Our Summer Issue of Tech IQ

Posted by Al Perlman

The Summer issue of TechIQ magazine goes to the printer today. Joe did the cover story on 90 Days to Managed Services. We’ve all been in the channel a long time and we’ve seen a lot of shifts in business models. In my view this movement toward managed services is the real deal. The key is not just that it makes sense for the VARs and their customers, but it’s got a lot of very smart people creating very smart packages behind it. In the past few weeks I’ve been able to spend time with Bob Godgart at Autotask and Gavin Garbutt of N-able and I’ve been extremely impressed with their passion, commitment and belief in this market. When you talk to VARs who’ve made the transition, they sound confident because they’ve seen it work and they know they have the strength of a burgeoning industry behind them. The printed version of TechIQ goes in the mail next week, but of course we are updating several times a day at www.techIQmag.com

Our Interns

Posted by Al Perlman

Today I’m interviewing candidates for an editorial intern position we’ve created this summer to produce a new Buyer’s Resource Guide we’re creating for MuniWireless. This will be both a print and online product and the challenge will be to integrate them so that there’s value in both. On Long Island we’re fortunate to have several good local colleges, including Hofstra, Adelphi, C.W. Post and Stony Brook, which is just launching a journalism program. We’ve also posted the ad on the NYU Web site, but for $10 an hour it’s not quite worth it for someone to commute here from Manhattan.

If We Say So Ourselves…

Today we finally got to see the printed copy of the 25th Anniversary Magazine we’ve produced for CompTIA. A ton of work went into this, but it’s been a great project. It features an oral history from several of the founding fathers of CompTIA, plus views of the future from top executives at Lenovo, CA, HP, N-able, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat and Kaseya. The magazine is available only to CompTIA members, but we have extra copies if anyone is interested. Just drop me a line at al@microcast.biz and we’ll mail it to you. No PDFs for this one.

Executive Roundtables: We’re Great at Them

Mike is in Fort Lauderdale today running a roundtable for Tech Data’s resellers. When we started the company, these executive roundtables were a major part of our business plan. But demand has declined in the past year or so and we find ourselves doing fewer than we expected. It’s too bad because they’re a great source of leads and information for the sponsors and, ahem, we happen to do them extremely well. It always works best when the sponsor has a targeted audience to tap into. Then we can shape the content and conversation to fit the sponsor’s needs and also to make it a pleasant experience for attendees.

Goodbye Network Computing

Many of you probably saw the announcement last week that CMP was laying off more than 200 people and folding several publications. Many of you probably also realize that most of the team here at Microcast worked at CMP at one time in their careers. The CMP announcement hurt a little because some of my friends got laid off and one of my former publications, Network Computing, is being folded. I wrote the original business plan for Network Computing and was the original publisher. It’s also where I met Gary Bolles, my partner here at Microcast. I don’t have any particular insight into what’s going on at CMP, but I know that the President of CMP, Steve Weitzner, is a solid, thoughtful executive and he’s got his hands full trying to reposition the company in the face of the near-collapse of print advertising.