Recent Articles
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Time for Solution Providers to Help Reinvent Enterprise IT
Most solution providers today still think in terms of classes of products. But it’s become increasingly clear that many of those products are starting to converge. Customers are obviously starting to think more holistically about IT. Instead of having isolated conversations about servers, storage and network, the arrival of next-generation systems such as the Cisco…
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Reinventing Cloud Storage with a Little Help from the Channel
There’s obviously a lot of interest in cloud storage these days, but actual usage of cloud storage has not been as popular as most solution providers in the channel might like. The reason for this is that most customers are not very disciplined about backup and recovery as a process, In addition, many customers can’t…
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Unified Storage Drives New Enterprise Opportunities
There’s a tendency to think of the enterprise as one massive entity. In reality, an enterprise is much like the average city, which is usually made up a series of neighborhoods that share access to common services. Similarly, most enterprise IT organizations are an amalgamation of divisional systems that ideally should depend on a common…
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The Open Source Challenge in the Channel
One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations. That…
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Mastering Your Own Cloud Computing Fate
As many solution providers continue to evolve into cloud service providers many of the server vendor relationships that many of them built their businesses on are being reevaluated. The primary reason this is happening is that if customers are buying a service they generally don’t care much about the specific IT infrastructure that enables it.…
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The State of the Managed Service Provider
For more than a decade now solution providers have been told they should embrace managed services as a way to ensure ongoing profitability in an age where profit margins associated with reselling products are razor thin. Now comes an age of cloud computing where many systems are being consolidated in the cloud. Many of those…