Recent Articles
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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…
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The Evolution of the Channel in an Era of Cloud Ecosystems
Cloud computing is changing the relationship between vendors and the channel is many ways. But none is more profound then when a vendor decides to not only build their own cloud, but also try to build its own channel ecosystem around that cloud. Of all the cloud initiatives in the market today one of the…
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The Long March towards Federated Unified Communications in the Cloud
While unified communications is an area that has held much promise for the channel, turning that potential in major new business opportunities has been something of a challenge. Not only is there a lot of internal customer politics to navigate as teams of IT and telecommunications people battle for control of unified communications, customers are…
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New Accounting Rules May Limit Usage of Hosting and Public Cloud Services
One of the major customer benefits associated with moving application workloads to either a public cloud or managed hosting environment is that it turns IT into an operating expense that makes their balance sheets look a lot better to investors. But over the next couple of years there are new accounting rules that may soon…
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Making Sense of Desktop Virtualization
More than a few IT organizations have made the plunge into desktop virtualization only to discover that this latest IT cure can easily wind up being worse than the disease. The issues that many of solution providers wind up confronting range from the fact that the costs associated with implementing certain types of desktop virtualization…
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Virtual Appliances Simplify Shift into Cloud Storage
Most IT organizations are not particularly good at managing data or, for that matter, IT in general. Not only is there a lot of redundant data strewn all across the enterprise; a lot of data that isn’t particularly important winds up clogging up expensive primary storage systems. Obviously, this creates an opportunity for solution providers…