Y2K Ain’t What It Used To Be

When people refer the “halcyon days” of the IT industry, they are usually thinking of three things – the early 80’s when PCs were $6,000 at 30% margin, the early 90’s when MDF meant “Money for Decadent Functions” or the late 90’s when customers spent more money on technology in 6 months than any other … Continued

Rethinking The Value Of Customers In A Cloudy World

Recently we have been working with a number of service providers building out their channel and XaaS offerings. The first part of the process is helping them to clearly define their target customer, and as a result what will be the best type of partner to acquire and service this customer. The second thing we … Continued

Profitable Partners Are Loyal Partners

It’s the end of the quarter, and we need to make the number. So out come the promos! We’ve all heard them before. “Buy 4, get 1 Free”. “Take 2 months stock, and I’ll give you a discount”. “Drop your margin by a couple of points to help us get this deal, and we’ll owe … Continued

Customer Life Cycle Management and The Cloud

Customer life cycle management is an important issue for every business selling cloud services. Where there was once traditional solution selling around a large capital item followed by install and management, we are now seeing the consumption of IT as a service driven by cloud technologies. Cloud services are usually billed monthly over a fixed … Continued