Sage Summit 2011: Tackling the Sage NA Branding Challenge

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Sage Summit 2011, Sage’s first combination partner and customer event. I’ve been attending Sage partner, customer and analyst events for several years, observing and commenting on its ongoing attempts to unify it’s corporate brand across multiple small and medium business (SMB) solutions. Earlier this year, following Sue Swenson’s [...]

What is Systems Management, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published March 23, 2011 in Small Business Computing)
What is Systems Management?
Systems management is an umbrella term that refers to the centralized management of a company’s information technology assets, and it’s one that encompasses many different tasks required to monitor and manage IT systems and resolve IT problems. Systems management solutions can help [...]

Dell 2.0: Top Takeaways from Dell’s Virtual Era Event

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Dell’s Solutions for a Virtual Era analyst and press event in San Francisco. At the event, Dell unveiled its new strategy to help companies more readily and easily provision computing capabilities to in the ubiquitous anytime, anywhere information era. At the event, Dell introduced several new hardware offerings based [...]

A Closer Look–Dell Managed Services for SMBs

Last April, I participated in Dell’s Managed Services launch for SMBs. At the event, Dell had a couple of customers on hand who were both very satisfied with the service. Later in the year, Dell asked my colleague Sanjeev Aggarwal and I to conduct a Dell-sponsored research study to learn more about how Dell Managed [...]

2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions

Fellow SMB analyst Sanjeev Aggarwal and I have teamed up to bring you our top ten technology related predictions-plus three bonus predictions–for the SMB (companies with 1-1000 employees) market for 2010. Details for each prediction follow the list below.
Remember to vote for your top prediction here!
2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions
1. Pent Up SMB [...]

What are Managed Services, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published in Small Business Computing, September 25, 2009)
Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add to the confusion by over-complicating things. To help add a sense of clarity [...]

Managed Services: Dell’s Next Disruption?

What do you get when you combine an industrial-strength managed services platform, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) desktop management solution, and a hardware vendor that transformed the PC and server industries with its direct, Internet sales model?
The answer is Dell’s ProManage Managed Services, which is built on Dell’s Silverback and Everdream acquisitions, web-based technologies, and Dell data [...]

Cloud Computing and Managed Services Opportunity – Is it the Large Enterprises or SMB/Mid-Market Enterprises?

The convergence of web delivered IT services – Cloud Computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Hosted Applications, Software-as-a-Service, Virtualization – will continue to redefine and add value to the SMB/mid-market IT services landscape, especially in the current economic climate.

Our outlook calls for rapid increase in adoption of various Cloud Computing and Managed Services components over the next 2-3 years [...]

IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Announcement and the Mid-Market Enterprise

With today’s ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’ initiative announcement, IBM is positioning itself as a holistic technology solution and service provider and partner. It combines all the element of separate cloud delivered services (cloud based, managed, and on-premise) and also traditional on-premise hardware, software and services.

Managed Services

Cloud Computing

Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Traditional on-premise based software, hardware and service

If IBM [...]