Channel

Economic woes linger, but it’s time to plan for growth

OK, so not every economic indicator we’re seeing right now is positive, although the revelation today that GDP grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter (instead of the 3.2 percent predicted) is definitely cause for at least a “Woo-Hoo!” (Here’s Reuters article analyzing the data.)

And for many different reasons, members of the IT channel are starting to sound like parrots: saying NOW is the time to really start planning for growth.

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NetSuite gives new meaning to ‘cash for clunkers’ program

Never one to miss a good marketing opportunity, NetSuite has stolen a page from the U.S. federal government’s “Cash for Clunkers” incentive initiative. Only NetSuite’s target is out-of-date hardware and software that businesses may be running on site. Continued »

1nService bucks economy, adds five new members

It’s refreshing to hear about a growth story when other economic statistics beg us to be depressed. So, here’s one for you: the 1nService organization, which is a group of regional integrators and VARs who act both individually in their respective local markets and collectively across North America, has taken on five new affiliate members. Continued »

IBM to business partners: Why don’t you mingle a little?

As if Facebook or LinkedIn or Plaxo or any of the other places where I’ve been personally congregating with VARs and IT solution providers for months weren’t enough, some of the biggest high-tech vendors in the channel are jumping with both feet into the world of social networks. The latest to announce a new community infrastructure (at least with a certain amount of fanfare) is IBM, which has launched something called PartnerWorld Communities.

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Channel advocate looking for others to help preach the cause

Pat Taylor, a former system builder who has been a member of Intel’s Premier Partner Board of Advisors for years who also has been its president for three years, wants the channel to stand up for itself with vendors.

Taylor has founded Atypical Business, a company he is using together to bring together a network of “channel entrepreneurs of all sizes” to share ideas. I guess you could call this a private social network, one that is being formed with the aim of helping “the high-tech channel” (aka resellers, managed service providers, VARs, system builders and the like) come up with ideas to help strengthen their collective bargaining position with their technology suppliers and partners. The public expression of his work comes in the form of YouTube videos that can be found at this link.Topics include arguments such as why businesses benefit when they buy local or why the vendor support contract that may seem less inexpensive on paper doesn’t necessarily play out that way in the real world.

You can “join” the social network, which Taylor will use to gather research and ideas that will be used to work on positioning projects for the community. He will use the data in work he does for vendors; he’s hoping to help change policies by providing them with access to community feedback if not to the community itself. Since the group is brand-new, he hasn’t shared the focus of those projects (with me at least, because I’m not technically part of the channel). But you can join his circle of friends and find out more.

Stopping directaphobia

There’s no worse feeling: You find out that an opportunity you were working on with a manufacturer was just taken direct. You found the opportunity and yet somehow control was lost and the customer placed the order directly with your supplier. How did this happen — and maybe more importantly — how can you prevent it in the first place?

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Minimizing tech support calls

While post-sale technical support is one of the key services the channel can provide to clients, sometimes it’s one of those services you wish you’d never heard of: The wrong product, a sloppy upgrade or an unsophisticated user can quickly consume all of the profit that the support center generates.

Whether you have a sophisticated help desk or rely on your installing engineers to play double duty and assist customers with problems, there are some key steps to take to cut down on support calls.

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Ripped from the headlines: Virtual adultery leads to real divorce

By Elaine Hom, Associate Features Editor

Just when you thought people couldn’t be any dumber about their avatars, Second-Life-being-someone’s-only-life makes the news again. A UK couple recently filed for divorce after the wife, Amy Taylor, discovered that her husband, David Pollard, was having a virtual affair. How scandalous!

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Tactics for gaining ground in big-vendor territory

In my last entry I wrote about large suppliers and their in-the-field resources and the problems that creates. After all, a larger supplier probably has more local resources than you do. Typically, they have you outnumbered in both engineers and salespeople.

In the past, many resellers have based their value-add on their ability to offer a complete solution. For example, if you’re working with a storage vendor, part of your value-add might have been to offer the backup products that complete the solution. The challenge is that many of the larger vendors already offer complete solutions. They have systems, disk, tape, software, etc.

Today, to avoid being stymied by this, there are two, not mutually exclusive, tacks that you can take. Continued »

Sun founder Bechtolsheim and former Cisco exec Ullal lead Arista Networks

Many a company has set out to take down Cisco. But Arista Networks — fledgling maker of ultra high-speed Ethernet switches and data center infrastructure — is coming at that task with executive superpowers. The company announced Thursday it snagged former Cisco top executive of switching and data center Jayshree Ullal as CEO and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim as chairman and chief development officer. Continued »