Recent Articles
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IBM Opens Up PureSystems Pattern Recognition Software to Partners
As part of an effort to accelerate adoption of a recently unveiled family of pre-integrated IBM PureSystems platforms that can be optimized to support different types of application workloads, IBM today announced it is making available a new tool that will allow solution providers and their customers to optimize the performance of custom application workloads…
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The Evolving Role of Solution Providers in the Age of the Cloud
There’s a lot concern these days about the profitability of managed service providers (MSPs). Like any product once a service becomes a discrete item that customers can purchase it becomes subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Most MSPs in the last few years have learned this lesson in the last few years the hard…
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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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Sales Management Rapidly Becoming More Science than Art
Sales management in the channel is more mysterious art than science. But as predictive analytics software continues to evolve additional light will soon be shone into one of the darkest corners of the channel. IBM recently moved to acquire a provider of an analytics application that has been specifically developed to address the challenges associated…
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Intel Gives MSPs a Small Business Advantage
One of the more frustrating aspects of IT from the perspective of solution providers in channel is the number of potential customers that don’t use their services. Customers complain all the time about how systems are difficult to manage. At the same time, there’s obviously no shortage of solution providers more than willing to help.…