October, 2011
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Rain Makers, The Weather Report
ChannelEyes Channel Partners Speak…But What Are They Saying?
Since its “early access” launch earlier this month, ChannelEyes has seen a sharp demand from both sides of the vendor and supplier sides of our IT channel. With about 35% of the signups coming from the vendor community, the community is shaping up to give the solution provider a strong voice. The message being received [...]
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HP: Keeping PC Division After All
Back in August, HP’s then-CEO Leo Apotheker surprised nearly everyone by announcing, along with the demise of its TouchPad tablet, that HP intended to “spin off” its Personal Systems Group (PSG), which accounts for a solid third of the company’s revenue. Analysts searched for reasons behind this intention. Some folks found that shedding the PC [...]
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Remember What You’re Here For
I came across a particular this blog this week, called “The Coffeeshop Fallacy” on thestartuptoolkit.com, that sort of haunted me after I read it. Basically the point of the blog was to remember that there’s a difference between caring a lot about doing something, and caring a lot about running a business that does that [...]
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How Cloud Box From Equus Makes It Easy For You To Deliver Affordable Business Continuity
Selling Business Continuity and backup/disaster recovery (BDR) solutions to our SMB clients can be a challenge. Upfront costs can be high, deployment complicated, and ongoing management laborious. As the client’s data inevitably grows over time, the complexities of managing per-unit storage fees and hardware and software and licensing can be daunting, costly, and confusing for [...]
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Three Things I’ll Be Watching For At IT Nation 2011
Each year Connectwise, the PSA software maker, hosts one of the channel’s biggest and most-talked-about events: IT Nation. Part user conference, part channel event, and part awesome party, the event hasn’t failed to impress in its 6 years running. This year’s event is coming up, November 9th-11th, in Orlando, Florida. Expectations and buzz are running [...]
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Why You Don’t Want to be the Technology Doctor
Just about everyone who’s ever sold understands what a “pain point” is. We’ve heard it said, described, and explained in a million different ways, and it has become a core concept to the sales process, specifically to the services sales process. Here’s the general idea: Technology has no inherent value. It is only valuable to [...]
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Two and A Half Marketing Lessons From The Neiman Marcus Christmas Book
You’ve probably heard of The Neiman Marcus Christmas Book – each year the luxury retailer publishes a selection of extravagant, expensive and unique holiday gifts, along with some less expensive items, too. The 2011 edition was just released this week. Google Catalogs is offering it along with a Fantasy Gifts Retrospective. One of this year’s [...]
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Where Are All The Cloud Supporters?
Today Redmond Channel Partner magazine asked the question: where did all the cloud supporters go? The question is based on the “tepid” interest in cloud-oriented topics reported by SMB Nation founder Harry Brelsford from attendees of this year’s SMB Nation Fall conference. The event was held in Las Vegas at the end of September. Not [...]
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Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich: Toning Down the “Geeky Nerd Quotient”
The official announcement broke yesterday that the highly anticipated Android 4.0 mobile operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, is coming in November. This year there’s been an awful lot of talk about Android’s tablet version, dubbed Honeycomb, and mixed reviews, that are rubbing off on the Ice Cream Sandwich effort. Yesterday Matias Duarte, Android’s head of [...]
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Gartner: Tomorrow’s Cloud Brokerages Will “Re-imagine Business”
The 2011 Gartner Symposium/IT Expo opened yesterday in Orlando, and the stalwart industry analyst firm offers its usual wealth of information, particularly about what it’s calling “the post-modern business” and the impact that Cloud Computing will have on it. This was a big topic in the opening keynotes. Here’s the oversimplified version: most people don’t [...]
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The Aftermath of Last Week’s BlackBerry Outage: Sausage-Eating Contests and Traffic Accidents in Abu Dhabi?
It hit the news last Monday that BlackBerry service outages were affecting users in South America, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Then, when the outages began to affect North American users as well, RIM responded and acknowledged a “core switch failure” behind the outages. Services were restored in full last Thursday. Maybe some folks [...]
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Now That the Deal is Closed, What Can We Expect from Microsoft and Skype?
Back in May we reported that Microsoft agreed to pay $8.5 billion cash to acquire Skype from eBay, investors, and the company’s founders. At the end of last week, the companies received their last key regulatory approvals and have closed the deal. Skype will operate as a division of Microsoft – at least initially – [...]
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Failure IS An Option: Innovation In The Cloud
Everybody knows that business thrives on innovation. We’re technologists; we in this industry may know it better than anyone else. We also know that with innovation come two necessary evils: risk and cost. Both tend to be quite high when it comes to the uncharted territory of new ideas – a lot of expenses and [...]
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Register Now For This Week’s Live Webcast “Four Important Questions to Ask Every Client”
How well do you know your clients, really? Do you just understand how their IT works, or do you also understand the purpose that IT serves for the business itself? More importantly, why is the business part is more important than the IT part? Join your editor, Kate Hunt, for this session to uncover four [...]
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Why I’m Not Making A Big Deal About This Week’s BlackBerry Outages
It hit the news Monday that BlackBerry service outages were affecting users in South America and Europe. Then, yesterday and today, when the outages began to affect North American users as well, RIM responded and acknowledged a “core switch failure” behind the outages. Perhaps some folks are wondering why we haven’t made a bigger deal [...]
