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Redmond, Big Blue Betting on Managed Services

Opportunities are so ripe in the managed services space that recent proclamations from both IBM and Microsoft prove there is more than enough room in this still burgeoning business technology niche.

Big Blue said recently it intends to make a push into the channel to get VARs to sell more security and managed services solutions to SMBs; this, according to company evangelists at July's IBM Security Summit.

IBM essentially said at the summit that its strategy for selling such services would be to provide incentives to resellers already selling IBM products but that this could also be an avenue to potential partner MSPs.

IBM's announcement of its commitment to more managed service offerings and initiatives comes at the same time that Microsoft is pitching its cloud computing offering to VARs, a cloud initiative with a textbook managed services focus.

At the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference there was much more emphasis on managed services than there had been in previous years, when it was all about selling software and related services through the channel.

To that end, Microsoft's SaaS-based managed services platform for maintaining and securing Windows devices called, Windows Intune, is in the beta stages.

Posted by Jabulani Leffall on July 14, 2010


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