Recent Articles
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Backup and Recovery in the Cloud Equals Change
Now is a time of great change when it comes to backup and recovery. For more years than anyone cares to remember IT organizations mostly dependent on traditional tape backup software, even when using disk-based backup systems. But with the advent of cloud computing things have become a little more complicated. Because of network bandwidth…
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IT Services Revenue at Heart of Most Channel Conflict
By and measure the delivery of services is by far and away the single most profitable segment of a solution provider’s business. The question then becomes what vendors and technologies drive the most amount of high-margin services revenue on behalf of the solution provider. According to Rob Sturgeon, chief delivery officer for ServiceSource, a provider…
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Putting a Channel Face on the Cloud
There’s a lot of contention these days not so much over whether customers should embrace cloud computing as much as what’s the right path to get there. This debate has some significant implications of solution providers that are being asked to represent various cloud computing service providers, especially in the enterprise. One knock that cloud…
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The Future of IT Services
Historically providing IT services has always been a business where the cost of labor was fairly high. But as IT continues to evolve it’s apparent that as the devices become more instrumented the easier it’s becoming to automate the IT services process. The latest case in point is Nexsan, a provider of storage systems that…
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The Evolving Role of Solution Providers in the Age of the Cloud
There’s a lot concern these days about the profitability of managed service providers (MSPs). Like any product once a service becomes a discrete item that customers can purchase it becomes subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Most MSPs in the last few years have learned this lesson in the last few years the hard…
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MSPs Need to Focus More on Providing Strategic Value
For many managed service providers (MSPs) the difference between winning and losing new business often comes down to whether they can convince customers that they can provide a higher level of service than the internal IT department. The challenge, of course, has been actually proving that on a regular basis. With the release of version…