WANTED: Products the Channel Needs but Cant Find

A blade server for the SMB; middleware for enterprise and BI apps; a single, business-wide sign-on. VARs offer their wish list of products missing from the market.

‘If someone would come out with a low-cost-of-entry blade system, that would be a huge hit in the small-biz space. Especially with Microsoft’s new Centro operating system less than a year away. Right now, small businesses have to buy multiple servers when

In our case we are a VAR, a reseller of products and services, so we would want a package that could do inventory, service ticketing, customer service, sales functions, back-office automation and other functions. If I were sitting on IT Santas lap

‘Especially one that is token-based, so we can ensure systems are secure. Managing passwords is such a pain in the neck for clients. They have to log into Web sites, inventory systems, e-mail.’ M. J. Shoer, president of Jenaly Technology G

‘We have a managed disk-to-disk backup service that we sell to our SMB clients. We want to have them get rid of tape entirely, but they still need to take backups off-site with them. We ended up having to build a NAS [device] with removable hard drives. I

‘Everyone is racing there, but the reality is that no one has truly figured it out yet. Oracle has something that’s getting there.’ Hal Hawisher, principal at Baytree Associates, an Oracle partner, Charlotte, N.C.

‘I would like to be able to offer them an edge Internet device that will do everything they need. Right now we use Cymphonix for bandwidth management/content filtering; Cisco for VPN, routers and firewall; and Symantec for anti-virus. Since these all sit

‘There are holes in the solutions that are currently available. There are good tools for virtual machines and other tools that focus on storage infrastructure. We love the integration business, but it would be much better if there were some good holistic

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