Recent Articles
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Analytics Applications Emerge as Next Big Thing in IT
On the plus side IBM is convinced that the combination of Big Data and analytics application software is laying the foundation for a major economic expansion. On the downside, prospective customers are a little short on analytics expertise and most IT organizations are still not familiar with Big Data technologies such as Hadoop. IBM is…