Recent Articles
-
VARs Tap SmartSource for Technical Skills
Keeping people with the right technical skills on staff and having enough work to extract the full value out of those skills is a delicate balance for solution providers. Increasingly, VARs, integrators and IT service providers turn to independent contractors to temporarily hire workers with the skills as they need them, partnering with firms such…
-
Lexmark Takes a Step Toward Hardware as a Service
Printer repair companies may have been among the earliest service providers in business IT. They were also among the earliest practitioners of hardware leasing (not accounting for Bell Operating Companies). So it’s no surprise that the first significant attempt at hardware as part of a managed service would come from the printing industry. Document management…
-
Distributors Fit for Managed Services
As channel companies continue to march toward managed services and utility computing, some have questioned the role of distributors, which traditionally has been to configure and ship hardware and software to customers. Where does the “configure and ship” model fit if the solution is delivered remotely and configured continuously? Not surprisingly, distributors are hunting for…
-
Microsoft to Patch Critical Security Glitches
Windows systems administrators will get a handful of patches by Microsoft as part of its scheduled April 11 security update. In all, the software maker said it is planning to address four Windows security glitches rated as critical, the company’s highest severity rating, while it will also distribute a patch to fix a moderate security…
-
Cisco Reports Critical Vulnerability
Cisco Systems has warned its customers about a handful of security vulnerabilities in one of its networking hardware product lines that researchers said could leave the devices open to attack. The networking giant reported the presence of five individual flaws in its Cisco Optical Networking System 15000 Series in a bulletin issued to customers. Cisco…
-
Avnet Teams with IBM, Novell to Encourage Linux in SMBs
Distributor Avnet has parceled together a pair of Linux stacks for the small and midsize business market, with support from IBM and Novell, with an eye to introducing the open-source operating system to first-time users. The bundled solutions, “Integrated Stack for Linux,” in enterprise infrastructure solution and Web application and database solution versions, are designed…
