February, 2013
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Gambling on New Vendors
The IT industry sees many new vendors come and go. There are great ideas and must have solutions, but taking a chance on a new industry vendor can sometimes be a gamble. If you are like me you love a good story. Company sees a need, builds a solution, fixes a problem, sees an opportunity [...]
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Are you on the List? Channel Choice Nominations End Today
Are you on the list? We have extended the nomination period for the Looks Cloudy Channel Choice Awards until Monday March 4th, time is running out to be recognized with your peers. The list so far represents a wide range of influential MSP’s, IT Solution Providers, Vendors, and Consultants. Check to see if you [...]
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Microsoft IE10 for Windows7 Hits the Market
The latest release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, IE10 has been released. This new version claims to be 20% faster than IE9 and brings with it new compatibilities for web standards. The release, which has some users leery given its coordinated release with an IE10 Blocker Toolkit by Microsoft, is set to roll out via [...]
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Copyright Alert System Going into Affect
For those that frequent, or even casually download material from peer to peer networks, a new system announced might finally be the deterrence needed to keep users from sharing copyrighted materials. The new system aptly named the “Copyright Alert System” allows copyright holders and associated groups to report violations directly to participating Internet service providers. [...]
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Does being loyal mean you can’t look, talk, or touch?
Having a loyal customer to their brand, solution, service or company is the wholly grail achievement for any vendor. It goes without saying that there are people that will go down with any ship or stand by a product through thick and thin based on their loyalty. In a world that seems to constantly evolve [...]
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The Conference Season has commenced
This week we are headed to the first of the ASCII series of conferences. The first conference, which is being held in Dana Point, California, just outside of Los Angeles, is the kick off to the conference season and promises to be educational and fun. Conferences and paid workshops are a great way to provide [...]
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Microsoft is merging more Products
Microsoft has made some bold moves as of late and has been merging and converting customers from their messenger platform to Skype, forcing all users to abandon their familiar chat and messaging solution. Well it doesn’t look like Microsoft is stopping there. The Redmond Company has similar plans for a number of products. Users including [...]
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Is CSP the new MSP?
MSP or “Managed Service Provider” has been around for some time now and has become “the” term to use for IT companies, replacing the outdated term VAR or “Value Added Reseller.” Recently there has been a shift in the way IT businesses, media outlets, and industry experts describe IT companies. Names such as IT Solution [...]
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Friday Confessional
Well if you know me very well or you read my articles, you may have gotten the feeling that I am not the biggest Microsoft fan. Though Microsoft has been a big part of my life in technology, especially having worked for a number of hardware companies and now software, they have held for me [...]
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Are BDR’s so 2010?
The BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) device has been a standard solution for many MSP’s for a number of years. As hardware based server installations have begun to decline for businesses that are seeing the value in cloud based solutions, and as Microsoft has shifted their strategies from hardware to the cloud, the question this [...]
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The Key to Growing your Business
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a magical way to grow your business? Plant a seed and watch it grow, climb the beanstalk and collect your gold? Unfortunately this is not the case, growing a business takes hard work, dedication, experience, and patience. The reality is there are many “giants” out there looking to [...]
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Collaborating in the Cloud
How Cloud Technology Helps Marketing Professionals Maximize Their Time and Performance by Gina Smith I can still remember the good old days working in marketing and public relations. There was no such thing as a “personal” schedule. My office schedule was set according to my clients needs. Times have drastically changed. Gone are the days [...]
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Where are MSP’s with Selling VoiP?
There was a ton of buzz a few years back with the movement of MSP’s and IT solution providers getting into selling and managing VoiP solutions. This excitement had many companies looking to expand their offering with what seemed like a natural addition to the solution stack. Dedicated hardware with great upsell opportunities was a [...]
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Microsoft goes to War with Google with “Scroogled” Campaign
Microsoft has launched an all out attack on Google in their latest marketing campaign for their Outlook.com solution. The campaign which they call “Scroogled” claims on the website of the same name “if you’re a Gmail user, Google scans all of your sent and received messages, extracts keywords that they think are relevant to you, [...]
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Why Hasn’t the Chromebook Caught On?
In this new world of mobility, tablet, and smartphones, the Google Chromebook would seem to be a good fit in a new cloud-centric environment. Google’s jump into the OS and combined hardware space though has been less than exciting and has yet to really take off with mass users. Initially this may have been from [...]
