MSP Market a Shifting Landscape

If there's any constant with MSPs, it's change. Not that that's unusual in the technology industry, but MSPs seem to have changed models and strategies more in the last few years than most other companies in most categories. They even changed their name: remember Applications Service Providers?

Well, the change continues, as companies refine outsourcing strategies. The new thing, apparently, is great big companies using multiple MSPs rather than going with just one or two, and general flooding of competition in the MSP market. More

Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20080 comments


IT Hiring Slowing

Maybe that shaky economy is starting to fall apart after all.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments


Enterprise Search Stinks, Study Finds

There's probably something wrong when it's much, much easier to find Norris Weese's career passing yardage total (1,887) than it is to find critical information about your own company.

One survey suggest that enterprise search is just lame , which, to us, sounds as though somebody should capitalize on the opportunity to make it better.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments


Windows XP's Brave Final Days

It looks as though Microsoft is going to kill XP after all, despite flickers of hope to the contrary . In fact, Microsoft officials were pretty adamant about saying that XP isn't here to stay More

Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments


Microsoft Sets Hyper-V Free

In case you hadn't noticed, the first four letters in the word "hyper" are H-Y-P-E. And, until today, a lot of what we knew about the core product in Microsoft's virtualization strategy, the Hyper-V hypervisor, was just that: hype. (Well, hype and the fact that, as we've maintained , Hyper-V sounds like an '80s break-dancing name.) More

Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments


Symantec Integrates Management Apps

Apparently, Symantec's purchase of Altiris, now about a year old, is going fairly well. The security giant released a mega-suite this week called Endpoint Management Suite 1.0 .

It's got just about everything in it that a product of that name would seem to have, and Kevin Murray, senior director of product marketing at Symantec (and not the former Texas A&M quarterback) said that everything in the new suite actually works together.

More

Posted by Lee Pender on June 25, 20080 comments


Social Networking at Work: The SalesCentric Model

A couple of weeks ago, we pondered what, exactly, social networking in the office would be good for. Well, Christine responded to our questions with great enthusiasm:

"Social networking for higher ed rocks! LinkedIn -- keeping up with your students who have graduated! You know what they are doing, where they are doing it, and what we missed in their education to correct class content and keep up with the industry. It also helps us with our completer numbers as most of my students change their e-mails and cell phone numbers as often as they change their socks or add additional piercings and/or tattoos, and we need to follow up with them six months after they graduate.

"MySpace -- post your calendar, let your students know when you are in class, when you are gone, when your office hours are. They're looking here, not on your campus Web page! Second Life -- get your administration to sponsor an island...let the fun begin!"

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Posted by Lee Pender on June 25, 20080 comments


Microsoft's Lonely Patches

Apparently Patch Tuesday isn't exactly a national holiday yet, as most users choose to ignore it completely .

Posted by Lee Pender on June 25, 20080 comments


Another Brand Survey Crowns Google

Google beat out Microsoft (again) in a Harris Interactive poll this time.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 24, 20080 comments


As Gates Steps Out, Tributes Roll In

We intentionally gave, or tried to give, this entry a New York Times -sounding headline -- they always seem to start with a dependent clause -- because this is one of those times when the big-name, mainstream, non-business media are storming into our territory.

Oh, sure, the Newsweeks of the world write about technology a lot more frequently than they used to, but they still mainly show up just for the big events -- enormous product launches, executive departures and arrivals, earnings disasters (or, less frequently, blockbusters), that sort of thing. Down here in the trades, we grind out technology news every day. Only relatively rarely are we visited by our friends in the big-time.

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Posted by Lee Pender on June 24, 20080 comments


XP on Life Support...Or Is It?

Dell is giving XP one more week to live, and if we're to believe some reports from credible sources , Microsoft might be thinking of extending the stay of execution for the popular operating system, too.

Well, it only makes sense, doesn't it? Look, More

Posted by Lee Pender on June 24, 20080 comments