Recent Articles
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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…
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Mastering Your Own Cloud Computing Fate
As many solution providers continue to evolve into cloud service providers many of the server vendor relationships that many of them built their businesses on are being reevaluated. The primary reason this is happening is that if customers are buying a service they generally don’t care much about the specific IT infrastructure that enables it.…
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MSP Ecosystems Start to Come of Age
An interesting phenomenon is starting to take shape in the managed services category that has some long term implications for resellers in the channel. Managed service providers (MSPs) are increasingly partnering with software vendors to deliver more products as a service. For instance, instead of the customer buying backup and recovery software, the customer relies…