Brian Sherman Posts

Life certainly doesn’t stand still, and neither does the IT world. Ten years ago, who would have thought that Apple products would be found in more than half the households in the U.S. or that mobility devices would be crucial business tools? Change is inevitable, but the technology we employ in our personal and corporate lives seems to be advancing at greater speeds each and every year. Some of those advancements have come about so quickly that they have become commoditized almost overn ...

When was the last time a client asked you to implement a unified communications (UC) solution? Chances are, it doesn’t happen often, but that doesn’t mean convergence isn’t in demand. Often times, business owners and managers know the goals they want to accomplish, but don’t know the platform to get there. If their objectives focus on improving customer service levels, creating greater sales team efficiencies or enabling remote workers with more access, unified communications should be part of t ...

This is the second of a two-part article commemorating the latest members of the IT Hall of Fame, who will be inducted April 11th at the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting in Chicago. The first honorees were the solution providers who helped found Ingram Micro’s Venture Tech Network (VTN), represented by Jane Cage, Steve Harper and Ted Warner. Today, we celebrate the work of the late Jacob “Jack” Goldman, a scientist with the vision to start one of the world’s most innovative research facilities.     ...

My county government conducts a full property assessment every 10 years and, thanks to errors in the contractor’s computer systems, I have had the pleasure of contesting their suggested value for our house two consecutive times. On paper, our house and the adjoining lot appear to be worth more than the ‘fair market value,” with several offsetting structural and neighborhood factors throwing off the numbers.Our house is old, and not in the historical way. We are upgrading the structure, but it’s ...

In the initial discussions around EMR (electronic medical records) incentives, some solution providers believed that doctors would literally be knocking down their doors. After all, who would turn down “free” technology that could help them run their business better? Shifting medical records to a digital format eliminates a mountain of paper, as well as the tremendous costs associated with filing and retrieving it on a perpetual basis.Of course, medical professionals and the IT community found o ...

Almost every sector of high-tech is booming and those upward trends look to continue for quite some time, but one group seems to be trailing a bit behind the curve. Despite the growth in numbers, the percentage of women in  IT (compared with men) has been in a decline over the past several years.     Research from the National Center for Women & Information Technology found that female IT industry employment reached its high point in 1991 at just 36 percent of the workfor ...

Almost every sector of high-tech is booming and those upward trends look to continue for quite some time, but one group seems to be trailing a bit behind the curve. Despite the growth in numbers, the percentage of women in  IT (compared with men) has been in a decline over the past several years.Research from the National Center for Women & Information Technology found that female IT industry employment reached its high point in 1991 at just 36 percent of the workforce. By 2009, that number ...

In general, companies avoid unnecessary risks and will invest in any cost-effective methods that will lessen dangers to their business. Some hazards are easy to prevent, or at least insure against—such as fire or theft, while others are more obscure and present a real challenge to those unfamiliar with prevention methods.That’s the position many businesses are in when it comes to cloud and security services. The prospect of accessing and backing up critical business systems via the Web seems con ...

What a wild 10 years it’s been in the IT channel. Earlier this week I attended one of the Level Platforms’ Road Shows in Columbus, Ohio, and, while listening to a number of MSP presentations and vendor presentations, I had a flashback to my first discussion on managed services. It was almost a decade ago when I sat down with Level’s CEO Peter Sandiford for a Business Solutions magazine interview at a Gartner ChannelVision event. Over the next two hours, he laid out the client and provider need f ...

Now that I have your undivided attention, let me confess that most solution providers won’t get rich simply by reading IT channel-related magazines and online posts. But by paying attention to a few publications and online news sources on a regular basis, they can track industry trends and better understand the events that can impact their business. IT channel-related media should be considered a free business intelligence resource, offering best practice articles and highlighting the technology ...