InsideIngramMicroBlog
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Fake News In Cybersecurity
7/1/2019
Ever since news spread that an HVAC contractor was the alleged vector in the massive Target breach of 2013, IT security consultants have been ringing out a common refrain: thoroughly vet your third-party contractors, especially the small ones. Restrict and monitor their access to your network and applications. Maybe even think about moving away from small business partners in favor of contracting with larger, well-heeled partners who are, presumably better equipped to thwart cyber threats.
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Life Sciences: A Target-Rich Environment For Tech
6/25/2019
A bit earlier this month, I had a unique opportunity to travel with a few of my colleagues to the BIO International Convention in Philadelphia. It’s a large conference and exposition, attended by some 17,000 life sciences professionals from 67 different countries. The event focuses largely on the pharma industry. Exhibitors and attendees span the gamut from biopharmaceutical manufacturing equipment builders to therapeutic research scientists to contract pharmaceutical manufacturers. It was a strange new place for a 20-year IT writer. What in the world was I doing there?
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Conversations On The Cloud: A Report From Ingram Cloud Summit X
3/13/2019
Gavriella Schuster, VP commercial partnership at Microsoft helped kick off Ingram’s Cloud Summit X in San Diego this week in front of more than 1,500 attendees with an abbreviated history of the IT channel and the rapid change it’s seeing of late. She focused those comments in the context of the cloud’s impact on a channel that’s looked pretty static for the past 40 years.
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Thoma Bravo Buys ConnectWise, Bellini Stepping Down
2/25/2019
Arnie Bellini is stepping down from the role he forged back in 1988, when he transitioned ConnectWise—then a managed services practice—into a business management platform for tech service providers. Under Bellini’s guidance as CEO and in the 31 years since, ConnectWise grew into an IT channel powerhouse that serves more than 25,000 partners in 65+ countries.
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What VARs & MSPs Can Learn From The Trump Campaign’s IT Provider
1/22/2019
The Wall Street Journal’s homepage on January 17 featured a headline that included the words “IT Firm.” VARs and MSPs take note: a fellow solutions provider is caught up in a nasty, politically-charged debate being litigated on a national scale. Obviously, your clients are not paying you in large sums of cash handed over in plastic Wal-Mart bags. This story is preposterous in so many ways, and it’s far outside the realm of what’s normal for how VARs and MSPs operate. As absurd as the entire situation might be, this story does raise a few legitimate questions about IT service provider business models that are worth rehashing.
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VARs: What Is Your Plan B?
1/9/2019
Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model is a must-read for leaders in the channel who come from a tech background and not from a business background. Here are some of the top takeaways for VARs.
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Client Security Training: Partnership Drives The Opportunity
12/19/2018
In a sweeping interview for Channel Executive Magazine, seasoned IT executive and SRC Technologies President and CEO BJ Havlik shared the wisdom behind his new-solution onboarding philosophy. In doing so, he zeroed in directly on the relatively new client IT security training opportunity.
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4 Prime Examples Of Uncomfortable IT Services Growth
10/31/2018
I just returned from the Ingram Micro ONE event in Washington, DC and here’s what I liked most about it. If I’ve heard one vendor or distributor exec implore a crowd of their VAR and MSP customers to do something innovative, something non-traditional, with their clients, I’ve heard a million.
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How VARs Can Make Customers Raving Fans
9/28/2018
We dedicate a good amount of editorial to encouraging VARs to innovate, to add to their line cards, and to transition their business models. We should spend more time reminding VARs the importance of keeping existing customers happy by ensuring your customer support operation is up to par.
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Geek Squad Founder Robert Stephens On IT Services Marketing, Pricing
9/24/2018
If Geek Squad is a nursery school for MSPs, its founder Robert Stephens, is the headmaster. I sat down with Stephens in Phoenix last week at the SolarWinds Empower user conference. Among many interesting points in our conversation were exchanges about IT services marketing and pricing.