With effort, a little prodding and help from peers, Jamison West took a "one-man band" to a 30-person firm. His company, JWCS, acquired two other Seattle companies in the last year and relaunched July 1 as Arterian.
- By Scott Bekker
- July 01, 2011
WEB EXCLUSIVE: In a major change from BPOS, 20 hosters with value-added services will handle their own customer billing for Office 365. VARs and MSPs must still go through Microsoft in the Partner of Record model.
- By Scott Bekker
- June 30, 2011
Partners and sales teams are entering uncharted territory in cloud computing. Here are six tips for building a successful cloud practice.
- By Ken Thoreson
- June 01, 2011
It's one thing to be productive, but if your productivity comes at a high cost, you lose. Therefore, it's important to be efficient, too.
- By Keith Lubner
- June 01, 2011
WEB EXCLUSIVE: It's hard enough to sell a product without having first-hand experience of it. That's even more evident when the product is Microsoft Lync. For some partners, adopting Lync for their own use has proven to be the best way to help their clients.
- By Doug Barney, Scott Bekker
- May 30, 2011
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has revamped its TrueNorth Partner Program to include four new specializations, the company announced this week.
- By Gladys Rama
- May 19, 2011
While most of the analysis of Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype has focused on the consumer aspects of the deal, partners have responded enthusiastically and are seeing some opportunities for Skype alongside Microsoft Lync.
- By Scott Bekker
- May 12, 2011
Finally, the company enters a cloud market that's becoming increasingly crowded with other IT heavyweights, including IBM and Cisco.
- By Jeffrey Schwartz
- May 01, 2011
Traditionally, businesses monitor things like revenue, leads and phone calls made. All are important items to measure...but they only tell part of the story.
- By Keith Lubner
- May 01, 2011
It's when your business expands more than one degree of separation from your core offering that things unravel.
- By Mike Harvath
- May 01, 2011
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Which components of Microsoft's 350-strong product portfolio are the most important to its partners' businesses? To find the answer, we asked the partners themselves -- over 500 of them -- to pick the 10 they and their customers can't go without.
- By Scott Bekker
- April 26, 2011
WEB EXCLUSIVE: From the early acquisitions of Great Plains and Navision, to the Burgum-Nadella-Tatarinov executive shakeup, to the company's tentative first steps toward an "all-in" cloud approach, we spotlight the top 10 milestones from Microsoft's decade of Dynamics.
- By Scott Bekker
- April 15, 2011
With the launch of the Microsoft Partner Network in November, Microsoft forced 400,000 partners to decide how they'll fit their businesses into the new structure. In our annual survey, readers reported how they're planning to adapt.
- By Scott Bekker
- April 12, 2011
There was a distinct cloud slant at some of the major IT players' recent partner confabs, with Cisco, IBM and VMware each rolling out new programs to help their partners transition customers to the new computing paradigm.
- By Jeffrey Schwartz
- April 07, 2011
Building a strategic and effective sales management system is just like building anything else: It takes time, refinement and follow-through.
- By Ken Thoreson
- April 05, 2011