Brian Sherman Posts

From Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop stores, every organization needs solid IT security specialists who can audit current systems and policies, recommend and implement proper upgrades, and monitor and support it all. Explore our related security resources — including a trustmark, executive certificate and quick start guide — and make sure your solution providing organization is up to the task.

Solution providers who want to get the most value from their alliances delegate partner responsibilities to their most capable employees: trustworthy and creative individuals who understand what customers need. Finding someone who can uncover and comprehend the objectives and concerns of their colleagues can be tricky business. It takes someone with good listening skills, problem-solving capabilities and flexibility.

The value of a sales playbook — the comprehensive action plan designed to help build a better dialogue with customers — is proportional to the effort you put into it. Use this article to tackle the five key points you should first address when you’re developing a new sales playbook, from the plays to the equipment to the position to the team.

The Federal Communications Commission’s new Open Internet Initiative focuses on three basic principles: transparency, blocking and unreasonable discrimination. While the proposal seems to be a watered-down version of the rules overturned earlier this year by the United States Court of Appeals, ISPs need to start thinking about investing in infrastructure to enhance services for their largest customers.

Collaboration shouldn’t be just another buzzword in the channel vernacular. When providers actively engage with other value-added resellers, managed service providers, vendors, distribution partners or other industry professionals, their efforts can result in far more sustainable outcomes than if they were to operate on their own. From extending creativity and working capacity to providing a more comprehensive system of checks and balances, cooperative efforts can clearly produce meaningful results.

In today’s fast-paced and fiscally cautious business environment, it takes a flexible and proactive IT services organization to meet the needs — and demands — of commercial clients. Are you ready, willing and able to succeed when opportunities appear, even those that require significant and swift operational changes?

The portfolio prospects for solution providers have never been brighter, from advanced cloud solutions to the Internet of Things. But with so much effort required to transform an IT business — and the considerable time and fine-tuning it takes to prepare a new VAR offering for a full-scale rollout — providers, vendors and distribution executives should be investing time and attention into their future products and services.

It could be today, tomorrow or even next year. The best time to make major improvements in your organization is not when sales are down or the creditors are knocking on the door. Successful entrepreneurs watch for positive trends and thoroughly research the latest innovations so they are fully prepared to take advantage of the next big opportunity. They adapt their business model to tackle new challenges and continually watch for better ways to run their operations, expand their customer bases and build the overall value of their organizations.

Adding a significant number of new clients to your roster sounds like a positive, but many businesses aren’t built for dramatic expansion without at least some growing pains. Successful hypergrowth takes time, solid procedures and infrastructure improvements, according to “The 5 Secrets of Hyper-Growth,” a CompTIA webinar by Axcient’s Justin Moore. While his approach is nontraditional, it makes perfect sense to for open-minded MSPs.

Remote monitoring and management tools have been available to channel companies for quite some time. Just last week, a friend of mine sent me a link to the first article I ever wrote on managed services — from almost a decade ago — to congratulate me on 10 years of covering this industry-changing topic. Though it was just a brief mention from the former Gartner System Builders’ Summit and VARVision show, the Business Solutions magazine piece reminded me just how much the channe ...