For nearly three years, Jeff Yelton has been out of the POS & data collection industry. Once president of ScanSource’s POS & Barcoding division, Yelton left ScanSource in January of 2012 and has spent the time since as the president of Wired Fox Technologies. About a month ago, Yelton returned to the distribution side of the channel when he joined Ingram Micro as Executive Director and General Manager of the distributor’s...  Continue Reading..

Solutions-as-a-Service. Mobility. Payment security. Video surveillance. Hosted backup. Ownership Thinking. An upcoming article on Lynn Skurla of Skurla’s POS Solutions out of Anchorage, AK illustrates how being a forward-thinking VAR can lead to great things.  Continue Reading..

I remember the days when IT admins so tightly locked down PC permissions that users couldn't change a printer setting, let alone install their own choice of applications. Of course, just 10 years ago, there weren't a whole lot of small specialized apps and there certainly weren't all the cloud apps we have today. Employees don't think they need permission to work smarter by installing apps like Dropbox on their computer. While...  Continue Reading..

You put a lot of thought, research, and training into selecting your latest cloud service and you know that coming up with an attractive price is very important. But, don’t fall into the trap of analysis paralysis, warns Jason Etheridge, president and CEO of Logic Speak, an MSP that’s projecting 25% revenue growth this year, following last year’s 15% revenue growth over 2012. Etheridge offers the following three tips to...  Continue Reading..

I’ve written in the past about the need to be running efficiently to be most effective with the as-a-Service model. During a recent conversation at CompTia ChannelCon, I was reminded how important it is to not just use the right software in your managed services practice, but to have it properly configured.  Continue Reading..

RetailNOW 2014 officially kicked off today. Despite the retail and hospitality IT channel's most important conference just getting started, a lot has already happened.  Continue Reading..

Our third event on the topic of transitioning from break-fix to the as-a-service model was held on Tuesday July 22 in Boston. Based on feedback from the initial respondents to our post-event survey, Channel Transitions East was a success. After pouring a lot of sweat into the event, I’m relieved. It’s not that I expected failure. We planned and prepared and prepared even more to set ourselves up to succeed. But there are so many...  Continue Reading..

When it comes to selling subscription-based IT and professional services, there are multiple approaches used by service providers. Here’s a quick summary of three popular approaches, followed by some thoughts from a successful MSP that helps put these options into perspective and offers a smart way to keep managed services clients from reverting back to their former break-fix statuses.  Continue Reading..

Last week’s Autotask Community Live! was held in Miami and gave Autotask users a lot to digest. Following are my notes from the event.  Continue Reading..

Last week I attended data backup solutions provider Datto’s annual partner conference in Las Vegas. The two and a half day event was loaded with big announcements and great information. Here are my notes in case you weren’t one of the lucky ones who could make it to the sold out event.  Continue Reading..