Leslie Hague Posts

Increased interest in cloud computing creates more opportunity for solution providers and vendors to be partners, a panel of vendor executives said at CompTIA Breakaway on Wednesday.Executives on the “power panel” from Microsoft, Google, Intel and Cisco spoke to attendees about partnering opportunities, markets poised for growth, and business strategy.Microsoft is seeing a number of businesses looking into IT solutions that weren’t economically feasible for them with an on-premise model but is w ...

Solution providers can capitalize on the green IT market by making a solid economic case to potential clients, touting an increase in brand value and bundling green options with other offerings.That was some of the sales advice given to CompTIA Breakaway attendees by a panel of experts today.“Green IT has to be transformational at some point,” said Jay McBain, Lenovo’s director of small and medium business for the Americas. “But pair it with something today that is transformational – cloud, mana ...

The conventional view that rewards and punishments are the only ways to motivate workers is an overly simplistic – and sometimes flat-out wrong – approach for managers to adopt, keynote speaker Daniel Pink said to CompTIA Breakaway attendees on Tuesday.Pink, author of The New York Times bestseller Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, said that a “carrot and stick” approach oversimplifies people who do work that requires them to be creative and cerebral.“Management is a technology ...

For Ian Pennell, one of the highest compliments a solution provider can receive from a small business client is, “I don’t know how you did it, but everything… just works.”“That’s like the Holy Grail,” he said. “In the end, the small business just wants it to work.”Pennell, senior vice president of Cisco’s small business technology group, talked to CompTIA Breakaway attendees about how to sell IT solutions to small businesses in a keynote speech on Tuesday.An increasing number of small business o ...

CompTIA will invest nearly $1 million over the next three years in new educational programs for the IT channel, CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux said today.“I want to see every CompTIA member as ‘best in class’, ” Thibodeaux said at the CompTIA Breakaway 2010 opening keynote session.CompTIA is looking to aggregate valuable content and knowledge from fields including healthcare IT, sales and marketing, financial management, and cloud computing. The not-for-profit association is looking t ...

How can solution providers position themselves as specific market vertical experts?   One of the many peer-to-peer discussion groups at CompTIA Breakaway investigated this question.“If you position yourself as the subject matter expert, the opportunity for you is going to take off,” said Stuart Selbst, president and CEO of Stuart Selbst Consulting.Solution providers asked questions and shared tips about hosting educational marketing events like “lunch and learns,” as well as utilizing local medi ...

Service providers don’t need to drop all their on-premise solutions in favor of new cloud-based options, but they do need to position themselves to start investigating cloud computing opportunities, an IT industry research panel said at CompTIA Breakaway today.“2011 is the year to experiment and figure this out and look into the different offerings,” said Darren Bibby, program director at IDC, to an audience of primarily solution providers.Customers likely will continue to use a hybrid of on-pre ...