As if they needed more stress, organizations are facing evolving and increasingly stringent compliance regulations from the Payment Card Industry, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others. Here are a few security compliance products that can make the audit process less excruciating.
Here are 10 of the distributor's hottest new offerings winning over solution providers.
New smartphones from Sony, Motorola and the first-ever Twitter-only mobile device -- the TwitterPeek -- headline a busy week for handset makers as the holiday shopping season heats up.
Dell-SilverBack Partner Conference: More Assurances, Less Answers
6:39 PM EST Thu. Jan. 17, 2008
Page 3 of 3
Cronin said he was told it's possible that Dell's pricing to end users could be higher than through partners. "But they weren't committing to that. There's no guaranteed price right now," he said.
Dell's Phillips said it's too early to discuss pricing. "We have not defined a direct offering, period. So it's premature to announce pricing and how it is going to fit. It is fair to say to that managed services through the channel is strategic to Dell. And as we put this program together, we have no desire to put pricing in place that inhibits that strategy," he said.
Dell also told MSPs that it plans to move SilverBack's managed services to a hosted model at its own data center, eliminating the need for partners to invest in their own infrastructure. Some attendees liked the idea, but others expressed concern about transferring their customers' data to a third party and disrupting compliancy issues.
"They said it will start as an option in the next six months, but it's inevitable that it will be the only way it's available," Cronin said. "That's when everyone brought up questions. That's a huge issue they're going to have to address. But a lot of people said Dell could build a data center far better than mine."
Cronin's biggest concern -- addressed but not solved --is whether SilverBack will continue to develop services around products that Dell does not sell, such as Cisco Systems networking gear.
"We're a Cisco Gold partner. That is a huge fear. There's already been too much time taken away from R&D because of the acquisition. If they're focusing R&D on Microsoft and servers, it will really have an effect on us," Cronin said.
Dell told him that it will continue to develop around other vendors, but Cronin added "They're behind the 8-ball today. They need to do extra work just to get that caught up. That's a huge issue," he said.
But like the others, he was satisfied with the output from the conference. "The one thing we heard from Greg Davis, one powerful sentence was, 'You are our customers.' That to me was very important," Cronin said. "Going into this, we were all questioning Dell's ability to create a channel right the first time. For him to look at us, truly as customers and mean it, that's the right mindset for Dell to begin building this channel."
