SMB Market

Samsung Electronics has acquired Nanoradio, a Swedish company that develops energy-efficient chipsets for Wi-Fi, it said on Friday.

Ann Livermore, a member of Hewlett-Packard's board of directors and a longtime head of the company's enterprise business, will be the first witness called when a court in San Jose, California, hears HP's lawsuit against Oracle for ending future development on the Itanium platform.

A fresh crop of ultrabooks sporting Intel's latest "Ivy Bridge" Core processors will start to go on sale next month, including 30 models with touchscreens, Intel said Thursday.

Windows 8 and ultrabooks are expected to take center stage at the Computex trade show in Taipei next week, as industry giants Microsoft and Intel try to develop products that can compete better against Apple's iPad.

Worldwide server shipments grew at a slower-than-expected clip during the first quarter of 2012, but Cisco, which has a small market share, beat market trends as top server makers struggled with slow demand and weak economic conditions, research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.

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.

2011 was a bad year for natural disasters. Several nations were rocked either by earthquakes, tidal waves, or floods. There was even a nuclear accident. But has the tumultuous year convinced businesses to bolster their disaster recovery?

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.

At a time when most businesses are looking to cut costs and leverage existing resources, channel partners may feel discouraged in the marketplace. But according to Lora Gernon, senior director of Microsoft Canada's partner group, there's actually no better time than now for partners to start having conversations with their customers.

It has been about eight months since Michael Bosnar replaced Sean Walsh as AppSense A/NZ managing director. HAFIZAH OSMAN spoke to him about some of the challenges the company has faced and the company’s expansion strategies.

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.

When it comes to his success, Anittel founder and CEO, Peter Kazacos, does not dwell on former glories. And why would he? The three year-old services company is successful in its own right, nabbing ARN’s SMB Reseller of the Year gong two years in a row.

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.