Recent Articles
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The Long March towards Federated Unified Communications in the Cloud
While unified communications is an area that has held much promise for the channel, turning that potential in major new business opportunities has been something of a challenge. Not only is there a lot of internal customer politics to navigate as teams of IT and telecommunications people battle for control of unified communications, customers are…
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New Accounting Rules May Limit Usage of Hosting and Public Cloud Services
One of the major customer benefits associated with moving application workloads to either a public cloud or managed hosting environment is that it turns IT into an operating expense that makes their balance sheets look a lot better to investors. But over the next couple of years there are new accounting rules that may soon…
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Making Sense of Desktop Virtualization
More than a few IT organizations have made the plunge into desktop virtualization only to discover that this latest IT cure can easily wind up being worse than the disease. The issues that many of solution providers wind up confronting range from the fact that the costs associated with implementing certain types of desktop virtualization…
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Virtual Appliances Simplify Shift into Cloud Storage
Most IT organizations are not particularly good at managing data or, for that matter, IT in general. Not only is there a lot of redundant data strewn all across the enterprise; a lot of data that isn’t particularly important winds up clogging up expensive primary storage systems. Obviously, this creates an opportunity for solution providers…
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Joint Ventures: A Recipe for Failure in the Channel
Joint ventures are tricky by definition. While they tend to start off with much promise over time they almost always wither and die. The reasons for this are varied. Usually, it comes down to conflicting internal agendas. But sometimes unforeseen external forces also wind up making the joint venture untenable. Such is the case with…
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Analytics Applications Emerge as Next Big Thing in IT
On the plus side IBM is convinced that the combination of Big Data and analytics application software is laying the foundation for a major economic expansion. On the downside, prospective customers are a little short on analytics expertise and most IT organizations are still not familiar with Big Data technologies such as Hadoop. IBM is…