You are all familiar with those studies from industry analysts that show you what the “true” cost of owning various IT equipment. I am visiting Adtran today and one of the things they talk about is how easy it is to figure out the total cost of ownership (TCO) without having to apply a lot of airy-fairy multiplers or other fudge factors to really get to the bottom line. Here are some quick ways that won’t require you to go ask your fourth-grader to do the calculations for you:

• Does your vendor offer extended warranties that really cover maintenance for five years at no cost, or do they require hidden maintenance contracts?
• Does your vendor offer free firmware upgrades for as long as you own their gear, or do you have to pay after a year or two to keep current with their upgrades?
• Does your vendor offer toll-free support both before and after you buy their product, and does the support team live somewhere in the US rather than overseas?
• How does your vendor pay its telephone support staff, by per call completes, by customer satisfcation, or by some other metric?

I think you can see where I am going here. The more stuff that is included in the price, the less funny business you have to deal with when you are four, five years out and have to keep things running. (Too bad the American automobile industry hasn’t yet figured this out.)

Tablet PCs have firmly established themselves in certain vertical markets where users don’t have offices or need to compute while standing. But as the tablet market matures, more sedentary office workers could benefit from using them, particularly when it comes to annotation and approval tasks. This presents opportunities for solution providers to spread the message about tablets.

In my story for eWeek’s Channel Insider this week, I talk about what the channel can do to help promote tablets as a solution for their customers.

My latest tech files column for eWeek’s Strategic Partner edition talks about how the concept of server repurposing is extending virtualization and describes ways that VARs should take a closer look at this technology. The idea is to take the parts of a server such as its IP address, its disk storage, and its associated applications, and make them virtual so that they can run on any machine in a data center and aren’t tied to a particular piece of hardware. When an enterprise needs more processing power for particular applications, you can bring up a new server in a matter of minutes and have it satisfy this demand.

You can read the full version here.

We talk with Mike Brunner, who is the VP of Worldwide Channels for Wyse Technologies about the changing nature of the thin client marketplace, competing head-on with HP, and how their channel program is structured.Download the podcast now from eWeek’s site here.

My next podcast for Ziff’s IT Link/eWeek is with Chander Kant, the CEO of Zmanda. We talk about the importance of open source standards for data protection, and the role it plays with enterprise backups.You can download the podcast here.  

My next podcast for Ziff’s IT Link and eWeek is with Rich Bader, the CEO of EasyStreet Online Services from Portland, Ore. We talk about what it takes to build a more green data center, and some of the issues that he has uncovered in the process of expanding his services.You can download the podcast here.  

My next podcast for Ziff’s ITLink community is with David Goodman, the Chief Technology Officer of the International Rescue Committee in New York City. We talk about the unique challenges of supporting third world IT shops and mention some of his experiences, which he blogs here. 

You can download the podcast here. 

Robert Packer, Security Practice Manager for Presidio Networked Solutions in New York City, talking about the key threats for small business security and ways that VARs can become smarter about the SMB space.

You can listen to the podcast, for Ziff’s IT Link site, here. 

My next podcast is with Gregg Kalman, the VP for channels for wireless vendor Meru networks. We talk about some of their challenges and channel strategies and the impact of 802.11n networks on their customers and how to deal with managing lots of “carpet space”.You can download the podcast here. 

David O’Berry, IT Manager with the State of South Carolina government, talks about his hot button topics for 2008, where he thinks endpoint security is headed, and how VARs can realign themselves to take advantage of the changing threat landscape.You can listen to this podcast for Ziff’s IT Link, here.