Michael Vizard

TAMPA—Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak says one of the primary emerging technologies that is capturing his imagination these days is area of robotics and how artificial intelligence will be applied on those types of systems. Wozniak said he hopes that someday the robotics field will take a page from the personal computer era by creating robots […]

Recent acquisitions by both Dell and Hewlett-Packard are probably giving solution providers across the spectrum cause for pause as they contemplate the ambitions that major vendors are beginning to harbor towards managed services. As everyone knows by now, Dell moved to acquire SilverBack Technologies, a provider of a platform for managed services that has relied […]

For years, solution providers have complained about the complexity of trying to first build a solution and then craft a deal across all the different business units of IBM. For many small solution providers focused on the small and midsize business market, all that complexity meant that the cost of doing business with IBM was […]

For as long as anybody can remember, Microsoft has always been pregnant in one form or another in the sense that there is always some great new product launch just over the horizon that spells great opportunity for the channel. But as we consider the news out of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver […]

As the channel enters the back half of 2007, there is a remarkable sense of calm pervading the community largely as the result of the convergence of several external rather than internal forces. The main sense of calm comes from the fact that the economy is continuing to grow, with the fastest amount of growth […]

With the arrival of the Fourth of July, the dog days of summer will soon be upon us. With them come rising concerns over energy costs, brownouts and rolling blackouts as utility companies struggle to keep up with demand. For a solution provider, this convergence of electrical woes creates an opportunity to have a really […]

When in the Course of IT events it becomes necessary for a customer to dissolve the bonds which have connected them with a vendor and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natures God entitle them, a decent respect to the […]

Among the things that keep managed services providers up at night is this concept of hardware as a service. But the sleepless nights have little to do with understanding the model, which is, after all, just a slight variant on the leasing model. The real concern is how to keep hardware service from eating away […]

For a lot of solution providers CDW has been nothing short of a mortal enemy, ranking right up there with Dell in terms of using volume purchasing to drive down margins. By leveraging the volume it sells, CDW has historically been able to get better pricing from suppliers, and it has used that advantage to […]

While the great search for sources of recurring revenue has mainly focused on managed services, one of the most overlooked sources of such revenue for solutions providers is the Internet connection itself and the increasing number of applications that are running over it. What was once considered a tactical opportunity that many solution providers felt […]