Category: English

Ingram Micro, Odin, Microsoft & Cloud Hosting: A Perfect Storm

This opinion piece I wrote covering Ingram Micro’s acquisition of Odin was one of the top stories on Channel Partners Online in January 2016.

Ingram Micro recently announced it is acquiring the Odin Service Automation platform from Parallels. It’s a very interesting piece of news, particularly in the context of a more general trend of consolidation in the cloud hosting industry. As cloud-based services become more widely adopted and commoditized, there is a movement toward fewer, very large players fighting for domination. It’s a battle that has already seen quite illustrious casualties, including HPE, which decided to give up trying to compete with its own offering and become a premium partner of Microsoft Azure.

What’s the relationship between Odin and Ingram Micro, and how does Microsoft come into the picture?

Read the full article on Channel Partners Online.

Thinking outside the .com box: how getting creative with new domain names can help you make a mark

In this guest post for Tech.eu, I explain how the increasing amount of options beyond registering a .com domain name opens up a whole array of fresh branding opportunities for smart marketers.

As a self-confessed domain geek, every time I am at an event I spend quite a lot of time looking at the Web addresses used by exhibitors and startups to advertise their wares. The result of my informal survey is that still a large majority swears by the mantra that “.com is king”, even if it means having to go through all sorts of keyword acrobatics to find an available one.

Particularly if the name chosen for the product is a fairly generic one, their Web address will invariably swell to include generic keywords like “get”, “hello” or “app” and the occasional dash.

Read the full article on Tech.eu.