A Blog From The Editors Of Business Solutions Magazine

CompTIA Survey Paves Path To Success CompTIA recently unveiled the results of its annual State of the Industry survey. As with past years, the results contained some very comp elling information regarding the state of the industry, the channel, and business trends. According to CompTIA, a total of 280 U.S. IT companies participated in the survey, which yields an overall margin of sampling error at 95 percent confidence (+/- 6.0 percentage points). Some of the highlights of the...  Continue Reading...

RSPA Inspire 2017 – Day 2 Recap Day 2 of RSPA’s Inspire continued the Roadside MBA educated that started the day before. Today, Scott Schaefer took the stage first and reinforced some of the lessons learned the previous day. One of my favorite nuggets from his session was concerned with increasing profitability. He said that every decision you make for your company should have some direct impact on profit (good or bad). If you decide to do something that doesn’t...  Continue Reading...

RSPA Inspire 2017 – Day 1 Recap Day 1 of RSPA’s Inspire kicked off today at the St. Kitts Marriott Resort. While some might think an event like Inspire is an excuse to sneak in a vacation on the business dime, they’d be very wrong. Sure, the venue is gorgeous, but it only serves as a backdrop for the networking, education, and relationship building that takes place. In short, for the VARs, vendors, distributors, and yes, the sole media representative (me), Inspire...  Continue Reading...

How Long Will You Be Relevant? This year’s Best Channel Vendors survey again afforded me the opportunity to study a lot of valuable data to glean insights from readers about their vendor partners. For the past few years, I’ve taken a deeper dive into the data in an attempt to unearth trends that might not be obvious at a cursory glance. The results this year are similar to last year’s, not so far as the specific winners and losers are concerned, but with...  Continue Reading...

It’s Time For Self-Evaluation, Improvement We’re coming up on nearly a decade since we launched our annual Executive Insight series, which appears in the magazine each December. The goal of this section is to have leading executives from the industry share their insights on the current year and recommended actions for the upcoming year concerning markets and technologies.  Continue Reading...

Lessons From The Road As this issue reaches everyone’s mailbox in the first week of December, I’ll be wrapping up my last business trip of the year by attending Ingram Micro’s fall ONE conference in Las Vegas. Including this trip, my fall event calendar was pretty full. Between partner conferences, expos, trade shows, and Business Solutions’ own events, I hit up eight events over the past few months. While each event was different, in looking...  Continue Reading...

VARCOM 101 For ISVs The following is an edited transcript of Business Solutions’ Editor in Chief Mike Monocello’ s Q&A with Jason Firment, Director of Point of Sale and Director of VARCOM for BlueStar which took place at ISV IQ Live! held October 6 in Philadelphia.  Continue Reading...

BlueStar Introduces ISV Connect The following is an edited transcript of Business Solutions’ Editor in Chief Mike Monocello’ s Q&A with Jason Firment, Director of Point of Sale and Director of VARCOM for BlueStar which took place at ISV IQ Live! held October 6 in Philadelphia.  Continue Reading...

Epson ISV Conference Recap: Full Speed Ahead with OmniLink Merchant Services I have to admit that after attending Epson’s inaugural ISV conference in San Diego last year, I was skeptical the company was going to be able to meet its projected deadlines — especially launching an ISV partner portal by the end of 2015 with 10 hand-selected ISVs. Sure enough, however, their OmniLink Merchant Services (OMS) announcement at the National Retail Federation (NRF) convention in mid-January removed much of that...  Continue Reading...

Top Takeaways From ISVs On Raising Capital Four ISV executives — Granbury Solutions’ CEO Tom Bronson; Tony Glowacki, CEO of Gusto; Jon Halpern, Co-Founder and CEO of AthleteTrax; and Software Logic Founder and CEO Luis Reyes — took part in How To Build A Successful Reseller Program, a panel held as part of the Business Solutions ISV IQ Live! conference October 6 in Philadelphia. The four discussed different avenues available for raising capital and how to successfully...  Continue Reading...