Recent Articles
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Suddenly, It’s a Lot Easier to Sell Managed Services
A year ago the typical VAR would require a fair amount of explanation and persuasion when being pitched on the merits of managed services. Not anymore, said Peter Sandiford, CEO of LPI Level Platforms Inc., an Ottawa-based provider of managed services software for VARs and integrators. “Everybody gets it,” he said “When we entered the…
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Channel Market Broadens for High Bandwidth
Like many sophisticated networking technologies, it has taken a while for 10-Gigabit Ethernet to become the market force analysts predicted when it debuted in 2002. It took more than three years for the U.S. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to certify a standard after 10GbE was proposed, and there still isn’t a standard for…
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VARs Must Protect Themselves Against Possible 2006 Downturn
While the IT spending outlook for the remainder of the year remains strong, concerns are growing about prospects for 2006. Forrester Research reported early this month that CIO confidence has dipped to the lowest level since the first quarter of 2004, which the research firm warns could translate into IT spending cuts. For the channel,…
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Automation: What’s Good for Customers Is Good for VARs
It’s tough to be a VAR in a competitive, low-margin world, so VARs have to constantly refine their business models to remain profitable. One approach, which many in the channel admit is underutilized, is to adopt the very notion VARs constantly pitch to customers: automate. That means taking customer orders and processing them electronically. But…
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Mac Retailers’ Reactions to Intel Move Are Mixed
Apple’s announcement that it will migrate its Macintosh line of computers away from the PowerPC architecture in favor of CPUs from Intel came as a surprise, not just to fans and developers, but to retailers, who have long carried the Mac torch as Apple’s market share declined in the 1990s. Though there are concerns about…
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CompTIA Partners on Certification Textbooks
IT trade association CompTIA has signed a deal with Thomson Course Technology to publish textbooks related to the organization’s certification curriculum. CompTIA is supplying the materials that Thomson Course Technology, a division of Stamford, Conn.-based Thomson Corp., is turning into textbooks, study guides and other training-related publications, said William Vanderbilt, vice president for education and…
