A few weeks ago, I wrote The Lazy VAR's Guide To Recurring Revenue. The contents of the article, at this point, have become the table of contents for a much larger project we're working on which will educate VARs on all the different ways they can be earning recurring revenue.  Continue Reading..

In the July issue of Business Solutions magazine, I wrote a tech trend article based on a recent distributor event I attended where I was struck by how unfamiliar the attendees were — many of them long-time partners of this particular distributor — of the various services the distributor offered. After the show, I was curious to find out whether this scenario was unique to that particular distributor or whether this was...  Continue Reading..

We haven't covered kiosks as much as we've covered other technologies in the magazine over the years. If I had to guess, I'd say that many VARs are put off by the enclosure portion of the solution. As you might know, there's way more to doing kiosk enclosures than people would expect. In 2009, I spoke with Chris Gilder, CEO of Merdian Kiosks, a company that specializes in kiosks (if the name didn't give that away),...  Continue Reading..

You may have heard about IBM's latest news announcement that it banned the use of DropBox for corporate use due to security concerns. It was also reported recently that presidential candidate Mitt Romney's DropBox account was hacked. You might wonder what this has to do with your present or future cloud storage sales. It actually has a lot to do with it. News about security breaches has a way of spreading rampantly, and the...  Continue Reading..

A friend of mine outside the world of resellers and IT reads this blog on a daily basis just because he wants to be a supportive friend and help boost my Google Analytics ego. Since its launch, we've posted 80 articles here on various topics. Of course, certain themes have presented themselves which even my friend the outsider has caught onto. Just the other day he asked me about the POS industry and what was happening.  Continue Reading..

Some of you may recall RSPA RetailNOW a few years ago (2009) when United Bank Card (UBC), now Harbortouch, made its grand appearance at the show. Jared Isaacman, the company's CEO, received boos from some of the dealers in the crowd as he tried to make an announcement that included the concept of free POS (point of sale) hardware and software.  Continue Reading..

If you've been following this blog or reading our monthly magazine, you know that we've been writing regularly about the opportunity for our integrator audience to sell IP video solutions. At this point, we've used survey data, analyst commentary, comments from experts, anecdotes from readers who've successfully made the jump, and so on.  Continue Reading..

Like all of the VARs/MSPS we cover in Business Solutions magazine, Tom Fox, CEO of Technology Experts Corp. was on a roll when we covered his company in our Aug. 2009 issue cover story. And, like so many of us, Fox felt the negative impact of the economy and even had to deal with a couple of additional setbacks, which he shared with me recently in his usual straightforward manner.  Continue Reading..

Since Sunday evening, I've been in Orlando, FL for Autotask Community Live! If you aren't familiar with Autotask, the company manufacturers software designed to (according to its website) organize, automate, and optimize your IT business so you can spend less time managing it and more time growing it. This is my first time attending the event and I'm pretty impressed for a number of reasons.  Continue Reading..

I'm a little slow to pick up on certain things. Over the past couple years, I've written scores of articles about the opportunity for our audience to sell IP video solutions. However, it wasn't until recently that I gained some insight that would have made my previous articles so much more valuable.  Continue Reading..