Celebrating Channel Creativity
During the last few months, I've had the opportunity to see many resellers' innovative projects, and I've wished I could give each of them an award for creativity. In this issue, I get the chance to do that with the inaugural edition of Business Solutions magazine's Channel Innovator Awards. We're honoring seven VARs that have taken ingenuity to new heights for their technologies. These technology resellers and integrators are building solutions to solve complex problems for their customers. By sharing their stories with our readers, we hope to help you find new opportunities to solve similar problems. This issue profiles each Channel Innovator, along with the project that earned it the distinction in 2005.
What is a channel innovator? These awards highlight the most revolutionary channel solutions in each of seven categories: AIDC/supply chain, wireless networking/mobile computing, point of sale, document and content management, networking/general computing, security, and storage/retrieval. Nominations were submitted by the innovators' channel partners and, in some cases, the VARs themselves. Business Solutions' technology editors reviewed the nominations and selected the winners. The winners had one thing in common: they went beyond the norm to successfully tackle projects that were challenging to implement.
Integrating Multiple Technologies Creates Additional Opportunities
Using multiple technologies in a solution allows a VAR to increase income, expand its expertise, and win new customers. Since promoting the integration of complementary technologies into total solutions is a key part of Business Solutions' mission statement, applicants demonstrating this capability received extra attention. Examples of this include combining a point of sale system with a wireless network, integrating a storage solution with a document management component, or developing a computing infrastructure that includes networking and security functions. The guide listings beginning on page 16 point you to vendors that can help you incorporate new technologies in your offerings.
Creativity And Unique Solutions Lead To Business Growth
In the next few pages, you'll see seven examples of the creativity of our readers. For example, VAR POSabilities LLC takes the winning honor in the point of sale category with its implementation of a mobile retail management solution for use at NASCAR events. KeyMark, Inc. wins the content management category (and finds a whole new market) with its document imaging and retrieval solution for the gambling and entertainment industry. Vibrant Technologies, Inc., a storage integrator, was faced with a legal technologies client that could not expand its storage system fast enough. Vibrant looked beyond the typical storage system upgrades and developed a unique, extremely large, scalable storage system that has contributed to a 600% business growth for the VAR. The stories on each of the winners in the other technology categories are just as compelling.
Our readers are implementing new and creative solutions every day, and you can benefit from hearing how they do it. These are the stories we feature each month in Business Solutions magazine, and we hope you enjoy celebrating the best of the best with us this month. We look forward to seeing many more of your projects detailed in our pages in the upcoming months.