After months of preparation and anticipation for NRF’s Big Show, I arrived at the Javits Center in New York City early Saturday morning ready for the event of the year to begin, and of course to make sure our booth setup was going smoothly. Weaving my way around crates, boxes, rolled up rugs and beeping forklifts was no easy task and it was hard to imagine the NRF Expo would start in just over 24 hours and the stacks of packing crates would be replaced by thousands of retailers from around the world.

The managed service provider industry is comprised of countless intelligent and influential professionals that are leading innovation in the channel. Each year, MSPmentor, the ultimate guide to managed services and the leading global destination for managed service providers, releases its MSPmentor 250 list. This list honors the world’s most influential, top managed services provider (MSP) executives, entrepreneurs and experts.

(Part 2 of a 2 part series)

With large organizations such as Microsoft and Google seemingly popping up a new multi-million dollar data center each day, there’s no doubt that the demand for data storage is driving data center facility growth--- and there’s no sign of slowing down either. But when you’re not Microsoft or Google, or don’t have a budget or the resources even close, how are you expected to build and manage your own data center?

With no signs of slowing down, converged infrastructure is establishing its place in the channel as the demand for cost-effective, scalable and agile data center solutions continues to grow.  Recently announced, Avnet Technology Solutions has signed a distribution agreement with Nutanix, the web-scale converged infrastructure company. Eliminating the need for expensive centralized storage, the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform merges server and storage resources into an easy-to-deploy integrated appliance. Below are the three things you need to know about how the Avnet/Nutanix partnership is driving the competition in the converged infrastructure market.

You can’t read the news without hearing about the accelerating rate of growth in cloud solutions. Cloud solutions have proven that they are a technology that is here to stay as enterprise customers are moving to cloud solutions outside of their datacenters faster than ever, and not only that, more recently, enterprise customer’s rate of consumption of cloud solutions has also accelerated by most analyst reports.