Recent Articles
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Planning for the Future: Consider the Possibilities
Nobody has enough salespeople. While that may not be how you thought this article would begin, it may indicate the reason why many current channel players will continue to survive and even thrive. At midyear, we are getting closer to the day when everyone will agree that standing up their own servers doesn’t make financial…
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Siebel Sees an Expanding IoT Role for the Channel
As the founder of a CRM application provider, Tom Siebel knows all too well how important the channel can be when it comes to building a company. Now Siebel, the founder and CEO of C3 IoT, a provider of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment optimized for internet of things (IoT) applications, is gearing up to dust…
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Meeting the Challenge of a Changing Channel Marketplace
“Never say ‘no’ to a customer” is advice that many sales managers have shared with their salespeople over the years. In the IT channel, however, this advice is often misconstrued, with challenging results. Dating back to the earliest days of the channel, when the key words were “value-add,” everybody wanted to do everything they could…
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Why Greenfield Cloud App Services Opportunities Matter
One of the major sources of contention between the channel and cloud applications providers is that because many of these vendors initially sold direct, they have substantial services arms that are often in conflict with their partners. This is a significant issue because, given the level of profits generated by selling SaaS applications, the only…
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HP Launches Channel Program for 3D Printers
With 3D printer technologies becoming robust enough to be used in a manufacturing process, HP is recruiting partners that have manufacturing expertise to drive adoption of 3D printers as an alternative to injection molding. “We want to lead the next industrial revolution, said Steve Nigro, president of the HP 3D Printing business unit. Until now,…
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Revenge of the Relational Database
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the rise of various types of database engines, collectively referred to as NoSQL databases. Regardless of whether it’s a Hadoop, key/value store or document database, they all support SQL queries in one form or another. That leads to one question: Are these database engines a passing fad…
