind, IBM has gone paperless. Starting June 19, the vendor is making it possible for partners to manage any type of contract required for product sales and services…
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Open-Source Message Queuing Protocol Set for Launch
A group of leading user companies, vendors and other organizations plans to launch an open message queuing protocol that will enable users to create systems that compete with or replace proprietary technology. On June 20, a group including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Iona Technologies, Red Hat, the Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards Team (TWIST, a European…
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Managed Services Acquisitions Are Coming
As a handful of SilverBack Technologies partners have demonstrated, there is money to be made in managed services. Big money, relatively speaking, if you do it right. The managed services platform vendor, based in Billerica, Mass., recently honored eight of its partners for hitting the $10 million annual revenue mark. And the vendor says it…
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Microsoft Forms Interoperabilty Council
BOSTON—Hot on the heels of revelations that it is reaching out to the open-source community to find ways of interoperating with software licensed under the GPL, Microsoft announced on June 14 that it has formed an Interoperability Customer Executive Council. The goal of the group is to identify areas for improved interoperability across not just…
