SMB Market

If you're an old-school iPhone user who still has one of AT&T's unlimited data plans, be prepared for a rude awakening.

Ingram Micro launches major national Partner Enablement Roadshow

AT&T will launch new cloud-based unified communications services on Thursday, giving businesses the ability to integrate chat, email, voice over IP calls, audio and video conferencing and more over desktops and many mobile devices.

In a move to broaden its offerings for the growing network intelligence and diagnostics market, telecom equipment manufacturer Net Optics recently announced the acquisition of network analytics software provider nMetric.

AT&T today unveiled data plans for new smartphone and tablet customers that will take effect on Sunday.

How to retain profitability within the channel is an issue vendors, distributors and resellers have to constantly stay focused on

Virtualisation is dominant in the enterprise market today, but how is it faring in the SMB space? ARN brought together a collection of channel players and vendors to discuss the opportunities and challenges for virtualisation technology in the smaller end of town.

ARN recently held a roundtable on selling virtualisation to SMBs. Attached are highlights from the recent event.

One highly-debated topic raised during the roundtable was whether resellers were investing in building managed and cloud services to meet increased customer demand.

One of the questions raised by Dell’s Jon McBride was how resellers were taking virtualisation in their customer base to the next level. While many clients claim to have deployed virtualisation extensively, a bit of digging shows many only have about 10 per cent of their environment on virtual technology.

It’s not new technology, but to SMBs, virtualisation can still be a scary unknown quantity. MATTHEW SAINSBURY investigates ways partners and vendors can allay those fears to the profit of everyone.

It's a great time to set up a small business. The Web gives even the littlest operation enormous reach, while vendors now sell small-business technology that delivers unbelievable bang for the buck.

There's a special place reserved for the stalwart hardware that many of us have depended on day after day, year after year. Or at least, we believe there should be a special place.

Figuring a good sales compensation plan is like making oil and water blend smoothly. Sales people always think management is cheating them out of commissions. Management always thinks sales people are stealing them blind. Owners of smaller companies who manage the sales people themselves often focus on the dollar paid in commission rather than thinking of the associated $20 of company revenue.

Just because you don't have a large enterprise doesn't mean you can't run your IT operation like the big guys. Here are seven ways to help your SMB--a small or medium-size business--implement some of the lessons big IT operations have learned over the years. Using these tips, you should be able to improve productivity, cut costs, and keep your business running smoothly.

InTechnology: The first of 10 interviews with channel-relevant technology companies that have achieved significant growth over the last three years

In an interview with IT veteran, Kaz founder and Hostech executive chairman, Peter Kazacos, discusses why businesses need to prepare for the NBN, opportunities in regional Australia and the integration of all the acquired business.

It’s been a big year for Cisco in more ways than one. Across its global operations, the networking powerhouse was, like many of its peers, hit pretty hard by the economic downturn.

Ingram Micro was caught in a whirlwind of economic forces this year, and its newly installed Australian vice-president and general manager, Jay Miley, found himself quickly anchored in the middle of it.

Westcon Group is confident its focus on core technologies such as collaboration, security, storage and networking will help it ride out the economic storm. General manager, Wendy O’Keeffe, caught up with ARN to discuss the state of the market and the distributor’s position in 2009.

It probably won’t surprise you to know that companies in Australia are using social media as a core part of their business strategy in greater numbers every day. This includes Dell, Coca-Cola, V Australia and Toyota to name a just a few high profile organisations.

Virtually every IT organisation is feeling the impact of the global downturn. But there is a silver lining. It provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo, eliminate ineffective systems and services, and make changes that management has previously refused to consider.

I hear people talking about selling solutions all the time. What they normally mean is that they want to bundle together as many products as possible to increase the sale to the customer. That to me is NOT a solution sale. It’s a drive for revenue and ultimately not something that is good business.

Australia may have been doomed to follow the world into recessions past, but some dire predictions notwithstanding, there’s a real sense of optimism on this occasion that we can ride the storm and come out stronger than many nations.

Since my first column on Gershon (ARN, July 23), Sir Peter has departed our fair shores and left a series of challenging and optimistic recommendations in a report laid down (presumably) with some gusto on Minister Lindsay Tanner’s table. Last week, Tanner stated the recommendations would be adopted completely in full.