The vendors spend a lot of time, money and resources wondering what's on the mind of the channel. It's only right that once a year we flip that question and ask: What's on the vendors' mind for this year?

And that's exactly what Amazon Consulting does in its report 2011: State of Partnering, its annual survey of the partnering plans and priorities of the IT vendor community. Based in Silicon Valley company, Amazon Consulting is a partnering services firm that uses this study (now in its 5th year) to look at the challenges, priorities, metrics and Read more...

by Taylor Deakyne, Marketing Development Manager, Onestopclick

In this article, we explore the ways IT vendors can maximize their success finding the right VARs while making fewer mistakes along the way and growing their channel beyond what they thought possible. The advice in this article comes from seasoned pros that joined together in a VARs/Resellers/Distributors discussion group on LinkedIn.

The IT market is full of casualty stories when it comes to VAR recruitment. Unfortunately, developing a stand-out win-win partnership with a VAR it is the Read more...

Dell's enterprise solutions and services revenue grows by 5% in Q1 2011, representing 30% of its consolidated revenue. Following its losses within its consumer segments, the writing on the wall says it all-- Dell will surely concentrate further on the enterprise segment. 

The company's enterprise growth goes through all its segments-- from servers and networking, to storage technology and services.

It will also be investing $1Bn this year into new solutions and cloud capabilities, such as launching the vStart virtualisation package. 

The move towards Read more...

Toshiba bolsters its smart-grid operations by purchasing Swiss smart metering provider Landis+Gyr for $2.3Bn.

Landis+Gyr specialises in smart metering, networking and service products for the utility industry. 

Toshiba is the Japan's biggest nuclear reactor maker, and will now have access to Landis+Gyr's customer base-- one spread globally across 30 markets with over 8000 utility customers, including E.ON AG, Centrica, British Gas and PG&E. 

The WW smart-grid market is a potentially lucrative one-- Toshiba says it could grow to $71Bn over the next Read more...

SanDisk purchases Pliant Technology, in a deal reaching $327m in cash and equity-based incentives.

Pliant is an enterprise-level SAS protocol-based SSD developer. It also sells PCI-e based solutions for high performance servers.

Pliant uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND in enterprise SSDs, and the lower cost of MLC is a key enabler for the broad adoption of SSDs in the enterprise market.

As it increases performance and reduces power consumption, flash memory is making significant inroads into the enterprise. By combining Pliant's enterprise-level Read more...

Avaya integrates its Virtualisation Provisioning Service (VPS) with VMware vCenter Server, providing a complete view of ethernet infrastructure and virtual machines within and between data centers. 

In its initial release, Avaya says VPS should provide insight into the entire VM lifecycle-- from activation to mobility to deletion-- updating Avaya networking devices in reaction to the lifecycle's changes. 

The company says VPS increases IT efficiency, reduces time-to-service and ensures consistent data center application performance as VMs move between Read more...