August, 2011
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In the Cloud Era, Who Will the Customer Trust?
When a business chooses to move a technology process to the cloud, nothing really gets easier or cheaper; the time and effort is simply transferred somewhere else. In this case, the cloud subscriber has some more complexity to deal with in making the right decisions about how to choose and manage cloud and hosted services. [...]
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Taxing the Cloud
I found this article on The Press-Enterprise over the weekend, addressing the question of whether tax revenue is lost in the cloud. We wrote about this burgeoning issue back in April, predicting that the real battles hadn’t even begun yet. Today, tax authorities and companies are debating this issue. Fundamentally it comes down to one [...]
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If You Can’t Beat Him, Hire Him
In this piece from MacRumors.com last night, it’s reported that Apple has just hired 19-year-old Nicholas Allegra, AKA Comex, the hacker behind jailbreakme.com, which enables people to jailbreak iOS devices easily, as an Intern. Allegra’s techniques are described as “elegant” and he’s clearly very talented, though apparently modest. He was quoted by Forbes saying that [...]
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How Well Do You Know Your Clients, Really?
We talk a lot about being a Trusted Advisor. Many of us claim this title with our clients, but there seems to be some variation in terms of the definition of the term, among MSPs and VARs and vendors in the channel. Fundamentally, Trusted Advisor is about credibility – being perceived by the client as [...]
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Don’t miss our live webcast at 2pm EDT today “The Cloud-Readiness Evaluation”
Join your Editor Kate Hunt live at 2pm EDT for this week’s webcast: The Cloud-Readiness Evaluation What if there were an easy way to monetize your knowledge and expertise and strengthen your relationships with your clients (or build new ones) at the same time? What if you had one more great reason to sit down [...]
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Wait, I Don’t Have to Fly to Get to a Channel Event? Thanks, Autotask!
Something is wrong with this picture. It seems that I always have to get on an airplane to get to a channel event. But it’s true. Jay McBain revealed in our recent podcast on Consumerization of IT and the BYOD trend that the reason they chose to kick off the Autotask On Tour road show [...]
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Don’t Miss Our Live Webcast Tomorrow at 2pm EDT: The Cloud-Readiness Evaluation
Join your Editor Kate Hunt live tomorrow at 2pm EDT for this week’s webcast: The Cloud-Readiness Evaluation What if there were an easy way to monetize your knowledge and expertise and strengthen your relationships with your clients (or build new ones) at the same time? What if you had one more great reason to sit [...]
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Inside Out or Outside In?
Outsourcing? Out-tasking? Cloudsourcing? Insourcing? Here in the IT channel, we’re very good at squabbling over terminology. Put a bunch of passionate, intelligent people together with the same common goal and you’ll get some disagreements. It’s just a part of the game. Heck, some folks still haven’t buried their hatchets when it comes to the term [...]
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The Technology Is Not The Problem
People. Processes. Technology. By many accounts, these three elements comprise the holy trinity of IT services. Effective organizations implement and refine processes to ensure repeatable behaviors. Supporting those people and processes are technology tools to improve the efficiency of the people performing the processes. As so many of us in the VAR and MSP space [...]
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Credibility in the Sales Process
I think about sales a lot, of course, because selling is a huge part of what we do in the IT services industry. And today, my sales thinking is about credibility. What is credibility? Why does a sales person need it? Why does a customer or prospect care about it? Credibility is believability or trustworthiness. [...]
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HP Dropping the TouchPad…and its PC Business?
Yesterday Best Buy asked HP to take back about 200,000 unsold TouchPads that are “taking up shelf space” after disappointing sales. Even with deep discounts, they’ve only moved about 25,000 units since TouchPad’s release in July. To make matters worse, the word is that Best Buy’s not the only retailer reporting lousy sales of the [...]
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Don’t Miss Our Live Webcast Today at 2pm EDT “Consulting in the Cloud Era: Less Rowing, More Steering”
Consulting in the Cloud Age: Less Rowing, More Steering Our revenue model as VARs and MSPs is being turned on its head. A lot of us are accustomed to giving away the advice (calling it “pre-sales consulting”) about what technology solutions our clients should use because we make margins on some other part of the [...]
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HP’s “OuchPad” Fail: Why Nobody Can Touch iPad
Today’s top story: Best Buy is asking HP to take back about 200,000 unsold TouchPads that are “taking up shelf space” after disappointing sales. Even with deep discounts, they’ve only moved about 25,000 units since its release in July. To make matters worse, the word is that Best Buy’s not the only retailer reporting lousy [...]
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This Week’s Weather Report Podcast: What Consumerization of IT and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Really Mean For The Future of The Channel
Consumerization of IT. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). These are big ideas, and certainly not terms that are new to you by now. People are using their own devices for work purposes – specifically tablets and smartphones. And from today into tomorrow, people will have even more IP enabled devices that they’ll want to put [...]
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Carrying the Torch for Business Transformation: Credit Where Credit is Due
OR “Everything Old Is New Again” Yesterday I had a long conversation with a really awesome Public Relations expert who works in our channel. I’ll leave her name out of this article, out of respect for her brand, but it quickly became apparent that she and I share a similar view of the vendor-solution provider [...]
