For RCP 350 partner AvePoint, the company's level of co-sell achievement with Microsoft is a point of pride.
"AvePoint is one of the leading co-sell partners globally, and we're shooting for number one," says Christian Buckley, AvePoint's Microsoft go-to-market director. AvePoint is on the RCP 350, a qualitative list compiled by Redmond Channel Partner of the strongest Microsoft partner companies in the United States. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on June 01, 20210 comments
Visitors to the Queue Associates Web site are immediately greeted with the declaration that it is "a global Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and leading Microsoft Dynamics 365 consultancy, in business for three decades."
No mistaking its commitment to Microsoft technologies. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on May 20, 20210 comments
The Henson Group is fully onboard with Microsoft's pledge to become carbon negative by 2030.
Microsoft made the commitment as a company in January 2020, setting a 10-year deadline to capture more planet-heating carbon dioxide than it emits. The company also pledged that by 2050 it would remove the equivalent of all the carbon dioxide it's released since 1975 when the company began. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on April 22, 20210 comments
After 28 years of brilliant service devoted to the partner channel and customers, David Willis has retired as Microsoft's U.S. channel chief .
Dave's is a record of ever-increasing success in which he served as vice president of Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners (SMS&P) in Canada, and eventually moved to the same channel chief role in the United States, after stints as Eastern Region VP for SMS&P and as U.S. Dynamics VP. He's been running Microsoft's U.S. channel since 2013, although the organizational name changed in 2017 to become U.S. One Commercial Partner (OCP). More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on April 20, 20210 comments
Tyler Bryson was recently announced as the new Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft U.S. One Commercial Partner organization, replacing longtime partner champion David Willis who is leaving Microsoft after 28 years.
Bryson, himself an 18-year Microsoft veteran, sat down to talk with me recently about his vision for the channel and the industry as he takes up these important reins. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on March 01, 20210 comments
Today's managed service provider (MSP) is faced with a challenge: The downright glut of refugee resellers that have migrated to the MSP ranks without doing the hard work is making it very difficult for those who have done the work to rise.
Some refer to it as a "race to the bottom" for MSPs as they try to deliver excellent service while competing with ridiculously low rates set by those who have no idea what they are doing. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on January 04, 20210 comments
It's the IT equivalent of alchemy -- magically turning a large cost-center into a big profit-producer for client after client and, by doing so, dramatically increasing efficiency and effectiveness in their organizations without adding capital investments.
You take something often considered to be a "necessary evil" and convert it into one of the greatest strategic weapons in your client's arsenal. And you turn one of their biggest frustrations into your greatest illustration of innovation. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on December 28, 20200 comments
The quest for relevance continues. When you first became an integrator it was pretty straightforward. You were considered superior based on your ability to identify the best choice of server, storage, router, switch and other network components, and bring them together to build a better system solution, preferably at a lower cost.
Then came the cloud.
Suddenly, most of the components you brought together, and sold, were being operated somewhere else by someone else. You still got the opportunity to integrate routers, switches, firewalls and other networking components, but the servers and storage were pretty much lost to you. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on December 22, 20200 comments
Are you doing everything you can to get your clients to see you as their trusted technology partner? Stop. You're selling yourself short and severely limiting the revenue and profit you can be generating from each client.
You absolutely want to be trusted; anybody in business wants to be trusted. Trust is a core component of any lasting business relationship. But by focusing on technology, you're not positioning yourself where you need to be in today's IT industry. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on December 17, 20200 comments
It's no secret that your experience, your skills, your expertise are valuable -- very valuable. They're the result of big investments. The mystery is why you'd ever give away any of the service value those investments have created. Yet MSPs often offer up their capabilities at no charge.
Learn how to leverage the art of assumptive selling to always receive the fees you've earned. What do you sell? There are so many ways to answer that simple question, and the way you choose to answer it says a lot about who you are, where you're at and what you should be thinking about next. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on November 12, 20200 comments
Today's IT requires more telecom services, more cloud services, more subscriptions than ever. Each one has its own pricing complexity to confound and confuse.
The MSP who is as adept at configuring the most cost-effective licensing and subscription strategy earns far more appreciation by protecting their customers' budgets. Here's some guidance on how to master the services catalog.
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Posted by Howard M. Cohen on October 30, 20200 comments
You're traveling through a land not of sight nor of sound, but of mind. Well, no, it's not like that. This is not another dimension in the multiverse; it's just another channel. But it's about as large as the one you're in.
If you're from the IT channel, I'm referring to the telecom channel, and if you're from telecom, I'm talking about IT. Two remarkably separate channels operating side-by-side and intersecting far less often than you might think. More
Posted by Howard M. Cohen on September 25, 20200 comments