Hardware sourcing used to be simpler. Most teams bought what the OEM listed as new and planned deployments around those available models. But over the past few years, shifting supply chains, tighter capital budgets, and frequent lifecycle changes have made that approach feel increasingly restrictive. These pressures have widened the [...]
Mid-market and enterprise IT teams are expected to keep environments stable, secure, and scalable while stretching every dollar as far as possible. It’s a balancing act that gets harder every year as lead times fluctuate and product lifecycles accelerate. Many organizations don’t realize there’s an OEM-backed sourcing option that rarely [...]
If you’re responsible for the acquisition, management, and disposition of networking equipment, you’ve had an – how shall we say this – eventful past few years. First was a global pandemic and the IT scramble for business continuity. Then came a worldwide chip shortage followed by supply chain disruptions. Now [...]
Many IT directors and systems admins returned to the office only to find themselves with a long list of challenges to address – like projects they had to put on hold or server and storage equipment suddenly nearing its end-of-life timeframe. Now, because of COVID-related supply chain delays, it’s harder [...]
Have you ever seen one of those Magic Quadrants that research giant Gartner creates? These handy graphics illustrate which companies within an industry are visionaries, leaders, challengers, or niche players. As 30-year veterans of the IT equipment industry, we’ve watched how different sales channels have emerged, grown, or adapted to [...]
When configuring switches, it’s helpful to have a guide that can walk you through the basics. Security is also important, and switches can be configured to be an effective part of your network security. In this post, we’ll cover switch basics as well as some ways to incorporate security in [...]
