Recent Articles
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Finding the MSP Path to Achieving Customer Control
Excelling at anything, especially when it comes to IT, is often a matter of discipline. Without a consistent, structured approach to managing IT costs inevitably rise. Worse yet, it becomes next to impossible to automate the delivery of IT services across multiple customers. And as every managed service provider (MSP) should know by now, custom…
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Dell Lays Bare OEM Ambitions
Rather than compete against commercial vendors many “white box” manufacturers shifted their focus to custom systems. As opposed to selling PCs and servers directly against Dell and Hewlett-Packard, they determined it was more profitable to build systems for specific vertical application areas such as healthcare. Of course, that’s a business that commercial vendors also covet,…
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Microsoft Lync Provides Unified Communications Momentum
There’s a war on for control over the future of unified communications. On one side there is the telecommunications community that tends to view unified communications as an extension of the PBX. Then we have Web-based entities that tend to view unified communications as a variation of a Web 2.0 application. And finally, there are…
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From Russia with Love for the Channel
There are a small number of fairly well-known companies that got their starts in Russia, including Parallels and Kaspersky Lab. Now The Skolkovo Foundation wants to help create even more by setting up shop in the U.S. to find business partners that will help take products that are being developed by 30 Russian start-up companies…
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HP Blue Carpet Partner Program Compensates Salespeople
There are very few things in the channel that are either all bad or all good and Special Incentive Investment Funds, otherwise known as SPIFFs, are no exception. The best thing about a SPIFF is that it gives sales people incentives to sell something. Like it or not, most sales activity is coin operated and…
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Redefining Channel Value in the Age of the Cloud
It’s tough to add any meaningful value when all your company really does is facilitate a transaction between customers and the vendors they want to do business with. Given the fairly limited set of services needed to support those transactions and the thin margins usually associated with reselling most products, solution providers need to start…