By Robert Peretson, PartnerPoint Contributing Writer

If you're a managed service provider, you know that every potential new client can possibly represent a significant boost to your revenue. And you know that it's challenging enough to just get your foot in the door. Once you do and you're face-to-face with your prospective new customer, how can you give yourself the edge you need to close the deal?

There are several things that you must do if you want to have any chance at landing the client. Ask questions… listen more than talk… develop a rapport… be honest.

But one of the most effective things you can do to turn your prospect into a paying client is to provide a compelling demonstration.

The late Billy Mays was one of the most successful and recognized sales pitchmen in recent history. There was a television program called "Pitchmen" a few years ago that followed the process that Billy and his partner Anthony Sullivan followed when choosing products to sell. In one of the episodes, Billy said very clearly, "The very first thing I need to see in a product is - "Is it Highly Demonstrable? When I show you the product in action, do you instantly know what it does… what the benefit is?"

Did you ever hear the slogan "Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking"? Back in the 1950's a small, young watch company used that slogan in a marketing campaign where in their commercials they "tortured" their watches with jackhammers, paint mixers and strapped them to the propeller of an outboard boat motor. These compelling demonstrations showing the abuse these watches were able to endure were the reason that in just a few short years, one of every three watches sold in the U.S. was a Timex… and why over half a century later, we still instantly know who the slogan belongs to.

Someday soon you won't see Microsoft's Windows XP as an option on new computers. A little less soon, and Windows XP won't even be available as a special order item. In three and a half years, all support for XP will stop. By then, everyone using Windows will presumably have moved up to Windows 7 or whatever else is next.

Last month we released a beta of the Microsoft Web Farm Framework. The Microsoft Web Farm Framework is a free product we are shipping that enables you to easily provision and mange a farm of web servers.  It enables you to automate the installation and configuration of platform components across the server farm, and enables you to automatically synchronize and deploy ASP.NET applications across them.  It also supports integration with load balancers - and enables you to automate updates across your servers so that your site/application is never down or unavailable to customers (it can automatically pull servers one-at-a-time out of the load balancer rotation, update them, and then inject them back into rotation).

VMware on Tuesday stumped for its IT as a service vision, which revolves around virtualization, efficiency and automation. This IT vision also includes a hefty dose of hybrid data centers as cloud computing and traditional infrastructure, or so-called private clouds, meld together.

Pomegranate is a novel distributed file system built over distributed tabular storage that acts an awful lot like a NoSQL system. It's targeted at increasing the performance of tiny object access in order to support applications like online photo and micro-blog services, which require high concurrency, high throughput, and low latency.

Apache Hadoop 0.21.0 was released on August 23, 2010. The last major release was 0.20.0 in April last year, so it’s not surprising that there are so many changes in this release, given the amount of activity in the Hadoop development community. In fact, there were over 1300 issues fixed in JIRA (Common, HDFS, MapReduce), the issue tracker used for Apache Hadoop development. Bear in mind that the 0.21.0 release, like all dot zero releases, isn’t suitable for production use.

The early numbers are in and it looks like Oracle's stewardship of the Sun Microsystems server franchise isn't going as well as claimed. And the figures, from the second quarter this year, reinforce SearchDataCenter.com survey findings showing Dell rebounding big-time in server sales.

For a quarter of a century, the relational database (RDBMS) has been the dominant model for database management. But, today, non-relational, “cloud,” or “NoSQL” databases are gaining mindshare as an alternative model for database management. In this article, we’ll look at the 10 key aspects of these non-relational NoSQL databases: the top five advantages and the top five challenges.

If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?

Some of the world's most popular Windows programs are vulnerable to a major bug in how they load critical code libraries, according to sites tracking attack code.

Among the Windows applications that can be exploited using a systemic bug that many have dubbed "DLL load hijacking," are the Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera browsers; Microsoft's Word 2007; Adobe's Photoshop; Skype; and the uTorrent BitTorrent client.

Learning how to scale isn’t easy without any prior experience. Nowadays you have plenty of websites like highscalability.com  to get some inspiration, but unfortunately there is no solution that fits all websites and needs. You still have to think on your own to find a concept that works for your requirements. So did I.

Today we released Microsoft Security Advisory 2269637. This is different from other Microsoft Security Advisories because it's not talking about specific vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. Rather, this is our official guidance in response to security research that has outlined a new, remote vector for a well-known class of vulnerabilities, known as DLL preloading or "binary planting" attacks.  We are currently conducting a thorough investigation into how this new vector may affect Microsoft products. As always, if we find this issue affects any of our products, we will address them appropriately.

Microsoft has released a hotfix for a serious issue in Windows  7 that is affecting users with hard drives that have a larger storage capacity than 2 Terabytes. While that may only be a minority of users, the impact of the bug can be fatal on affected systems.

It’s been a while since the Redmondians have talked up “Dryad,” Microsoft’s answer to Google’s MapReduce and Apache’s Hadoop. (I think the last time Dryad got any coverage outside the research community was when Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates mentioned it to the New York Times in 2006.)

Intel, the chip maker, has turned into Intel, the security specialist.

Making one of most eye-catching moves in its 42-year history, Intel announced Thursday that it planned to acquire McAfee for $7.68 billion in cash.

Today, Rackspace announced the release of Windows based Cloud Servers to compete with Amazon EC2 Windows instances and Windows Azure. According to Rackspace, the new service delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing applications and supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next social networking phenomenon. This was expected for a long time because they needed to have Windows based offerings in order to effectively compete with Amazon.

Intel has announced that it is shipping several new Atom processors targeted at home media and business storage appliances. Other than its support for DDR3 RAM, the performance of the new Atom processors is also boosted via higher CPU frequencies. The 1.8GHz D425 is a single-core processor, while the D525 is a dual-core chip. The new Atom processors support both Microsoft Windows Home Server and Linux platforms.

Windows XP Mode was introduced in Windows 7 as one of mitigation which would allow users to run legacy applications on Windows 7 as of one Compatibility  solutions.  This method looks cool and easy. Its suited for individuals or small scale companies. However, when the size of the organization is high, this solution is not advised. It is not easily manageable and thats exactly where MED-V comes to help!

The OMPM utility is available for download from our web site in order to help you analyze your files and applications compatibility while preparing your Office 2010 migration.

As part of our usual cycle of monthly updates, today Microsoft is releasing 14 security bulletins, addressing 34 vulnerabilities. Eight of those bulletins have a Critical severity rating, and we consider four of those to be high-priority deployments.

Wondering what’s new in Exchange Best Practices Analyzer for Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (ExBPA E14SP1)? Curious about how updates to the tool are being handled in Exchange 2010? Here’s the answer to some of your questions.

Microsoft as expected has just released an out of band security update for the Windows operating system that fixes a critical security vulnerable. The vulnerability affects all Microsoft operating systems that have been released in the past years, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and the Windows Server product line.

The severity of the issue and the fact that the security vulnerability was already exploited actively made the out of band release a necessity.

Microsoft is announcing the beta for the next version of Microsoft Security Essentials. Microsoft Security Essentials was first released in September 2009 and is our award-winning  no-cost light weight anti-malware service. It’s designed to help address the ongoing security needs of PCs running genuine Windows – helping keep people protected from viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.