SLIDE SHOWS

This week, retailers and vendors will converge on San Diego for Everything Channel's RetailVision show to talk about strategies in the cutthroat retail market. Here we collect 25 (plus a few extra) hot products vendors will be showcasing.

A talent search, a maker fair, and of course Intel's latest cutting-edge chips were featured at last week's Intel Developers Forum.

Everything Channel went deep into the heart of Texas to honor 17 vendors at the 2008 VARBusiness Annual Report Card awards ceremony in Dallas. Here's a look at who lassoed the top prizes.

HEALTHCARE

Avnet has launched a program to help educate health-care solution providers by letting them observe doctors and medical staff to better understand how hospitals work.

[05:00 PM, August 15, 2008]

It's one thing for a solution provider to assess a hospital's IT challenges. It's quite another to walk in the shoes of doctors and nurses and feel their pain points firsthand. But that's what nearly two dozen Avnet Technology Solutions Inc. VARs did last month, spending five days at Scottsdale Healthcare facilities in Arizona observing hospital personnel admit patients, perform surgery and organize records, all in an effort to better understand how technology is used in the field.

[05:00 PM, August 15, 2008]

Companies that don't embrace virtualization from desktop to servers to storage are putting their business at risk, CEO Ron Dupler says in a keybnote at the company's 12th annual Solutions Summit.

[12:48 PM, August 11, 2008]

Microsoft's Silverlight technology will get a big dose of exposure this month as the technology delivering online multimedia for the Beijing Olympics.

[12:00 AM, August 11, 2008]

C.J. Ezell, president of The ASI Group, a fast-growing VAR that uses the tagline "Powering Digital Healthcare," has given his business a makeover that is a model for solution providers of all stripes. First off, Ezell said bye-bye to his entire break/fix business four years ago in order to specialize solely on the health-care market. That move had his employees thinking he was "nuts." In fact, Ezell's lead technician quit and started his own break/fix business that captured many of the 150 customers that ASI Group was serving.

[03:00 PM, August 08, 2008]

Quick Clicks: Scientists at Northwestern University have created a tiny eye-shaped camera that can conform to the shape of a human eye.

[03:57 PM, August 07, 2008]

Avnet Technology Solutions organized a unique hands-on internship for nearly two dozen VARs last month in which the group got a behind-the-scenes look at how a hospital operates.

[10:12 AM, July 31, 2008]

Avnet's HealthPath University initiative to educate VARs on how to sell into health care customers included giving them a rare, behind-the-scenes look into several hospital departments. .

[08:00 AM, July 29, 2008]

SAP Brazil revamped its channel strategy this year, reorganizing its territorial and vertical makeup

[02:57 PM, July 18, 2008]

Lenovo announced a new series of notebooks geared specifically to price-sensitive, services-starved SMB customers.

[12:01 AM, July 15, 2008]

It's easy to understand why vertical markets are so hot: The degrees of specialization, industry-specific regulations and powerful customization features in operating systems, applications and hardware alike mean nice returns for the channel.

[12:00 AM, July 07, 2008]

Solution provider investments in EMR systems are beginning to pay off as the electronic medical record IT market continues to grow.

[01:39 PM, July 03, 2008]