The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy is touring Silicon Valley this week. He met Netscape veterans launching a new company. He visited Trend Micro insiders. He spoke with the CEO of Nimsoft. During more than six hours of meetings, the recession was discussed for about 15 minutes. Fact is, savvy IT businesses aren’t bombing. And they aren’t bogged down in recession talk. Here’s a recap of Day 1 in Silicon Valley.

Generally speaking, I have little interest in online slideshows. They’re often lame excuses by media companies to drive more page views. However, this slideshow from BusinessWeek features a range of experts describing how the President should help entrepreneurs.

As The VAR Guy continues his tour of Australia, he’s hearing solutions providers express more and more concern about the global economy. However, our resident blogger was pleased to hear some upbeat channel news from the States. Specifically, one of the world’s top managed service providers — DirectPointe — disclosed record third quarter sales results. In this economy, every victory counts.

Sometimes the best way to deal with stress is to laugh at the situation — before regrouping to face new challenges head-on. The VAR Guy rather enjoyed this video spin on the US economy. A pal who works for a major US broadband provider sent him the link:

The VAR Guy is often skeptical of market studies that make bold statements about all the money technology companies lose to the high-tech underground. But our resident blogger loves statistics. And the latest stats about gray market high-tech products should be alarming to VARs.

Judson Althoff, group VP of worldwide alliances and channels at Oracle Corp., is putting a new spin on old partner training tactics. During a chat with The VAR Guy, Althoff says Oracle’s Enablement 2.0 partner strategy will leverage some lessons from the open source world.

General crankiness with technology appears to be on the rise. Is it because of the stress in the US financial marketplace, are people in general just overworked? Are they getting what they were promised?  Were they promised something and didn’t get what was asked for? Here are five ways to prevent customer crankiness from spoiling your revenue stream.

When it comes to coping with the US economic storm, VARs can run and hide — or they can strive to line up new IT projects even faster. If you’re the type who keeps pressing forward, spend a few minutes checking out the newly revamped OnForce marketplace, which allows VARs to outsource projects to each other across the US and Canada.

It’s official. Even CNBC says the Wall Street meltdown has spilled over into Main Street USA. Credit is getting tighter. It’s going to be difficult for entrepreneurs to make deeper investments in their own business. But don’t panic, folks. Here are five steps every VAR and managed service provider should take — right now — to generate more recurring revenue during the economic turmoil.

Gas is expensive … inflation is rising … yada, yada, yada… where should solutions providers focus their efforts amid the economic turmoil? Finally, some answers from OnForce, the online marketplace for IT service providers. OnForce has analyzed recent trends within its marketplace, and spotted some key areas of opportunity for solutions providers.