Channel Intelligence will reside on the SearchITChannel.com home page; postings will be sent by newsletter to registered members of SearchITChannel.com. The primary audience will be your peers, but the content will be searchable on the Web, able to be read by a wide variety of people, whether vendors, potential customers or your peers.

What’s in it for you? You get a platform from which to address your peers, develop your voice and raise your profile in the marketplace.

What’s in it for us? We get to learn more about you and about the technical challenges and business issues you face doing business in the channel.

If you’re interested in submitting an article for SearchITChannel.com, we’re happy to consider it. We have a few ground rules, however, so please read the following before submitting anything:

• We are only accepting submissions from companies that resell IT products or that provide IT services (whether managed services or otherwise) directly to IT organizations. We are not accepting content from technology manufacturers or vendors that sell hardware or software to IT organizations through another party.
• Content must be original.
• Submissions must be neutral and may not promote a particular vendor’s products or services. We’re seeking subject-matter experts and thought leaders to write about technical and business issues facing VARs, systems integrators or MSPs. We will not publish thinly or not-so-thinly veiled marketing material.
• As mentioned above, the audience is your peers — not customers.
• Submissions must be at least 400 words and will be edited by an editorial staff member of SearchITChannel.com to ensure conformance with the requirements listed here.
• Some contributors (those who are most active) will get a small stipend.

Have an idea? Send your pitch to me at stroy@techtarget.com.

Partners can either become an agent for the services, which means they receive a referral fee, or they can work with Dell to provision their own instance of the service and then resell it to their customers in a traditional resale model for a margin.

The company has also added a new certification level to its training programs for VARs, systems integrators and MSPs interested in wrapping their own services and solutions around a Dell cloud offering.

The new level is called Cloud Enabler, and it will be used to designate Dell partners that can integrate a range of different cloud services on behalf of a customer and then operate it via managed services. The platform for doing this is the Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Data Center Service. The infrastructure as a service offering (IaaS) is a secure, enterprise-class service that lets MSPs create private clouds for their customers.

“We have been helping our customers implement IaaS for a few years now, so we’re very familiar with customer needs and onboarding challenges that can arise. Dell helps us meet those head on,” said Dell partner Michael Pearson, DSA Technologies.

The Cloud Enabler certification level launches this week in the United States and Canada; it is scheduled to become available in the EMEA markets at the end of August.

The MSPAlliance has already established its name as an accrediting body for the managed services industry, with programs such as the Green IT certified MSP, which recognizes certain best practices in remote management and power management. The new certification, called the Unified Certification Standard, will cover the cloud services and managed services offered by a given service provider. There are two levels: one that covers a fixed period of time, and one that offers a forward-looking certification timeline.

Said Charles Weaver, president and cofounder of MSPAlliance:

“This certification will offer the service provider a public-facing report issue by an independent third party, certified public accounting firm that will provide greater levels of assurance — more than any technical certification — to the service provider and their clients.”

You can consult the MSPAlliance Web site for more information on the new recognition.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com and follow us on Twitter! Here’s how to follow Heather Clancy directly.

Yep, that’s David all right, looking awful silly but also real approachable. And if you visit the Evolve Facebook page, you’ll be introduced to many other Evolve employees who have gotten into the spirit of Red Nose Day, which is this Friday, March 18, 2011. (Perfect timing for red noses, don’t you think, given that St. Patrick’s Day is the day before?)

The idea of this day is to basically do something silly or fun in the name of fund-raising for charity. Sobel picked up the idea during his travels in the United Kingdom, where he facilitates one of the Heartland Technology Peer Groups.

In Evolve’s case, the company isn’t raising money this year. But it will make a donation to Martha’s Table, which is an organization based in Washington, D.C., that is focused on addressing poverty through after-school and food service programs. It is encouraging its Facebook and Web site visitors to join in this contribution.

This is the sort of thing that endears smaller technology solutions providers to their local communities. It shows a connection with the place it does business, plus it shows the human side — which we all know is a big factor in long-term relationship. What creative things has your company done lately to become more closely involved with its community?

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com and follow us on Twitter! Here’s how to follow Heather Clancy directly.

Yes, I know, you don’t care. But, increasingly, your larger customers might make this one of their buying criteria, as they incorporate green IT sensibilities into their overall corporate strategies. Plus, it is in your interest to worry about energy efficiency because it can help you save some money over the long term and differentiate your message from the increasingly voluminous MSP crowd.

Consider the case of Steadfast Networks, a Chicago-based Web services and hosting company that has spent a serious amount of time thinking through the green-ness of the design of its latest data center. The first phase of the facility, which can handle about 600 kilowatts of IT load, employs 4 main techniques to keep things cool without jacking up the energy bill according to Steadfast CEO and founder Karl Zimmerman. They are:

1. Opting for hot and cold aisle layout to keep air flows separate and so that the hot air can be consolidated and exhausted from the space more efficiently.
2. Using variable speed fans that run continuously, but only at the rate right for the ambient temperature and environmental conditions.
3. Keeping the data center temperature just a bit higher, which saves 5 percent to 10 percent of your energy costs off the bat.
4. Investing in free cooling technology, which uses the outside air to keep things cool until supplement air-conditioning systems kick in.

Did this cost Zimmerman more money when he was designing the facility? The short answer is he says that some of these approaches, such as variable speed fans, currently DO cost more, although the prices are dropping quickly. But energy is his organization’s second or third highest cost, so over time the return on investment makes sense, Zimmerman notes. Incidentally, that ROI generally takes as little as a year, he adds.

Steadfast just enhanced its green credentials by forging a relationship with Carbonfund.org to help offset its carbon emissions impact even further. Another interesting item: Steadfast buys up to 90 percent of its technology locally so that it doesn’t have shipped as far. Which is another thing you might want to consider when sourcing equipment on behalf of your customers locally. The transportation and shipping industries account for something like one-third of all the carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And Steadfast is using some of the latest most power-efficient processors and solid state drives from Intel as the basis of its servers. Says Zimmerman in a press release about the Carbonfund deal: “These new lines cost slightly more upfront, but they offer significant improvements in processing power per watt, which lowers the operational cost. We save a tremendous amount of power, which allows us to pass on better pricing to our customers while reducing our carbon footprint.”

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com and follow us on Twitter! Here’s how to follow Heather Clancy directly.