Recent Articles
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Reinventing Cloud Storage with a Little Help from the Channel
There’s obviously a lot of interest in cloud storage these days, but actual usage of cloud storage has not been as popular as most solution providers in the channel might like. The reason for this is that most customers are not very disciplined about backup and recovery as a process, In addition, many customers can’t…
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Unified Storage Drives New Enterprise Opportunities
There’s a tendency to think of the enterprise as one massive entity. In reality, an enterprise is much like the average city, which is usually made up a series of neighborhoods that share access to common services. Similarly, most enterprise IT organizations are an amalgamation of divisional systems that ideally should depend on a common…
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MSPs Need to Focus More on Providing Strategic Value
For many managed service providers (MSPs) the difference between winning and losing new business often comes down to whether they can convince customers that they can provide a higher level of service than the internal IT department. The challenge, of course, has been actually proving that on a regular basis. With the release of version…
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The Open Source Challenge in the Channel
One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations. That…
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Time to Dismantle the Channel Welfare State
There’s a lot of discontent these days with the state of the channel that largely stems from some of the very core economic theories that the channel is based on. The root of the problem that many companies have with the channel as it currently exists is that channel chiefs routinely struggle with the number…