Recent Articles
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Oracle Shakes Up North American Sales
Reshuffling its North American sales organization is Oracle’s latest bid in an ongoing campaign to file down the teeth of its infamously carnivorous sales force. The campaign has taken on new urgency as the database giant seeks to digest its recent acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Retek without scaring off customers or partners. To wit, the…
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MS Patch Train Drops Off ‘Critical’ IE Fix
Microsoft on Tuesday released 10 advisories to cover a slew of security flaws in a range of products, including a “critical” cumulative update for the Internet Explorer browser. Three of the 10 bulletins are rated “critical,” the company’s highest severity rating. The IE fix, covered in MS MS05-025, corrects a remote code-execution vulnerability that exists…
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Suddenly, It’s a Lot Easier to Sell Managed Services
A year ago the typical VAR would require a fair amount of explanation and persuasion when being pitched on the merits of managed services. Not anymore, said Peter Sandiford, CEO of LPI Level Platforms Inc., an Ottawa-based provider of managed services software for VARs and integrators. “Everybody gets it,” he said “When we entered the…
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Channel Market Broadens for High Bandwidth
Like many sophisticated networking technologies, it has taken a while for 10-Gigabit Ethernet to become the market force analysts predicted when it debuted in 2002. It took more than three years for the U.S. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to certify a standard after 10GbE was proposed, and there still isn’t a standard for…
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VARs Must Protect Themselves Against Possible 2006 Downturn
While the IT spending outlook for the remainder of the year remains strong, concerns are growing about prospects for 2006. Forrester Research reported early this month that CIO confidence has dipped to the lowest level since the first quarter of 2004, which the research firm warns could translate into IT spending cuts. For the channel,…
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Automation: What’s Good for Customers Is Good for VARs
It’s tough to be a VAR in a competitive, low-margin world, so VARs have to constantly refine their business models to remain profitable. One approach, which many in the channel admit is underutilized, is to adopt the very notion VARs constantly pitch to customers: automate. That means taking customer orders and processing them electronically. But…
