Big Changes to BSM
By Matt Pillar, chief editor
This is the last issue of Business Solutions magazine you’ll receive.
Make no mistake, the Business Solutions team and our 30-year-old brand aren’t going away. On the contrary, we’ve been putting a lot of hard, behind-the-scenes work into crafting a brand-new, one-of-a-kind family of media outlets that are truly for the channel, by the channel.
It was just before the holidays last year when I began talks with Jameson Publishing’s leadership about making some changes to the IT Group here, which is the group that publishes Business Solutions, Innovative Retail Technologies, Health IT Outcomes, Field Technologies, and a number of other titles in the IT field. The more we talked, the bigger the changes we envisioned. As Business Solutions goes, those changes will come to fruition next month, when we mail issue one, volume one of Channel Executive magazine the first week of July.
Why the change? Firstly, because we’ve recommitted our focus and are dedicating our editorial content to channel executives and creating a venue for channel executives. With the launch of Channel Executive magazine, you’ll see more, deeper, and exclusive content about the business challenges and opportunities facing VAR, MSP, ISO, and integrator businesses, challenges and opportunities such as hiring qualified talent, fast-changing product and service delivery models, sales and marketing efficacy, technology selection and adoption, and more. This content will be curated from the most successful executives and brightest minds in the IT channel, and you won’t find it anywhere but Channel Executive.
But that’s just the beginning. We’re also investing significantly in the remodeling and refining of our circulation to better serve our ever-changing readership. In recent years, we’ve organically attracted a sizable community of ISV executives to our readership. Not surprisingly, the content needs and desires of executives in the software development community are considerably different from the needs and desires of our traditional VAR and MSP audience. Their challenges and opportunities are unique. Many yearn for knowledge of the investment opportunities available to them, how to build channel programs, and how to take their software products to market — the kind of knowledge that’s been shared openly at our acclaimed ISV IQ Live! event series. These challenges and opportunities demand dedicated and ongoing attention. That’s why, on the heels of the inaugural issue of Channel Executive, we’ll give the ISV community their very own title with the launch of Software Executive magazine in August.
Supporting these two bolder, brighter, and decidedly better titles will be a new online community of segment-specific websites including VARinsights.com, MSPinsights.com, and ISVinsights.com. As their names imply, these sites will host fresh, topical insight for channel and software professionals daily.
Meanwhile, the exclusive content that’s curated specifically for the C-suite and published in the two new print titles will be reflected online at channelexecutivemag.com and softwareexecutivemag.com.
And, of course, we’ll continue to build on the success of our event programming by hosting more of the Retail IT VAR of the Future, Channel Transitions, and ISV IQ Live! events that have become so popular among our subscribers.
Next month, the title you hold in your hands, the newsletters that hit your inbox, and the URLs you visit to gain actionable, business-empowering intelligence will all be different. They’ll be bigger, bolder, and brighter. More importantly, their contents will be flatout better. That’s a promise.