Recent Articles
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Sales Management Rapidly Becoming More Science than Art
Sales management in the channel is more mysterious art than science. But as predictive analytics software continues to evolve additional light will soon be shone into one of the darkest corners of the channel. IBM recently moved to acquire a provider of an analytics application that has been specifically developed to address the challenges associated…
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Pressure to Take Sides in Virtualization Wars Starts to Mount
There is no shortage of virtual machine platforms these days, but from a market perspective the dominant three are VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. What’s still a little unclear at this point is to what degree are solution providers going to need to support all three platforms. In general, the Citrix Xen platform tends to be…
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Reinventing the Way Modern Organizations Work
There’s a lot of interest in changing the way organizations work these days. A lot of this effort is an outgrowth of a “consumerization of IT” phenomenon that is allowing end users to increasingly define not only how they want to work, but what tools they want to use. On one level this is incredibly…
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The Unfulfilled Potential of CRM Software in the Channel
Given all the noise that has been generated about customer relationship management (CRM) software over the years, solution providers in the channel could be forgiven for assuming the CRM market is pretty well saturated by now. In reality, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin says that 60 percent of organizations today don’t have a CRM in place…
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The Path of Least Channel Resistance to the Cloud
Every time there is a major disruption in computing models the impact on business models in the channel is profound. The ongoing shift to cloud computing is no exception. At this point it’s not really a question of whether solution providers will be participating in the cloud, but rather finding the least disruptive approach to…
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The Many Faces of WAN Optimization
The history of opportunity for solution providers in the channel is very closely tied to bottlenecks. Almost any time there is an impedance mismatch between storage, servers and the network it creates a limited IT resource that needs to be optimized. Today the resource that is most limited is the wide area network (WAN). While…