Brian Sherman Posts

IT is everywhere… that reality will help ensure successful futures for the IT solution provider community, as well as the many companies with a role in the IT channel. CompTIA CEO Todd Thibodeaux kicked off the 2012 Annual Member Meeting (AMM) yesterday by touching on where the industry has been over the past few years, and then stressing some of the most lucrative opportunities that lie ahead.The economy has affected the industry tremendously over the past few years, just now getting back to th ...

One highlight of today’s IT Services and Support Community gathering during the CompTIA Annual Member Meetinghttp://www.comptia.org/amm (AMM) was the presentation by IT Services Marketing Association President and CEO David Munn. Starting out with a review of Google results for “solutions,” he demonstrated how generic the term has become. With millions of hits across a variety of different categories, the descriptor is clearly favored by businesses throughout the world.According to Munn, today’s ...

Business technology isn’t what it once was. A little more than a decade ago, the system infrastructure consisted of servers, work stations, network components and the software manually loaded in each machine. The support process was primarily on site, with the occasional call center to walk users or the company’s IT staff through some primary diagnostics and repair steps.A lot has changed, with the new business system environment encompassing extensive cloud platforms, a wealth of mobile devices ...

Dell is on a tear this week, scooping up Wyse Technologies and Clerity Solutions and adding thin client and even more cloud solutions to their ever-expanding portfolio. The former hardware-centric vendor obviously has a plan to transform its business model, rapidly expanding into areas formerly supported by channel organizations. The moves help the company continue to reduce its reliance on hardware, shifting to more profitable and higher growth segments of the IT industry.But Dell’s strategy is ...

Life certainly doesn’t stand still, and neither does the IT world. Ten years ago, who would have thought that Apple products would be found in more than half the households in the U.S. or that mobility devices would be crucial business tools? Change is inevitable, but the technology we employ in our personal and corporate lives seems to be advancing at greater speeds each and every year. Some of those advancements have come about so quickly that they have become commoditized almost overn ...

When was the last time a client asked you to implement a unified communications (UC) solution? Chances are, it doesn’t happen often, but that doesn’t mean convergence isn’t in demand. Often times, business owners and managers know the goals they want to accomplish, but don’t know the platform to get there. If their objectives focus on improving customer service levels, creating greater sales team efficiencies or enabling remote workers with more access, unified communications should be part of t ...

This is the second of a two-part article commemorating the latest members of the IT Hall of Fame, who will be inducted April 11th at the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting in Chicago. The first honorees were the solution providers who helped found Ingram Micro’s Venture Tech Network (VTN), represented by Jane Cage, Steve Harper and Ted Warner. Today, we celebrate the work of the late Jacob “Jack” Goldman, a scientist with the vision to start one of the world’s most innovative research facilities.     ...

My county government conducts a full property assessment every 10 years and, thanks to errors in the contractor’s computer systems, I have had the pleasure of contesting their suggested value for our house two consecutive times. On paper, our house and the adjoining lot appear to be worth more than the ‘fair market value,” with several offsetting structural and neighborhood factors throwing off the numbers.Our house is old, and not in the historical way. We are upgrading the structure, but it’s ...

In the initial discussions around EMR (electronic medical records) incentives, some solution providers believed that doctors would literally be knocking down their doors. After all, who would turn down “free” technology that could help them run their business better? Shifting medical records to a digital format eliminates a mountain of paper, as well as the tremendous costs associated with filing and retrieving it on a perpetual basis.Of course, medical professionals and the IT community found o ...

In general, companies avoid unnecessary risks and will invest in any cost-effective methods that will lessen dangers to their business. Some hazards are easy to prevent, or at least insure against—such as fire or theft, while others are more obscure and present a real challenge to those unfamiliar with prevention methods.That’s the position many businesses are in when it comes to cloud and security services. The prospect of accessing and backing up critical business systems via the Web seems con ...