channel pro june 2016 issue

The Insider’s Guide to SMB

PEERTOPEERINFO SECURITY:FOCUS ON THE SIMPLE STEPS FIRST

Next-GenerationDigital SignageThe latest signage technologies help gain, and hold, the attention of today’s distracted consumer PAGE 24

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The Insider’s Guide to SMB

CONTENTS

ChannelPro: The Insider’s Guide to SMB

ChannelPro: The Insider’s Guide To SMB (ISSN 2167-4310) Vol.10, No.6 is published monthly by EH Publishing Inc., 111 Speen Street, Suite 200, PO Box 989, Framingham MA 01701-2000, 508-663-1500. @2016 EH Publishing Inc. ChannelPro: The Insider’s Guide to SMB is a pending registered trademark of EH Publishing Inc. All reproduction, including photocopying, is prohibited without written permission. Periodicals postage paid at Framingham, MA and additional mailing offices. Printed in USA. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ChannelPro-SMB, PO Box 989, Framingham, MA 01701-2000.

COVER STORYSee Me, Feel Me, Touch Me: Digital Signage Fights to Be Noticed By RICH FREEMANChannel pros are waging a battle for the attention of today’s distracted consumer with the help of next-generation signage technologies. Will they win it? Page 24

FEATURES 21 Scenes from the ChannelPro SMB Forum

Last month we hit the West Coast on the second stop of our 2016 “Channel Fitness Tour,” helping MSPs and VARs turn their businesses into lean, money-making machines.

28 Partner Program Tips and Tricks MEGAN SANTOSUS To reap valuable vendor benefits such as MDF, training, and leads you need to mine partner programs for all they are worth. These channel pros explain how.

DEPARTMENTS 2 Quick Hits A look at DevOps methodologies for MSPs, SANs and

software-defined storage, and more

8 SystemBuilderPro Price, Performance, and Relationships Rule in Education MARTIN SINDERMAN

12 Review ZyXEL’s AC2200 Wireless Gigabit Router: Fast and Affordable JAMES E. GASKIN

16 ChannelWise Your Feet Are Too Small! GIL CARGILL

30 ChannelBeat It Takes a Village to Enable a Partner RICH FREEMAN

32 ChannelGear Accelerate 2016: Growth, Growth, and More Growth MATT WHITLOCK

34 Peer to Peer Info Security: Focus on the Simple Steps First STEVE WELTMAN, CISSP

36 POV Supporting SMB Customers in the Cloud DAVE HAUSER

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY SCOTT KOHN

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QUICKHITSSMB NEWS AND VIEWS IN BRIEF

2 JUNE 2016

DevOps for MSPsDevOps methodologies are all the rage in the world of startups and web app management. Do they have anything to offer MSPs? By James E. Gaskin

DEVOPS, a term that’s a mashup of devel-opment and operations, is a practice that uses collaboration and automation to upend many old IT business methods. The tighter integration between programmers and IT ad-mins speeds improvements, and MSPs can lead the charge to help their customers.

David Powell, vice president of market-ing and strategic development at TekLinks Inc., an eight-office IT solutions provider headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., says, “With DevOps, you want to engage custom-ers early and adapt to meet the changes needed by the customers. And you need to stop thinking of DevOps as a software tool and consider it more of a mindset to meet customer needs.”

Technology and customers move fast today and MSPs must keep up. “Customer needs are changing so quickly, you need process to handle that. Call it ‘agile of DevOps’ or whatever,” says Powell. “It’s continual improvement that drives the DevOps methodology.”

“Software is eating the world. Software has also become a service,” says Jeff Suss-na, principal at Minneapolis-based Ingineer-ing.IT LLC, a small company that provides coaching and workshops for MSPs and SaaS companies, helping them go faster while im-proving quality and customer satisfaction. “People used to develop and sell software and the customer had to operate it. Now they pay to have you both provide the soft-ware and figure out if new servers and up-grades are needed.”

MSPs have to learn a new approach to service, says Sussna. “We recommend start-ing by automating one process. Leverage that success and change how people work together. Start small, learn, and then attack larger issues.”

Sussna sees too many companies deploy new code to production via conference calls and emails filled with checklists. Rarely does

the rollout go smoothly because it’s easy to forget a step. “Automate that process, and you’ll cut out a bunch of wasted time and ef-fort. You will stop making mistakes and start going at the speed of business.”

Where Applications Are CentralPowell encourages MSPs to develop ap-plication expertise by hiring programmers or business analysts. “Reports that every single server is working are great, but if the applications don’t work, we have failed the customer. Everything serves the applica-

tion today. A long time ago we had to figure out how to get this router to talk to another router and that switch. Now we spend much more time getting one application to talk to another application.”

“Your remote monitoring and management tools are just the first level of automation,” says Sussna. “You have to adopt a DevOps mindset to see automation across the entire process. It’s all about an overview of a complex system and how the pieces connect to each other. A lot of what I do is to proactively get stakeholders to solve problems together. It’s surprising how hard that is.”

An example Sussna gives is from his time as an MSP. “We ran into situations where our customers were unhappy but we weren’t doing anything wrong. But they didn’t un-derstand what we were doing and we didn’t understand what they needed. Once we started spending time with the customers as we built new products, the collaboration and understanding made things a lot easier.”

According to Sussna, Amazon is big-ger than other cloud providers because it’s focused on delivering new capabilities to help customers do things more quickly, not just to make its infrastructure cheaper. “You can no longer just be in the ‘this is what I do’ biz. You have to fill in the gap between what you do and what your cus-tomers need,” he says.

Powell sees a change in his custom-ers’ attitudes. “The line-of-business groups spend their money on applications. They’re not buying servers and SANs; they’re buying applications that need servers and SANs.” TekLinks got into DevOps-thinking early on, says Powell. “We’re now having discussions with customers we never used to have. If you’re not ready, this can be a jarring mind-set change.”

JAMES E. GASKIN is a freelance writer and former reseller based in Mesquite, Texas.

“Customer needs are changing so quickly, you need process to handle that. Call it ‘agile of DevOps.’”

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QUICKHITS

4 JUNE 2016

VENDOR TO WATCH

KIRILL BENSONOFF is looking for early adopters. That is, the company he founded, Framingham, Mass.-based Unigma, is looking for MSPs who want visibility into their customers’ servers, stor-age, applications, and databases on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and are willing to go with a startup that has created a tool to do just that.

In a nutshell, the Unigma cloud monitoring tool enables IT service providers to view met-rics for different customers and cloud services via a single pane of glass.

What prompted Bensonoff to create Unigma was the same thing that motivates many MSPs: necessity. In 2015, clients of ComputerSupport.com, the managed services busi-ness for which he is managing partner and CEO, were increasingly interested in using public clouds—specifically AWS and Azure—to host their infrastructure and applications, and he wanted to create a new services offering around those platforms.

Bensonoff’s team vetted a number of available products but couldn’t find one with the functionality they needed. “None of them [had] a single pane of glass, policy-driven alerting, or integration with an existing service desk,” he says, “and thus we decided to build our own.”

Pricing for Unigma is tiered. The “free forever” option lets MSPs monitor up to 15 cloud “resources,” meaning virtual machines, storage repositories, load balancers, and so on. The “pay per use” option costs $10 per resource per month beyond the free initial 15. Lastly, the “unlimited” plan costs $299 a month, and as the name suggests lets MSPs manage as many resources, customers, and clouds as needed.

Roughly 20 partners are currently using the tool, but Bensonoff looks to the future: “It’s critical for service providers to expand their offerings to encapsulate public clouds and give their customers the option of using whatever makes the most sense for their specific envi-ronment.” And when they do, Unigma will be waiting for them.—Cecilia Galvin

Unigma Inc. Location Framingham, Mass. Website www.unigma.com Description Unigma enables MSPs to view metrics from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure for different customers and cloud services via a single pane of glass.

WITH SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE solutions and appliance-based products like Micro-soft’s Azure StorSimple hybrid cloud storage offering increased affordability, the future of traditional storage area networks is in ques-tion. Or is it?

“Software-defined storage is beginning to open up a whole new venue for [people] to provide pretty good virtualization capabili-ties, and also to do a pretty good job of se-curity under the right circumstances,” says Walt Hubis, storage architect and owner of Hubis Technical Associates, a storage con-sultancy in Lafayette, Colo. However, he believes that it’s not an out-and-out replace-ment for SANs. “I’m seeing it more as an adjunct, especially as we’ve moved into a lot of what I would consider to be lower-cost systems.” These less expensive solutions, he adds, could be suitable for many SMBs.

But for midsize or larger businesses requiring scalable solutions, Lazarus Ve-kiarides, CTO and co-founder of ClearSky Data, a storage services provider in Boston, notes that software-defined storage doesn’t necessarily eliminate the issues associated

with traditional SANs. “You’re still going to have just as many disks as you had before, and just as many servers. Depending on the type of capabilities you want, you may even have more boxes than you had before because you may be doing complete mirror-ing,” he says.

Also, the components necessary to con-struct a software-defined solution don’t al-ways play well together. “If you’ve ever tried to build a storage array, you quickly find out that … all these disks, they’re not created equal, they’re not equally tested, they don’t all work exactly the same, [and] there are all sorts of nuances to getting these things working.” For IT organizations, this requires a significant investment in human resources.

That said, equipped with the right skill sets, channel pros stand to benefit from including software-defined storage in their portfolios, argues George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland LLC, a Dallas-based technology assessment and re-search firm. That’s not to say you should cut ties with your SAN providers; instead, it’s another option you can offer your customers.

“The resellers that I’ve worked with to de-velop that kind of a model have been quite successful,” Crump says.

Hubis notes that regardless of the specific solution, it all comes down to management. “I think that’s probably where the existing SAN infrastructure has some benefits, be-cause the management technique is well known, it’s well understood, and it’s comfort-able for a lot of people,” he says. “As we look at the way that storage continues to expand and grow, I believe that management is going to be a key part of it.”—Carolyn Heinze

Software-defined storage doesn’t eliminate issues associated with traditional SANs. “You’re still going to have just as many disks as you had before, and just as many servers.”LAZARUS VEKIARIDES CTO AND CO-FOUNDER CLEARSKY DATA

Are SANs Facing Obsolescence?

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6 JUNE 2016

‘Designer’ Cyberthreats on the UpswingDESIGNER CLOTHES, watches, handbags, fabrics, and even cars abound—but designer ransom-ware? Yep, it’s here now too. Recent research from SophosLabs, a global network of internet security researchers and analysts and part of Burlington, Mass.-based Sophos Ltd., points to a growing trend by the black hats to target—or filter out—specific countries when designing ransomware or other nefarious emails.

Seeking to entrap more victims by mak-ing threat-carrying spam look and sound more like authentic emails, the research says, cybercriminals have started using re-gional vernacular, counterfeit company lo-gos, and locally familiar payment methods.

To frighten recipients into action, moreover, the latest malware attacks impersonate local

postal companies, tax and law enforcement agencies, and utilities, sending phony ship-ping notifications, refunds, speeding tickets, and electric bills. And you’re less likely to see the telltale misspellings or sentence fragments that make malicious emails easier to spot.

And what about the places the spammers avoid? Sophos Senior Security Advisor Chester Wisniewski suggests malware writers often steer attacks clear of their own country to avoid de-tection or to misdirect blame. “It could be na-tional pride or perhaps there’s a conspiratorial undertone to create suspicion about a country by omitting it from an attack,” he says.

Though Western economies are targeted more than other nations by cybercriminals, they also have a lower Threat Exposure Rate

(TER), which measures malware infections per 1,000 Sophos endpoints in each country.

Based on data collected from January 1 to April 8 of this year, the five nations with the lowest TER are the United Kingdom at 2.8 percent, the United States at 3 percent, Aus-tralia at 4.1 percent, Canada at 4.6 percent, and France at 5.2 percent. Countries with the highest TER in the same time period in-clude Algeria at 30.7 percent, Bolivia at 20.3 percent, Pakistan at 19.9 percent, China at 18.5 percent, and India at 16.9 percent.

The takeaway for channel pros is this: “You have to look harder to spot fake emails from real ones,” says Wisniewski. “Being aware of the tactics used in your region is becoming an important aspect of security.”—Cecilia Galvin

Good News: Progress against Security RisksAT-A-GLANCEEMBEDDED WITHIN a new research study, Solarwinds IT Security Sur-vey North America, published last month by Austin, Texas-based software maker SolarWinds Worldwide LLC, is both good news and bad news about the state of IT security today. And the good news, essentially, is that there’s finally more than bad news to report.

Despite the ever-increasing volume and sophistication of secu-rity threats, 40 percent of respondents to the new study say their organizations are somewhat less vulnerable to attack this year than last, and another 10 percent say they’re much less vulnerable.

The study surveyed 221 IT professionals, managers, directors, and executives at North American SMBs and enterprises.

“Typically when we talk about security news and security surveys there’s a lot of bad news,” says Mav Turner, director of business strategy for security at SolarWinds, which makes both security soft-

ware and IT management systems. That there’s finally encouraging data to report “was something we felt was really great,” he adds.

Also striking, Turner notes, is how quickly study participants say they detect security incidents. For example, 63 percent say their com-pany typically identifies the presence of malware on their network with-in minutes, while 59 percent and 48 percent say they spot phishing attacks and cross-site scripting assaults, respectively, just as rapidly.

Even so, the new research underscores just how treacherous the security landscape remains. Fully 22 percent of surveyed compa-nies experienced a data breach in 2015, and an additional 7 per-cent suffered more than one. “There’s still a lot of work to be done,” Turner observes.

The full report can be found at www.channelpronetwork.com/ZZJ.—Rich Freeman

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Among respondents, 48 percent say their companies identify cross-site scripting attacks in minutes (average 23 minutes), but 39 percent report that detection takes days (average 2.8 days).

MAKING THE SWITCH TO WEBROOT: LIGHTER WEIGHT, MORE PROTECTION, INCREASED PROFITSTwo years ago, SWAT Systems had had enough of its latest anti-virus software. At that time, the Seattle-based MSP had used a succession of anti-virus products, and none of them worked particularly well. “The products were not a good fi t for us,” recalls David Blake, SWAT’s chief technology offi cer. “Our clients’ machines were still getting infected and the products were too resource-intensive.”

That’s where Webroot came in.To fi nd a better anti-virus software product,

SWAT consulted with the HTG Peer Group and also asked other MSPs for referrals. After hearing about Webroot and getting a demo, Blake says that SWAT was impressed enough by the lightweight nature of the product to switch from its legacy system. A week spent migrating 2,500 machines from the old system to Webroot was enough to convince Blake that SWAT’s selection of Webroot was a good move. “In switching those machines, we found that about 200 were infected with malware and adware that had not been detected by our previous defi nition-based anti-virus solution,” Blake says. The infected ma-chines were discovered when Webroot was installed and scanned those machines—machines that were ostensibly protected by the legacy software.

As if the infection episode weren’t enough, Blake says that Webroot continues to prove its worth during upgrades. At approximately 1 mega-byte, the Webroot installation package downloads to client endpoints nearly instantly. Compare that to the one hour SWAT spent previously per machine with the prior anti-virus software, and that adds up to signifi cant time and cost savings, Blake says. “Webroot has a footprint that is orders of magnitude smaller than our other endpoint protection product,”

Blake explains, “and it catches many things our previous system did not.”

As a result, Blake says that SWAT now enjoys better margins and can deliver more value to clients. Since Webroot effectively prevents the vast majority of malware and adware from infecting machines, SWAT’s employees are considerably more productive; they now spend more time provid-ing value-added security services to clients. “Our security contracts have increased profi tability 10 to 20 percent depending on the client, which enables us to dedicate more resources to those agree-ments. That makes our clients even more secure,” Blake says. That’s an important metric for SWAT, given that security is a component of nearly every managed services contract. “One of our selling points is that our clients don’t have to worry about their machines,” Blake says, adding that Webroot enables SWAT to provide that kind of service.

While Blake continues to appreciate Webroot’s technical capabilities, he’s also impressed with the partner experience. “Webroot makes a real effort to reach out to the MSP community and work with us,” he says. “It is great to partner with a vendor that listens to its core market.” One case in point: After hearing from MSPs that they wanted integration with RMM tools, Webroot integrated its software with Kaseya.

In every respect, Blake says, migrating to Web-root has been “an all-around win, which is very rare when you’re switching products in the MSP space.”

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8 JUNE 2016

SYSTEM BUILDERS who want to sell to schools will find that education is a growing market that is going through a period of change. One thing that has not changed, however, is that schools spend a lot of money on tech. The latest (2015) numbers for IT spending as a whole are $4.7 billion in the K–12 arena, and $6.6 billion in the higher-education realm, most of which goes to hardware and applications, according to Kelly J. Calhoun, Ed.D., research director, edu-cation, for research giant Gartner Inc.

Growth in Digital ResourcesThose are numbers that have been growing for the past several years, thanks to the continu-ing move, particularly in the K–12 segment, to-ward utilizing digital resources to support and/or supplant textbooks. “There is more demand for digital learning resources,” Calhoun notes, “with growing numbers of school districts mov-ing money over from print to the digital side.”

As a result, schools increasingly need devices for their students that enable them to access these digital resources. And they have historically looked for lower-cost de-vices to get the job done. “School districts have to make a business case for moving millions of dollars now spent on print cur-riculum/traditional textbook options into the digital side, and they can’t make that case by buying $2,000 desktops,” says Calhoun.

Indeed, pricing considerations have led a lot of schools to eschew desktops in favor of Chromebooks and other low-cost devices over the past three years or so, but that trend appears to be changing, according to John Samborski, CEO of Ace Computers, a large system builder and VAR based in Elk Grove Village, Ill. “They [the schools] have been trying to go on the cheap with $200 Chromebooks they hope will do the work of regular desktop machines. But they’re finding they aren’t getting the savings they

thought they would,” Samborski explains. Because Chromebooks don’t have the capa-

bility to do a lot of processing on their own, they are almost entirely dependent upon a steady network connection, and utilize a lot of network resources in the process, Samborski notes. So when a school opts for Chromebooks, “It often has to do a massive wireless infrastructure up-grade immediately after deployment,” he says.

Also, unlike desktops, Chromebooks are not commonly used in the business world, says Samborski, “and schools are realizing that they are not providing a real-world educa-tion to students by teaching them on machines that no one in the business world works with.” The result has been an increase in demand for desktops, Samborski says, “as schools look for something that gives them better performance and economy over the long term.”

One of the best ways smaller system builders can enter the K–12 market is by teaming up with a larger company such as Ace; Morrisville, N.C.-based Lenovo; or Equus Computer Systems, in Edina, Minn., says Samborski.

Device Differences in Higher EdThe device dynamics of the higher-edu-cation segment are different than those in K–12, according to Calhoun. Colleges and universities do buy laptops, desktops, and other devices for various uses, but typically not for students, who generally bring their own devices with them to school “and need a very device-agnostic environment.”

Calhoun says that system builders who want to crack the education market in general, and the K–12 segment in particular, need to familiarize themselves with school district buy-ing cycles and procurement procedures, which differ greatly from private-sector entities. For example, the fiscal year for most school sys-tems starts July 1, she says, “so you often see

them closing out budgets in March, and then gearing up to make purchasing decisions for the next year in April and May.”

Meanwhile, Calhoun adds, “The vendors that are really successful in education are the ones that are good at relationship-build-ing.” For K–12 buyers, “There is a comfort level that comes from working with vendors that know them, their requirements, and the demands of the environment they work with,” she notes.

Finally, remember that references count. “Very often in education,” she says, “the first question you will be asked is, ‘Who else are you working with?’”

MARTIN SINDERMAN is an Atlanta-based freelance writer.

“There is more demand for digital learning resources, with growing numbers of school districts moving money over from print to the digital side.” KELLY J. CALHOUN, ED.D. RESEARCH DIRECTOR EDUCATION, GARTNER INC.

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12 JUNE 2016 ChannelProNetwork.com

REVIEW

IN CASE YOU MISSED THE MEMO, it’s a wireless world today that will be even less wired tomorrow. Supporting every wired device in a resi-dential, departmental, or small business situation likely means an upgrade from an older 802.11b/g router to one that supports all those protocols plus 802.11n/a/ac with some fancier frequency controls. New products are shipping regularly, including the AC2200 MU-MI-MO Dual-Band Wireless Gigabit Router (Figure 1) from ZyXEL Com-munications Inc., in Anaheim, Calif. Yes, that’s a long name for a small router, and one that doesn’t include the NBG6815 part number that the company uses just often enough to confuse us.

The feature list will be familiar if you’ve researched Wi-Fi rout-ers in the past couple of years. “Dual-band” means 2.4 GHz for 802.11b/g and 5 GHz for 802.11a/ac (/n straddles both) frequen-cies are supported. MIMO is marketing speak for “multiple input multiple output,” a technology that has helped router performance take a jump up starting less than 10 years ago. Cynics say it just means multiple antennas, but every little bit helps. The MU stands for multiple users. Yes, marketing again, but ZyXEL does claim some innovative ways to allocate bandwidth more efficiently between users.

In the past, ZyXEL flaunted a colorful yet industrial design palate relying on silver metal boxes with a splash of red. This router’s design is softer, unobtrusive, and meant to visually disappear within the modern home or office. The attached stand reclines the box at a gentle angle, and when mounted on a wall, both stand and router still look good.

Like the majority of Wi-Fi routers today, the AC2200 includes a WAN port and four LAN ports. Also included are two USB ports for printers or storage devices. The buttons you can barely see include an on-off button—which is handy during setup—on-off for the Wi-Fi ra-dios, and an option to turn off the icon display showing power on, inter-net access, and whether or not the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radio frequen-

cies are working (Figure 2). This is a better option than the tape users have put on some devices to lower the distraction level of the lights.

Configuration FunThe retail-designed box held the router, a Quick Start Guide, a yellow Ethernet patch cable, and a small power brick. A detailed manual awaits online.

Setup suffered for two reasons: The instructions say to connect the AC2200 router to your WAN link before configuration. We found the router “disappeared” by passing through IP addressing details from the upstream router, making it harder to connect directly to the router for setup. And while Step 1 says attach your computer to the router via the Ethernet patch cord, Step 4 says connect wirelessly for setup.

The next issue we can blame on Microsoft and/or our test laptop. ZyXEL recommends using a browser supporting HTML5 in general and Microsoft IE version 9 or above. Yet the admin page rendering on the Easy Mode option was unreadable. The Expert Mode rendered clearly. So we upgraded IE 9 to IE 11, but still no joy.

Our Firefox browser rendered the Easy Mode page, but couldn’t find the router using the http://myrouter address. IE could find the router that way, but couldn’t display the screen correctly. It took a while to get all that organized, primarily by using Firefox and the specific IP address for the router to configure the details.

For many installations, the “eaZy 123 Setup” screen will do most of your work (Figure 3). Assuming your cable modem or upstream router has internet access and DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) turned on, which is the default, Step 1 is handled. Step 2 allows you to change the SSID to something more descriptive, and you can handle both radios at once. And, of course, write down your settings before you get interrupted.

Fast and AffordableThe 2200 in the name AC2200 comes from combined wireless bandwidth totals of the two radios: up to 1,733 Mbps on the 5 GHz band and up to 450 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz side. All vendors use these

ZyXEL’s AC2200 Wireless Gigabit Router: Fast and AffordableThe company’s MU-MIMO, dual-band unit has both the range and speed of routers costing up to twice as much. By James E. Gaskin

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REVIEW

numbers, but no routers deliver such performance in real life. But based on what we’ve tested in the past, the AC2200 has the range and speed of routers costing up to twice as much.

Looking sleek without any external antennas, the AC2200 still pro-vided usable bandwidth as far away, and through as many walls, as the leading routers in our past tests. We were sure the lack of bug-like antennas would reduce the range, but credit ZyXEL for fitting good performance into a good-looking case.

ZyXEL makes much of its StreamBoost technology, as well as the QoS-type bandwidth priorities settings that let you rank devices (1, 2, 3, etc.) that get the most bandwidth when the network gets busy (Figure 4). Expe-rienced admins will tell you raw bandwidth fixes a multitude of problems, but the ability to make sure the boss, or the boss’s administrative assistant, gets an adequate slice of a limited bandwidth pie makes sense.

ZyXEL stresses the video streaming prowess of the AC2200 for the home user, but businesses need just as much video streaming today. Surveillance cameras, YouTube, training videos, and FaceTime-type applications require as much or more streaming support as Net-flix. Video streaming and speed tests showed the AC2200 to be the equal of earlier routers with external antennas and a larger price tag.

Fans of mobile phone management will enjoy the One Connect feature. Using a QR code provided in the admin screens, you can load ZyXEL’s management app to your iPhone or Android smartphone. Op-tions 4 and 5, Routing Table and Traceroute, provide information the main console screens don’t for some reason. At least we couldn’t find that info except in the phone app.

SummaryGood looking, good performance, and great price. It’s hard to beat the combination of features built into the ZyXEL AC2200 MU-MIMO Dual-Band Wireless Gigabit Router. When you’re ready to upgrade your Wi-Fi to support all the smartphones and tablets in the office, take a look at the AC2200.

JAMES E. GASKIN is a freelance writer and former reseller based in Mesquite, Texas.

SPECIFICATIONS AND PRICING (COURTESY OF ZYXEL)

PRICING $139 street

WIRELESS STANDARD➤ 802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz➤ 802.11 a/n/ac 5 GHz

WIRELESS SPEED➤ TRANSMIT 450 Mbps for 2.4 GHz, 1,733 Mbps for 5 GHz➤ RECEIVE 450 Mbps for 2.4 GHz, 1,733 Mbps for 5 GHz

WIRELESS SECURITY WPA/WPA2, WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK

WIRELESS FEATURES➤ Guest Wi-Fi➤ Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS)➤ Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM)➤ Auto channel selection➤ Wireless scheduling➤ Wireless output power management➤ MAC address filtering

ROUTING➤ Network Address Translation (NAT)➤ WAN type: Static IP, DHCP, PPPoE➤ DHCP server/client➤ IGMP v1/v2➤ Dynamic DNS➤ Auto-IP change➤ IPv6

VPN PASS-THROUGH IPSec/PPTP/L2TP

F IREWALL Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), denial-of-service (DoS) prevention

APPLICATION CONTROL➤ Usage monitor➤ Smart QoS (StreamBoost)➤ Parental control➤ ZyXEL One Connect

U SB SUPPORT Mass storage support by SMB/CIFS/FTP, print server

MEDIA SERVER DLNA

SYSTEM MANAGEMENT➤ Online firmware upgrade➤ Remote management➤ Wake on LAN➤ UPnP

Figure 3

Figure 4

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16 JUNE 2016

NO, THIS ISN’T AN ARTICLE about buying or selling shoes. Rather, the reference I make in the title is to the size of your marketing footprint. In today’s crowded, competi-tive sales arena, the team that has the best and biggest marketing footprint is, more often than not, the team that gets the majority of the new leads. Let’s examine the two components of your marketing footprint.

Your ReachThe first component is your reach. Reach is determined by examining the number of demographically desirable opportunities in your marketplace. Once you’ve deter-mined how many opportunities exist in your market, compare that number to the number of contacts in your database. It’s relatively easy to determine the number of demographically desirable companies in any geography by contacting a list broker.

Once you’ve contacted the broker, ask him or her for a count of demographically identical companies to those companies you have already sold and served. A list broker will ask you some questions to determine the at-tributes of the companies that you’ve served. Once that’s done, the broker will provide you with a count. This ser-vice is most often offered without charge or obligation.

So if the broker says there are 10,000 companies in your marketplace and you have 100 companies in your marketing database, then your reach is 1 percent. Your goal should be to reach 100 percent of those de-mographically desirable companies. Obviously, this is a goal that is difficult to achieve, but the closer you get the more leads you will receive.

The Frequency VariableThe second and most important variable in your market-ing footprint calculation is frequency. Even if you have 100 percent of the demographically desirable companies in your database but you are not touching them often enough, you will not generate enough leads to satisfy your growth and profit goals. Recent studies show that inbound inqui-ries need to be responded to within a matter of minutes.

In fact, The InsideSales.com/MIT Lead Response Management Study, published by InsideSales.com Inc. and Dr. James Oldroyd, professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, shows that the difference between a five-minute response time to inbound inquiries and a 10-minute response time is a reduction in the probabil-ity of success by 400 percent! When I learned that, I was alarmed. That’s because I can remember when three,

four, or even five days was considered an appropriate response time to an inbound inquiry.

Perhaps my age is showing, but the market today re-quires very rapid response and frequent, repetitive touches. The frequency that Oldroyd recommends is 15 touches in 15 days. His study is scientific, and he looked at thousands of leads to determine these optimum success factors.

So, what’s your frequency? If you’re adhering to the old-school philosophy of 6.7 touches in one year (I’ve preached that thousands of times in the past 40 years), you’re likely missing some opportunities. I encourage you to dramatically increase the frequency of your touch-es with your customers.

The simple math of reach x frequency will help you de-termine your marketing footprint. The bigger the footprint, the more inquires you’ll receive. What’s more, these are two variables that are very easy for you to control.

GIL CARGILL is the founder of Cargill Consulting Group Inc., a sales acceleration consulting firm in Los Angeles that he founded in 1978. He has taught salespeople across diverse industries the importance of developing sales processes, the ad-vantages of implementing new technology, and the benefits of tracking sales performance.

If a list broker says there are 10,000 companies in your marketplace and you have 100 companies in your marketing database, then your reach is 1 percent.

Your Feet Are Too Small!In today’s crowded, competitive IT services market, you must increase your marketing footprint to fill your sales pipeline. By Gil Cargill

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MAY THE 4TH BE WITH YOU! That was the rallying cry at the ChannelPro SMB Forum in sunny Garden Grove, Calif., on May 4, 2016, where IT professionals (and Star Wars fans) gathered for a full day of business-building sessions, presentations, leader-ship videos, hands-on hardware demos, and a showcase of solutions and services for SMBs and channel partners alike.

Thank you to our Platinum sponsors HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Pre-Day and Gold sponsor LOGICnow Ltd.; additional Gold sponsors Cytracom LLC, Data Deposit Box Inc., Datto Inc., Eaton Corp., and StorageCraft Technology Corp.; as well as our many Silver sponsors.

Photography by Steve Phelps, 8612 Images

Last month we hit the West Coast on the second stop of our 2016 “Channel Fitness Tour,” helping MSPs and VARs turn

their businesses into lean, money-making machines.

Scenes from the ChannelPro SMB Forum

➊ Master Yoda greets attendees who gathered at the StorageCraft Technology Corp. table, offering up some company swag. ➋ Erick Simpson, SPC International Online Inc.; Dave Seibert, IT Innovators; Zack Schuler, Ninjio LLC; and Ro Kolakowski, 6th Street Consulting, discuss ways to increase managed services revenues. ➌ An attendee tosses a lighted Death Star ball during a T-shirt challenge. ➍ Karl Palachuk, president of Small Biz Thoughts, and his brother Manuel, principal of Manuel Palachuk International, don their Jedi robes and vie for votes as they offer advice on improving business processes.

➊

➋

➌ ➍


➎ Gil Cargill, Cargill Consulting Group, and Gary Beechum, SPC International Online Inc., provide straight talk about market-ing and selling cloud solutions. ➏ One of the benefits of the forum is the free exchange of ideas and best practices, as well as business cards. ➐ Alan Helbush (left) and Jim Muglia flank Todd Haugland of LOGICnow, who went home with the company’s Best in Show award. ➑ It’s gratifying to see attendees not only listening and asking questions, but taking notes too! ➒ Mark Pearlstein (left) and Larry Nicholas agree to “Say No to Booth Babes” with Brittani Von Roden of CloudPlus, which was honored with Best Selfie Video and Best Showcase Presentation (Silver sponsor) awards. ➓ The networking started the evening of May 3 with a cocktail reception hosted by industry association CompTIA.

➎ ➏

➐ ➑

➒

➓


ATE IN 2014, researchers in Microsoft’s Canadian subsidiary surveyed 2,000 peo-ple to see if the internet, mobile devices,

and social media services really were shortening attention spans as widely suspected. The results? On average, study participants could concentrate on one thing for just eight seconds. That’s down from 12 seconds as recently as the year 2000, and also one second less than the attention span of a typical goldfish.

There’s no question about it. In a world teeming with distractions, grabbing and hold-ing a consumer’s attention is harder than ever—even for providers of flashy, colorful digi-tal signage solutions. The endless parade of visual stimuli competing for your notice these days has eroded the eye-catching power of tra-ditional signage deployments based on plain old rectangular, flat-panel displays.

“We are so inundated with information from our smartphones to our tablets, laptops, and most recently digital signage, that new shapes, sizes, and locations will be needed to empha-size a message and make it memorable,” says digital signage analyst Alan Brawn, of Brawn Consulting LLC, in Vista, Calif.

Signage vendors know it, too, and are re-

sponding with a wave of innovative new tech-nologies designed to be all but un-ignorable. Though some are years away from mainstream status, leading-edge channel pros are exploring their potential already.

Jaw-Dropping and Budget-BustingMuch of today’s innovation, not surprisingly, centers around the part of a digital signage solution more responsible than anything (short of the content) for attracting and retaining a viewer’s gaze: the display.

OLED displays, for example, are one of sev-eral new technologies slowly making their way into the signage solution designer’s arsenal. Brighter and sharper than LCD panels, OLED models also come in larger sizes that enable signage specialists to create wall-filling solu-tions without assembling a mosaic of separate, smaller devices.

“It’s completely seamless,” says Gary Pinke, president of Ridgewood, N.J.-based signage provider Ten Foot Digital, of solutions built with giant OLED displays, adding that such systems are becoming steadily more common too. “The prices are coming down, so I’m seeing them be-ing used in more creative places,” he says.

cover story

Channel pros are waging a battle for the attention of today’s distracted consumer with the help of next-generation signage technologies. Will they win it?

By Rich Freeman • Photography by Scott Kohn

DIGITAL SIGNAGE FIGHTS TO BE NOTICED

See Me, Feel Me

TOUCH ME

Hussain Ali, principal of Houston Dynamic Displays, installed 63 HD displays at the Houston Museum of Science grouped in an “L” shape that’s 65-feet wide on the longest side, 25-feet wide on the shortest, and about 8-feet high. The screens are arranged into seven groups of nine, each with its own controller, so they can play separate content simultaneously or the same content all at once.

ChannelPro: The Insider’s Guide to SMB JUNE 2016 25


“Ultra-high-definition” (Ultra HD) 4K displays are gradually appearing in signage solutions now as well. Until recently, afford-able high-resolution panels topped out at 65 inches, notes Hussain Ali, principal of Hous-ton Dynamic Displays, a signage solution consultancy in Houston. Thanks to 4K tech-nology, however, equally sharp products up to 98 inches have begun arriving in mounting numbers. Pricing for such products, moreover, is rapidly dropping into the range of merely high-def panels, and Ali believes their dazzling brightness and clarity can more than justify the extra cost in settings where image quality matters, such as museums. “[If] you’ve got the right content, it’s jaw-dropping,” he says.

Finding such content is neither cheap nor simple at present, though, and Pinke

for one questions whether a typical SMB re-ally needs the extra resolution a 4K display provides. “The distance people are viewing these at is just greater than you need 4K for,” he says. “The ROI just doesn’t quite cut it yet to do 4K versus HD.”

Pinke is one of many in the signage channel with similar doubts about the curved displays manufacturers have recently begun shipping. LG and Samsung are two of several vendors that showcased such products at this year’s Digital Signage Expo in February, but while they do make an impression, Pinke concedes, they’re also significantly pricier than flat pan-els and typically not as sharp. “The resolution on them is still a little loose,” he says.

On the other hand, curved displays open up an entirely new range of possibilities,

Pinke observes, citing a restaurant he sup-ports as an example. The owner wants to attach a display showing upcoming orders to a round column near a serving station. In the past, the only option would have been a flat panel that stuck out at both ends. Now Pinke can theoretically use a curved display that lies flat against the pillar instead.

Curved displays offer more than just practical advantages too. Last November, for example, LG Electronics rolled out what it called the world’s two largest OLED displays at South Korea’s Incheon International Air-port. Composed of 140 55-inch curved pan-els, the two installations exert a visual impact that equally large flat displays can’t match.

According to Brawn, however, it’s too soon to know if solutions like that will prove to be more than just a novelty. “Only time will tell if they will become a trend, but they make great food for thought,” he says, noting that prices for curved displays will need to drop substan-tially before they become anything more than a sporadic presence in signage solutions, es-pecially in the SMB market.

Interaction vs. IntrusionOne recent phenomenon that Brawn does ex-pect to endure is the rise of proximity-based signage solutions capable of exchanging in-formation with nearby smartphones. “This will not supplant traditional digital signage, but enhance it and it expand it beyond the big displays in a local area,” Brawn predicts.

Jason Ault agrees. “It’s a way to entice the customer to further interact with your brand,” says Ault, who is co-founder and COO of Coffman Media, a digital signage so-lution provider in Dublin, Ohio.

For example, he continues, retailers can automatically give shoppers one-click access to live chat assistance or in-depth product information based on their location in a store, while restaurant owners can auto-matically send digital menus to diners when they arrive at their table. In a different but equally compelling vein, hospitals, universi-ties, and other organizations that use digi-tal wayfinding solutions can automatically transfer step-by-step directions from a sta-tionary display or kiosk to a visitor’s phone.

According to Ali, businesses can also gain valuable insights from proximity-based

The main terminal at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport showcases two OLED displays from LG Electronics. Each is composed of 140 55-inch curved panels that are light enough to be hung from the ceiling.

cover story

See-Through SignageOLED TECHNOLOGY can do more than power unusually bright, sharp displays. Manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and Planar are using it to create an emerging class of transparent screens as well.

“The applications for that, creatively speaking, are really exciting,” says sig-nage pro Gary Pinke. Businesses can place displays in a window without blocking out light, for example, or superimpose video, images, and text on top of physical objects in a showroom.

Just make sure you have a compelling, strategic reason to invest in a transpar-ent display and enough budget to fund strong content. “Without it, the display doesn’t do anything,” Pinke cautions.


applications about purchasing habits, in-store traffic patterns, and more. “People are able to collect a lot of analytics,” he says, which they can then use to improve store layouts, product selection, and sales offers.

At present, most proximity-based signage solutions rely on miniature beacons that ex-change information with mobile devices via Bluetooth using one of three dominant stan-dards: Apple’s iBeacon, Google’s Eddystone, or the AltBeacon specification from Radius Networks Inc., of Washington D.C. All three have pros and cons. The great strength of so-lutions based on iBeacon, for example, is their ability to act on information stored in apps on a user’s smartphone, such as their shirt size or standard latte order. The big problem with solutions like that, though, is how intrusive they can appear. “Some folks do see them as kind of Big Brother,” Ault notes.

Businesses worried about such reactions should consider using Eddystone instead, he continues, as it lets solutions interact with users anonymously, and has the added advantage of being developer-friendly. “It’s adaptable [and] easy to implement,” Ault says, in part because it can connect with ordinary websites rather than mobile apps.

Look Ma, No GlassesAdding smartphone content is just one way to teach old-school signage solutions new tricks, however. Adding sound is another. People have been doing that for years, but only in settings where no one was likely to complain about the noise. These days, “directional audio” systems like HyperSound, from San Diego-based Turtle Beach Corp., are enabling signage providers to create soundtracks that only people standing in front of a display and within a limited range can hear.

“It’s a phenomenal product,” says Ault, who recently used it in a solution at a techni-cal academy. Installed in a student common area, the system broadcasts information about the school to campus visitors without disturbing people studying or talking nearby. Better yet, Ault adds, HyperSound is reason-ably priced and easy to use.

Opinions about another emerging tech-nology, by contrast—so-called “glasses-free” 3-D signage solutions—are decidedly more mixed. “It’s a good tool for creating

that ‘wow’ factor,” Ali says, but has serious drawbacks as well. For starters, suitable con-tent is in short supply, and what little there is costs a bundle, as do most 3-D displays at present. Worse yet, some people find looking at 3-D images a dizzying eye strain.

“You can only experience it for a short period of time,” Ali says. That’s a serious problem for digital signage implementations, which are often evaluated on how much “dwell time” they inspire among consumers.

Some signage experts consider the lim-ited viewing angle associated with many glasses-free 3-D offerings to be another weakness. “You have to stand inside the sweet spot,” observes Brawn, who dismisses 3-D as an “interesting curiosity” unlikely to gain widespread acceptance.

Not so fast, counters Mike Egan, prin-cipal, CEO, and director of business devel-opment for Boca Raton, Fla.-based signage vendor Exceptional 3D Inc. Three-dimen-sional signage is hard to watch for extended periods only when 3-D content is ineptly produced, Egan maintains. “There’s good 3-D and there’s bad 3-D,” he says. Solu-tions with good 3-D content attract more dwell time than comparable 2-D deploy-ments, Egan contends, and produce signifi-cantly better recall later on. Display prices are dropping too, he adds, noting that his firm has clients who’ve been profitably run-ning 3-D solutions for as long as four years.

There are interesting new capabilities com-ing to 3-D signs as well, Egan states, includ-ing the ability to interact with them via hand gestures. A user at an auto dealership, for ex-ample, could swipe different wheels or colors into a 3-D virtual showroom display and see exactly what the car they’re ordering will look like when they take delivery. “You’d be doing it maybe five feet away,” Egan says, adding that it’s an experience you’re unlikely to forget.

Indelible ImpressionSound like science fiction? Ali is currently experimenting with even more futuristic-sounding solutions that utilize virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. One such system combines off-the-shelf VR technologies with an omnidirec-tional treadmill to let prospective buyers of expensive custom homes walk through a

complete virtual simulation of their future residence, complete with carpets, cabinets, and countertops that they can swap out with a few flicks of the wrist. “You’re using the same gaming tools that have been out there for a long time,” Ali says, but for a commer-cial application that makes an indelible cus-tomer impression.

And that ultimately is the rationale be-hind all of today’s next-generation signage technologies. They may cost more—if only for now—but they may also increasingly be the only way to get through to people less capable of focusing on one thing at a time than their pet goldfish.

IN A DISTRACTION-FILLED WORLD, grabbing and holding consumer at-tention is tougher than ever.

OLED, 4K, AND CURVED DISPLAYS are among the next-generation technolo-gies that digital signage providers are using to get their solutions noticed.

PROXIMITY-BASED SIGNAGE SYSTEMS are creating new ways for brands to interact with consumers.

DIRECTIONAL AUDIO AND 3-D SIGNAGE are two additional ways to extend a solution’s “dwell time,” but some ex-perts question whether 3-D will ever have more than niche applications.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

ALT BEACON The proximity beacon specification. http://altbeacon.org

APPLE INC. About iBeacon on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. www.channelpronetwork.com/ZZU

BRAWN CONSULTING Signage analyst Alan Brawn’s blog. www.brawnconsult-ing.com/category/blog-posts

DIGITAL SIGNAGE FEDERATION News, events, resources, and more. www.digitalsignagefederation.org

GOOGLE DEVELOPERS All about Eddystone, the open beacon format. https://developers.google.com/beacons

FOR MORE INFO


OR SMALL CHANNEL PARTNERS, takingadvantage of vendor partner programsis important for running a successful

business. Marketing collateral and funds,events, training, and lead generation areamong the valuable carrots that vendors of-fer through various programs. Yet getting themost out of all the programs offered requiresboth skill and effort. To stand out from otherpartners—and more important, to reap themost benefits—channel pros need to mineprograms for all they are worth.

“Almost every one of the vendors hasburied in the fine print better ways to inter-act with them,” asserts Joshua Liberman,president of systems integration and man-aged services provider Net Sciences Inc., inAlbuquerque, N.M. Over the years, Net Sci-ences has been involved with many vendorsand partner programs; today the companyworks primarily with Datto Inc., Intel Corp.,and Dell SonicWall. “The basics of mostpartner programs come down to discounts

and training, events and MDF [market de-velopment funds], or other marketing subsi-dies,” he says.

The key to better interaction begins andends with relationships, says Michael Co-canower, president of itSynergy, an MSP inPhoenix. That is straightforward advice thatnevertheless requires considerable time. “Irun a company and the vendors run [compa-nies] even though they are much larger thanmine,” he says. “It’s about people workingtogether to accomplish an objective.” Find-ing out a vendor’s objective often requiresa brutally honest conversation during whichan account manager and partner discusstheir respective goals.

Cocanower had such a conversationwith Microsoft. “The majority of our rev-enue comes from recurring fees,” he ex-plains. “While we certainly sell Microsoftsolutions, it is more of a secondary focusfor us.” Cocanower clearly expressed itSyn-ergy’s goals and where Microsoft’s products

could support those goals. “That level-setting of expectations is what makes therelationship,” he adds.

The Path to MDFAnd it is a productive relationship thatopens the door to MDF. Jamison West, CEOof Seattle-based IT service provider Arterian,a subsidiary of Aldridge, finds that solid per-sonal relationships with account managersare particularly useful when working withlarger vendors such as HP and Microsoft,and take considerable time to establish.“There isn’t one rep and one tool whereeverything about MDF is contained in oneplace,” he explains. “For Microsoft, I haveused four different tools.”

Thanks to regular meetings with the ac-count manager, West says he understandswhich MDF offerings are most relevant toArterian. In addition, he knows that thereare often buckets of funds that are availableoutside of typical channels. “I am able tocontact a couple of people at Microsoft out-side [of the channel program] who can oftenpoint me in the right direction due to therelationships I’ve developed,” he says. Thisapproach has proved successful for getting afew thousand dollars to co-sponsor events topromote specific products.

In getting partner funds for events, Liber-man says it helps to come up with new ideasor new venues. Several years ago, Net Sci-ences teamed up with SonicWall and an-other local company to hold an event at akart racing track that was co-funded by thevendor. Currently, Liberman is thinking ofholding an event that adds a twist to thetraditional lunch and learn—with a late af-ternoon start, attendees can pack up a mealto take home. This “dine and dash” idea,as Liberman calls it, is garnering interestamong partners. By taking a novel approach

Demonstrating ROI with Vendor PartnersIN TIM AGUILAR’S EXPERIENCE, the best way to get the most out of partnerprograms is to be proactive and demonstrate ROI. Aguilar, the CEO of CalculatedResearch & Technology (CR&T), an IT services provider in Orem, Utah, believes in“creating our own marketing ideas and events and having the partners buy intothem.” One recent example: Aguilar approached Barracuda Networks with the ideaof co-branding vehicles with wraps and now has a program in which the vendorunderwrites the cost on a quarterly basis.

As for ROI, Aguilar says that CR&T aims to provide partners with a return of20-to-1, and in some cases has reached 30-to-1 or better. “That means for everydollar a partner spends on a program, there should be $20 in revenue as a result,”he explains. In the case of an event, for example, a $7,000 investment from a partnershould deliver $140,000 in associated revenue. CR&T documents the results by log-ging every encounter—from the initial event attendee list, to sales calls, through to aclosed deal—into an Excel spreadsheet and shares that with the partner. “We wantour vendor partners to know that when they give us money for a program or event,they have a genuine opportunity to sell into our client base.”

By Megan Santosus

Partner Program TIPS AND TRICKS


to events, or targeting new verticals, Liber-man says that “funds are surprisingly avail-able even to partners who do $50,000 peryear, which frequently is the level that weare at with some of the vendors that haveprovided us with MDF.”

As a small partner from a small state,Liberman is acutely aware of the power ofvisibility, and he works hard to gain attentionfor Net Sciences above and beyond what itssales numbers alone may warrant. One wayto do so is to become a subject matter expertin a particular vendor’s product and flex thatknowledge publicly, either in online forums,by speaking at events, or by publishing suc-cess stories of client engagements.

Of particular value is sharing ideas withpeer organizations such as HTG Peer Groupsand The ASCII Group Inc. “Some vendorsare better than others at recognizing exper-tise, dedication, and loyalty,” Liberman ex-plains. Such recognition can lead to one ofthe more valuable yet less-exploited aspectsof partner programs: education. “We havesomeone here who has passed eight differ-ent tests through SonicWall over the years;I’ve passed a dozen, and another person haspassed four,” Liberman says. The classestypically cost between $1,200 and $2,000

and “we have yet to pay for one as they areall offered as benefits based on our relation-ship,” he adds.

Partner and Vendor Buy-InStaying highly trained in a vendor’s prod-ucts also contributes to a sense of mutualbuy-in as well as integration between part-ner and vendor. This can certainly increasevisibility and also enables a small partnerto gain valuable access to channel pro-gram executives. In something of a virtu-ous circle, West says that visibility begetsmore invitations—to roundtables, advisoryboards, and the like. West’s relationshipwith Microsoft’s account managers (whomhe talks to on a daily basis) has translatedinto participation in the company’s Tech-nology Adoption Program (TAP), which inturn gives Arterian the opportunity to pro-vide feedback on products.

As Liberman sees it, the most valuableaspect of partner programs “is having in-fluence over the future of the product line,so becoming a partner council member isa great benefit.” Partner council member-ships can also provide access to channelprogram executives. As a result of frequentinteractions, West gets direct attention from

VP-level executives at Microsoft’s WorldwidePartner Conference. “I have direct accessdue to my interest in promoting Microsoftproducts to my client base,” West says. “Itypically don’t attend sessions at the confer-ence; instead I just meet with executives.”

MEGAN SANTOSUS is a freelance writer inBoston.

GETTING THE MOST out of vendorprograms is important for running asuccessful business, but it requiresskill and effort.

YOU CAN ENHANCE PROGRAM BEN-EFITS through solid relationships.

GIVE-AND-TAKE efforts are crucial.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

THE ASCII GROUP INC.www.ascii.com/ASCII/Index.html

HTG PEER GROUPSwww.htgpeergroups.com

FOR MORE INFO


CHANNELBEATNEWS FROM THE CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM WORLD

It Takes a Village to Enable a PartnerSophos is serious about partner success, and is making the investmentsto prove it. By Rich FreemanIT CAN BE DIFFICULT to boil a vendor’s marketphilosophy down to a few words. In the caseof Sophos Ltd., though, “more is better”works pretty well.

For starters, the U.K.-based securityvendor, whose North American headquar-ters is in Burlington, Mass., offers morekinds of security software than many of itscompetitors, spanning from the endpointto the network. Since late last year, thoseproducts have offered integrated protectionvia Sophos’ “Security Heartbeat” technol-ogy as well.

The Sophos Central management por-tal gives partners greater control overmore solutions too. Introduced in Febru-ary, the system provides access to toolsfor monitoring, quoting, pricing, ordering,and more through a single, consolidatedinterface.

And last but not least are all the peoplebacking Sophos resellers, ranging from thechannel account executive every partnerprogram member gets to the nine special-ists ready to assist them in areas such asmarketing and license renewals. It’s a modelSophos refers to internally as “the powerof 10,” and according to Vice President ofNorth American Channel Sales Erin Malone,it’s a key pillar of Sophos’ partner enable-ment strategy. “We invest really heavily inthe resources available to support the part-ner,” she says.

That, in turn, has helped Sophos re-cruit more resellers. Sophos presently hasapproximately 15,000 partners worldwideand roughly 6,000 in North America, up 25percent in the last year. Helping those part-ners sell more software to more customers isMalone’s top priority for 2016. “You have to

have a keen eye on recruitment, but reallywhere we’re seeing fantastic success is …making the partners that are in our programsuccessful,” she says.

And more profitable, she continues,citing three ways Sophos protects part-ner margins. First, it offers a competitivestandard discount across its entire productline. Then it augments those discounts forsales under $5,000 logged in the compa-ny’s deal registration system. Significantly,Malone notes, Sophos’ pricing scheme isdesigned to level the playing field acrossthe four tiers of its partner program, so thatresellers at the lowest tier who register adeal can fend off bids from partners at thehighest tier. That’s not always the case witha lot of other vendors,” Malone says. “If youbring a new opportunity, you can have theopportunity to compete with the partners atall levels.”

If you close that deal, moreover, you’llget an additional “incumbency discount” atrenewal time to help you retain the client.Sophos quietly rolled out a new and optionalrenewal assistance program last fall as wellto make re-upping customers easier. Clicka check box in Sophos Central and Sophoswill drive the entire process on a partner’sbehalf.

“They can select maybe one renewalthat they don’t have the bandwidth to do.They can select multiple renewals. They canselect all of their SMB renewals. It’s up tothem,” Malone says. There’s no fee for theservice regardless of how much a partneruses it, and no reduction in the marginspartners earn.

Last month, Sophos began offering ad-ditional enablement support to a subset ofits channel via MSP Connect, a new partnerprogram “extension” for managed serviceproviders. In a first for the company, quali-fied members can pay for Sophos softwarethe same way they charge clients for it, via

monthly recurring fees rather than one-timelump sums. There’s also aggregated billingfor all the Sophos licenses and productsan MSP sells, and volume-based discountsfor those seats. “All of this is going to hap-pen on the back end,” says Scott Barlow,Sophos’ global MSP vice president. “TheMSP won’t need to sit there with a calcula-tor doing the math.”

As an added perk, MSP Connect letspartners integrate Sophos Central withthe ConnectWise PSA system, and sup-port for additional PSA platforms is com-ing soon. That’s right: When it comes toPSA integration, Sophos figures more isbetter.

“If you bring a newopportunity, you canhave the opportunityto compete with thepartners at all levels.”ERIN MALONE, VICEPRESIDENT, NORTH AMERICANCHANNEL SALES, SOPHOS LTD.


CompTIA Managed ServicesCommunity Creates ClientLifecycle ToolA new tool to help MSPs navigate the customer engagement pro-cess—from initial prospecting through contract renewal—is availablefrom CompTIA, of Downers Grove, Ill. The Managed Services ClientLifecycle was created by the CompTIA Managed Services Communityto help MSPs with customer acquisition, retention, and growth.

The tool enables any MSP to visualize the optimal client engage-ment for a managed services practice. When combined with other con-tent and programs created by the community, MSPs have access toresources to help them build and grow an effective services business.

“Many MSPs are winging it, with no real direction or understand-ing of what it takes to bring on a new customer and keep the cus-tomer for the long term,” says Vince Tinnirello, community chair andCEO of Anchor Network Solutions Inc., a Lone Tree, Colo.-based MSP.“The Managed Services Client Lifecycle can help them identify andevaluate all areas of their business to [ensure] that they’re doing allthey should for their clients.”

To access the Client Lifecycle tool, visit www.channelpronetwork.com/ZZw.

Lenovo Increases Incentives on ServicesAt Lenovo Accelerate 2016last month, Sammy Kinlaw, theMorrisville, N.C.-based com-pany’s North American channel chief, told attendees that Lenovo wasnot offering resellers enough incentives to sell its services. So thecompany has increased margin from 1.5 to 5 points for selling DataCenter Group or TopSeller services.

Look for a formal services program called Partner Sold, PartnerDelivered to be rolled out this summer, first for servers and then forPCs. For more information, go to www.lenovo.com.

D&H Adds Free Pre-Sales Technical SupportHarrisburg, Pa.-based D&H Distributing Co. has madenew pre-sales technical assistance resources availableto its resellers at no charge. Effective immediately,D&H partners with questions about pending dealscan solicit insights and guidance over the phone from

dedicated in-house specialists. The program supplements the configu-ration and post-sales support offerings long available to D&H resellers.

There will be 12 people on the pre-sales support unit initially, butD&H ultimately expects it to contain about 30 technicians, rangingfrom SMB generalists to specialists with expertise in specific vendorproduct lines and solution categories.

Many of those will be employees brought in from other units, butD&H will backfill most of those positions with new hires, so the finalimpact of adding pre-sales support will be a significant payroll in-crease. All told, and factoring in some associated training events andwebinars the company plans to conduct this year, the new resourceswill cost D&H roughly $1 million.

Go to www.dandh.com/presales to learn more.

Spiceworks Adds New Member BenefitsAustin, Texas-based Spiceworks Inc. has rolled out new benefits formembers of its professional IT network.

The first, introduced in beta form for users of Android-based de-vices, is a mobile app named Spiceworks Mobile that provides on-the-go access tothe latest IT dis-cussions and insights from the Spiceworks community. A version ofthe app for iOS devices will be available shortly, and Spiceworks sayssupport for push notifications, advanced searches, and private mes-saging will arrive within the next few months.

Also introduced was a personalized newsfeed that highlights newand relevant content about a user’s favorite people, groups, and ven-dors, as well as a quiz game called the “Daily Challenge” that testsmembers’ knowledge of IT topics like cloud computing, security, andnetworking. Both the newsfeed and quiz game are available in themobile and desktop editions of Spiceworks.

Find out more at www.spiceworks.com/about.

OpenStack Vendor ZeroStackIntroduces Global Partner ProgramPrivate cloud startup ZeroStackInc., of Mountain View, Calif.,has launched its first global part-ner program. The new programenables channel pros to build a practice selling preassembled privatecloud environments based on the OpenStack platform without firstacquiring OpenStack skills.

To date, the difficulties of implementing and administering Open-Stack have kept it from making significant headway among SMBs,according to Sean Cardenas, ZeroStack’s vice president of sales andoperations. “The ongoing management effort comes at a high pricetag,” he says.

Overcoming challenges like that is at the core of ZeroStack’sproduct strategy. The company makes a complete OpenStack pri-vate cloud implementation built around hyperconverged 2U appli-ances equipped with end-to-end compute, storage, and software-defined networking resources. Installing a base deployment of thesolution takes as little as 45 minutes and requires no OpenStackexpertise.

The solution includes a cloud-based management portal thatautomatically handles tasks such as applying patches and detectsand remediates technical problems before they occur. There’s alsoa built-in app store with templates for cloud development platformslike Puppet, MySQL, and Hadoop. ZeroStack expands the app cata-log roughly every two weeks, and users can add their own apps forinternal distribution as well.

ZeroStack customers must make a one-time payment for eachappliance they utilize and buy a subscription for at least one year ofZeroStack’s software and back-end support. Both fees are payablein advance, although Cardenas declined to specify pricing for thesolution.

Find additional details at www.zerostack.com.


CHANNELGEARAccelerate 2016: Growth, Growth, and More GrowthWith passion and purpose, Lenovo strives for dominance in not just PCs, but mobile devices and servers. By Matt Whitlock

THOSE WHO HAVE READ my ChannelGear column for the past several years know that I generally focus almost ex-clusively on hardware. Morrisville, N.C.-based Lenovo, and its Accelerate partner conference, held this past May 9 through 11 in Orlando, Fla., are rare exceptions.

At a cursory glance, writing about a vendor’s partner conference may seem out of place in a column devoted pri-marily to gadgets and gear. Lenovo isn’t the only company that makes computers and servers with reseller offerings. I’m not one to discount the likes of HP and Dell, as both are in a much better competitive position today, from a hard-ware catalog perspective, than either has been in years. In the end, though, the people at Lenovo have something spe-cial when it comes to their products: passion. From product creators, to channel representatives, to the highest execu-tives in the company, a clear love for hardware drives Lenovo’s business.

For the past three Lenovo conferences I’ve attended, the company has gone to great lengths to not only put incredible thought and care into its hardware, but communicate how that’s a differentiator for part-ners. ThinkPad, it’s BFG (Doom reference, look it up) brand in main-stream PC hardware, has stayed true to the things that set it apart, such as mil-spec durability, while innovating with new hardware designs like Yoga and the X1 Carbon. The company’s passion for making great hardware, combined with an amazing devotion to the channel, is what helped make Lenovo the number one PC maker in the world. Important note: It wasn’t any single partner program, discount, service offering, or rebate that got Lenovo there; it was making great hardware so partners could choose to sell “computers” or “ThinkPads.”

Lenovo, dominant in the computer market, needed new areas in which to grow. While the company had been successful selling self-branded phones outside the United States and made a few strides in the SMB server market, both areas seemed like an uphill battle. As a result, the company spent much of 2014 and 2015 making acquisitions. Motorola’s smartphone device business, for instance, was purchased from Google. And last year, right around the time of the 2015 Accelerate partner conference, the company had just acquired IBM’s x86 server business, also known as System x.

Lenovo’s momentum in PCs has been unparalleled, but these newer business ventures have been slower to take off thus far.

At Accelerate 2016, Lenovo’s always amazing and over-the-top general session drove three words home to the audience—OK, re-ally just one word repeated three times: growth, growth, growth. That means growth in the three major areas of the company’s hardware offerings: PCs, mobile devices, and servers.

Lenovo is once again poised to not only continue its role as the number one PC maker, but will likely continue to grow market share,

further distancing itself from competitors based on the products it is offering this year. Just check out a few of the devices highlighted later on and you’ll see why.

Since acquiring Motorola, Lenovo’s mobility business has not been of much interest to consumers or businesses, although the company made it clear that that would change on June 9, 2016, when it an-nounces new products at Lenovo Tech World, including the first “Proj-ect Tango” AR (augmented reality) device in partnership with Google. That device will likely fare better than HP’s Elite X3, the company’s Windows 10, 3-in-1 consumer phone, but I can’t help but think HP is out-innovating Lenovo by leapfrogging smartphones and shooting for the longer-term play in the next generation of hybrid devices.

Large mergers aren’t easy, but by this past January Lenovo had finally brought IBM’s System x business into the corporate fold. Most of the partners I spoke with remain positive about the change, but typical merger issues combined with supply chain snafus have kept System x from having a great year. While I am still uncertain that Lenovo’s mobility business will take off, its big-server business is ready to fly in the next 12 months.

Hardware has never been the problem with System x, nor Lenovo’s sever efforts in general, but rather the software and services side that drive value. If there has been any quantum shift at Lenovo, it’s to enter into strategic partnerships with companies like Nutanix Inc., Red Hat Inc., SAP SE, and Microsoft Corp. with the aim of marrying hardware and software to drive unique and innovative solutions for channel partners.

Lenovo has a tall mountain to climb to overtake Dell’s number two spot before the next Accelerate conference, but I wouldn’t count the company out. The solutions are there, as are the partners who can now leverage existing relationships to sell up the stack. Add the fi-nancial incentives that make selling big servers lucrative for partners, and it looks like a recipe for success on all fronts.


ThinkPad T460STechnology not only ad-vances as time passes, but it tends to get cheaper, too. Case in point, Lenovo’s original X1 Carbon had a base starting price near the $2,100 mark. Today Lenovo can offer an Ultrabook with nearly the exact same dimensions (and better internals) for almost $1,000 less. That’s exactly what the ThinkPad T460S represents, and I have a feeling this will be the company’s best-selling ThinkPad through the next year. Don’t get me wrong, the new X1 Carbon is even slimmer and more powerful, but the T460S will be the premium notebook that IT departments can afford to deploy to employees who are not top executives. And you know what, most workers won’t even notice—it’s that good.

X1 TabletWhen playing devil’s ad-vocate, I can easily ar-gue that Microsoft should cede the tablet/notebook hybrid market to its OEMs since Surface got them pointed in the right direc-tion, and products like the X1 Tablet are prime examples why. From a pure computing standpoint, Microsoft has still managed to cram more computer into a compact space than anyone, thanks to the full Core i3/5/7 chip and all it brings. That said, in anything other than GPU performance and sheer “premiumificationality” the X1 Tablet is a superior choice.

The X1 Tablet is based on Intel’s Core m chip, which is purpose-built for tablets like this. In productivity workloads, it is generally competitive with its Core i series counterpart found in Microsoft’s Surface, but will fall short in GPU performance and other high-inten-sity workloads. It is significantly more power efficient, however, allow-ing the X1 Tablet to hit 10-plus hours of battery life in real-world use, compared with about six for Surface. It’s a trade-off, but most mobile users would probably go for battery life over raw power.

That’s just internals though. Where Lenovo’s X1 Tablet shines is in all the areas where the Surface falls short. I’ll admit, I like Microsoft’s latest few Type-Cover keyboards, but all pale in comparison to the included keyboard with the X1—the typing and pointing experience is superior in every way. Plus, the X1 is serviceable (yes, you can replace the battery), and significantly more extensible. Lenovo has already built several add-on modules well-suited for business, like a pico-projector add-on, an extended battery module (15-plus hours!), and a full 3-D camera module. There was even a Surface blade that turned Surface into a DJ booth (because that’s a huge market, right?).

Lenovo N23 ConvertibleLenovo has been wildly suc-cessful in the K–12 educa-tion market. Products like the ThinkPad 11e, with well-thought-out durability fea-tures for this segment, have made a case for their value over uber-cheap alternatives. At Accel-erate, Lenovo unveiled a 14-inch Chromebook dubbed the N42 for $199, and while it will likely be a success, I was more taken with the N23. The N23 is a fully convertible, durability-focused, 11.6-inch touchscreen notebook costing a mere $249.

Hyperconverged HX Series ServerI’ll be the first to admit that Lenovo’s partnership with San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix has resulted in a hardware product not dis-similar from many other 2U servers with similar specs. However, it’s tough not to be impressed that this new “data-center-in-a-box” is built for infinite scalability and simplicity. For instance, expanding your resources with a new server is a three-click process, as the software takes care of everything from resource management to workload distribution.

Plus, the hardware is nice, too. Give one a feel and you’ll agree that System x servers are top-notch.

ThinkPad in SilverAlthough many people, myself included, find the ThinkPad’s classic black styling appealing, Lenovo has finally gotten the mes-sage that one style doesn’t appeal to everyone. As a result, the company is now offering select 2016 ThinkPads in a beautiful metallic silver paint color, and plans to bring the silver style to many more products next year. That means if you have a customer who wants silver, you no longer have to switch to another vendor to get it.

If you’re wondering why the choice of a metallic paint instead of a silver material, such as aluminum, then great minds think alike. So I asked, and the answer was a good one. To meet the durability standards of a ThinkPad, the amount of aluminum that would need to be used would add nearly a pound of weight to the final product, and most users would rather shed weight than add it for the sake of the metal. Lenovo is constantly experimenting with new materials, and if the company can find that magic metallic material that can take a pounding and keep the weight in check, certainly consider it.

5 Exciting Products from Accelerate 2016


Steve Weltman, CISSPFounder and CEOAbsolute Network Solutions Inc.

FOUNDED 2014

LOCATION Torrance, Calif.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES 1

WEBSITE www.absolutenets.net

COMPANY FOCUS Keeping clients’ data safe by making security the under-pinning of their managed IT

FAVORITE PART OF MY JOB Being in front of the client and reporting findings

LEAST FAVORITE PART Billing

WHAT PEOPLE WOULD BE SURPRISED TO KNOW ABOUT ME I am an autocross racer and a practitioner of Muay Thai, a Thai form of mixed martial arts.

PEERTOPEER

creo


O REDUCE RISK you have to do something different than what you’re doing today. And that can be simple, low-cost or no-cost actions that will help boost your information security

posture. It’s important to remember, particularly for SMBs, that size means nothing to an attacker. Everyone is a target.

Intellectual property is the new currency in today’s environ-ment, and when I talk with clients about financial risk, informa-tion security has to be a component of that discussion. As a man-aged services and managed security services provider (MSSP), you cannot take a purely technology point of view. You’re not just fixing or monitoring something, you’re adding value to a business by identifying the risks, the things that keep them up at night: How do we prevent CryptoWall ransomware? How do we prevent virus outbreaks? How do we prevent content or phishing scams? And how do we get awareness of these things quickly?

While the physical-logical implementation of firewalls and intrusion prevention solutions is important, security is not solely about technology. It’s the system and the process built around it, and more important, it’s the SMBs’ business strategy of what they want to protect. So my main focus is to talk to the business owners and the business decision makers about the risks they have, and to think in terms of their brand and their market value.

The 80/20 RuleAs an MSP/MSSP, the biggest hurdle to InfoSec education and awareness is the common misperception that either InfoSec can be done easily, or it is overwhelmingly difficult. Neither extreme is the reality. I advise SMBs to follow the 80/20 rule: Assume you’re targeted 80 percent of the time, so do 80 percent of the basics. Doing some simple things well often mitigates the 20 percent risk.

Here are some of the simple steps we should be advising our SMB clients to take to improve their security posture:

1. Stop ignoring email threats. In addition to employee train-ing, utilize email filtering at the server level. Office 365, Hosted Exchange, and Gmail have this feature, so use it.

2. Assume your websites are vulnerable. Look for free or com-mercial website vulnerability scanners, and consider contract-ing a security tester for a few hundred dollars a month.

3. Disable high-risk desktop and server software. The biggest offenders include Flash and video plug-ins for browsers. Re-move them and you remove a good percentage of risk for very little cost to your user.

4. Use data encryption. It can still be complex to manage keys, but costs are coming down. Also, business laptops are al-ways offered with Full Disk Encryption (FDE) as an option—one SMBs should always utilize. That, and USB sticks with corpo-rate data should always be encrypted.

5. Secure access to online financials. There is no universal coun-termeasure for this attack, but one option is to use a dedicated VM running a minimal install to access these services. Most SMBs tak-ing this approach either use a Linux machine or a stripped-down PC, but another option is to use a cheap Google Chromebook.

6. Get serious about passwords. The best practice is simply changing administrator passwords often. Automating the pro-cess with a password manager is the only way to change and manage all of your critical passwords consistently.

7. Embrace system and software patching. While enterprises buy complex solutions to manage patching to defined timeta-bles and policies, small businesses can use simpler patching scanning tools such as Microsoft’s Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) or ManageEngine Desktop Central. And don’t forget about remote systems.

8. Reduce admin rights use. You need appropriate controls over your system changes, even at the desktop level.

9. Monitor cloud storage. Know who is sharing what, and with whom. Monitor who has access to modify, create, and add do-main names in your portfolio and how they are used in your com-pany. And don’t confuse cloud storage with backup and recovery.

10. Dispose of old hardware securely. Use a reliable wiping process.

Once your SMB clients are on the right side of the 80/20 equation, you can talk with them about moving from free or home versions of their productivity solutions to commercial versions, which have more built-in security, as well as implementing some advanced security products. As part of your security offering provide a vulnerability assessment with some tools that create automated reports, and then furnish them with quarterly reports to discuss their data systems and data at risk internally and ex-ternally. It doesn’t require high complexity or a lot of learning to offer this as a business value add. The key is to have data protec-tion top of mind while dealing with day-to-day IT services.

Teaching your SMB clients to do the small things when it comes to security will not only reduce their security risk, but also their financial risk. And that’s the ultimate value add.

Absolute Network Solutions advises SMBs on the simple steps they can take to boost information security and reduce financial risk. By Steve Weltman, CISSP • Photography by Teri Weber


POIN

T O

F VI

EW

Whose POV do you want to hear? Send suggestions to [email protected]

36 JUNE 2016

SMALL AND MIDSIZE BUSINESSES (SMBs) aren’t adopting and gaining the benefits of the cloud because they don’t have the time and resources to implement these new technologies and applications—or to get their employees trained to use them. That’s according to The Appification of Small Business, a research e-book by Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit Inc., creator of the popular QuickBooks software. Here’s what’s going on:

• 19 percent of SMBs surveyed state that different solutions don’t work well together.

• 17 percent say applications and software aren’t designed specifically for their businesses.• 14 percent say applications and software are too time consuming and difficult to use.• 6 percent say it doesn’t help them advance the goals they’ve set.

If you’re part of the cloud ecosystem—making, distributing, and/or selling cloud technologies to SMBs—the odds are that helping those SMBs get up and running on your cloud “stuff” and actually experiencing the benefits of it may not be your core business. But here’s the conundrum: It’s unclear whose job it is! Let’s explore the possibilities.

Is the independent software vendor (ISV) the best candidate to help? Not likely. While the ISV has a lot to lose in the cloud game—it’s the company’s brand name on the line and revenue depends on seat activation—it isn’t able to deliver activation and technical support at scale.

Is it the channel’s role? That’s a much likelier answer, with some reservations. The channel, with players like VARs, MSPs, ISPs, telcos, cable operators, and system integrators, are “both feet into cloud,” expanding their portfolios with cloud offerings designed to build the installed base, increase average revenue per user (ARPU), and generate greater customer lifetime value. To bring that to life, however, requires securing activation, ensuring adoption, and delivering ongoing support—disciplines most have not mastered, and frankly don’t have the competencies to do so.

Core Competencies LackingMuch like the ISV, most channel partners’ core competencies do not include supporting the activation, adoption, and ongoing usage of cloud technologies for the businesses they serve. Though migration, other IT projects, and/or monitoring and management services might be at the heart of their background, these organizations aren’t built to scale, and don’t have proficiencies to aid the customer in getting up and running, consistently using, and advancing their use of cloud technologies, let alone provide prepurchase consultation or ongoing support.

So what’s the cloud ecosystem to do? There’s a new category in the ecosystem: cloud enablers. Some of these companies provide tools for things like migration; others are built from the ground up to offer the technical services that get businesses up, running, and realizing value from their cloud technology purchases—from sales, migration, and installation to ongoing support.

Cloud enablers possess the expertise, processes, tools and technology, and purpose-built services to help end users fully embrace and benefit from their cloud journey. By partnering with a specialized cloud enabler, ISVs and their channel partners can rest easier knowing that SMBs are activating what’s been purchased, and have access to experts whenever they need them.

Cloud enablers help you achieve higher adoption rates, greater customer engagement, lower churn, and greater customer profitability. Enablers also help with more upsell opportunities and the acquisition of more customers, sell-ing more with better margins!

DAVID HAUSER is director of channel development and alliances at PlumChoice Inc., bringing 15 years of sales, marketing, and channel leadership experience to the company and the market.

guest columnist • Dave Hauser

Supporting SMB Customers in the CloudWhat do you do when the cloud isn’t your specialty? Here are your options.

Most channel partners’ core competencies do not include supporting the activation, adoption, and ongoing us-age of cloud technologies for the businesses they serve.

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