microsoft
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Do Small Businesses Still need Servers?
As more and more software manufacturers and Line of Business application vendors move to software as a service models, the need for on-premise servers would seem to become less necessary. As an IT salesman for many years, the number one sale I made was for networked servers. This single device allowed offices to share files, [...]
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Is Dell Preparing to Take Over the IT Space?
Dell has been making a lot of interesting moves lately and all of its moves point to a big shift in focus for the former hardware company. The latest in a long list of moves is the acquisition of enterprise cloud management company, Enstratius. According to the Enstratius website, they provide a suite of [...]
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SMB Nation Conference Back at The Microsoft Campus
The SMB Nation Spring Conference 2013, now in its seventh season, is back on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington. The event, which kicks off tomorrow, has an agenda that is clearly focused on integrating cloud and mobility into the MSP business model. Sessions include “Why you should become a CSP (Cloud Services Provider),” [...]
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Are Certifications Still a Necessity?
At one time, having an MCSE really meant something in the industry. Technicians and technical personnel worked long and hard to reach their certification statuses in order to obtain a job, get promoted, or provide status for their companies. But are certifications like this really still necessary in today’s environment? The answer is it [...]
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Will Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Offering be able to compete with Amazon?
Microsoft has announced price matching with Amazon for its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure offering, which will have Microsoft partners seeing up to a 33% savings over the current pricing model. This comes as a surprise considering the low cost of Amazon’s cloud offering and Microsoft’s usual unwillingness to heavily discount its services. The move comes [...]
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It’s All Microsoft’s Fault!
Image source: www.wpcentral.com The media is overrun today with news stories about the significant decline (11-14%) in PC sales. Most of the headlines and stories would have you believing that this is all due to the recent release and lack of excitement over the Windows 8 platform. Well media, as much as I would [...]
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Dell’s Future is Unclear
Michael Dell may have never thought that proposing a buyback of his company and taking the company private could have ended in him ousted as CEO, but that may be just what happens if one of the competing bids for the company is accepted. Back in January we reported that Dell was considering a privatization, [...]
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Have your Managed Services Sales Flat Lined?
Managed Services has seen a major growth and maturing over the last five years. From a small percentage of IT companies calling themselves MSP’s, to now most owning the title, the market has grown exponentially to what it is today. With widespread acceptance, has come fierce competition, market expectation, shrinking pricing/margins, as well as [...]
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Protecting Your Assets, Your Customers
Maybe you’ve never thought about it this way before, but your customers are your biggest asset in your business. If you’ve ever been approached by a competitor who wanted to buy your customers, you will understand exactly what I mean. Protecting these assets is just as important as protecting the physical assets within your business. There are many threats [...]
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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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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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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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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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Microsoft Invests in Dell to go Private why would Microsoft do this?
The Dell board today voted to take the company private in a $24.4 Billion dollar takeover plan. The plan has shareholders in the company receiving $13.65 per share for their existing shares. The big surprise in the deal has been the over $2B investment from Microsoft. The investment has many worried about what it will [...]
