How To Ditch Your Business Model and Survive

So between the revenue generated from teaching and serving customers that typically employ between 50 to 250 workers, things have been fine for the company, except in the summer, when the humidity and temperature make life a bit too hot and sticky to tolerate.

The company's story was told to me by Schuster, Bob Duff, his senior technical consultant, and Jeffrey Brock, a senior services manager. What still surprises me is the unanimity in their decision to focus exclusively on products developed by Computer Associates. This is one makeover Joan Rivers would be proud of. But let's not trivialize the efforts here. The decision was based on the solution provider's assessment of a greater long-term potential focused around one vendor's security and storage offerings. In order to completely re-engineer its operations, the company had to ditch old vendors--including longtime partners HP, Seagate, Sprint and Veritas--inform existing customers that they would be addressing a new set of solutions and retrain their employees. The result was what Schuster says was a "10- to 12-month sacrifice in profitability."

"The typical channel partner doesn't need to do it this way, but we are in a hurry," Schuster says. The transformation has led to a much tighter working relationship with CA; the company was recently selected as CA's ETrust Partner of the Year. By the way, Networks of Florida is still in the training business. "You can't wear five hats," the firm's president says. In this case, two should fit just fine.

A couple of years ago, technology newspapers and magazines were filled with stories about the potential of .Net and the confusion surrounding the platform. Don't worry, you're not experiencing dj vu when it comes to this issue's cover story. .Net may be the story the tech press has forgotten about, but the channel certainly has not. Like a favorite old album you haven't listened to in some time, this tune is going to sound a bit familiar, but the music is all the more relevant. Today, as our cover story reveals, .Net is on fire. Whether you track studies by VARBusiness, Forrester Research or Evans Research, or listen to tales of ISV success stories, the paradigm is growing in importance and adoption despite the growing popularity of open-source tools and J2EE.

As senior writer Carolyn A. April observes so aptly, "A grassroots legion of developers see .Net as their ticket to creating software they can get to market quickly and cheaply, a must in this continued era of short-term projects." For the rest of the story on what ISVs and application developers are doing with .Net, please read April's story, beginning on page 30.

The VARBusiness Annual Report Card event is only a few weeks away. It will be held at XChange '04 in Chicago, where we will honor vendors for outstanding performance in the channel. One of the highest honors of the evening goes to the VARBusiness Channel Executive of the Year. After an intensive evaluation process, we select an executive from a leading IT vendor who has clearly served as an advocate for the channel and introduced programs that were truly innovative. We would like to know which top channel executive you believe deserves such an honor this year. Let me know at [email protected]. And look for more on this column on the Web at www.varbusiness.com.