Everyone seems to be pointing fingers in the wake of a network malfunction that hit the New England Patriots sideline during last week's AFC Championship game. Here's a look at what might have sidelined Surface and whether a solution provider could have saved the day.

For the week ending Jan. 29, CRN looks at IT companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions.

Microsoft, in its fiscal 2016 second quarter, said Azure, Office 365 and Surface products are driving healthy revenue, including growing sales of premium offerings.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson says about 40 percent of new business is now done through the channel and that its strategy of creating an 'army of skilled partners around the globe' is paying off.

This week's top stories include a roundup of earnings reports from Apple, EMC and Samsung.

CEO Peter Altabef said a bloated cost structure and lack of vertical integration have caused Unisys to struggle.

Armed with millions in cash, consulting giant CGI says the Montreal-based firm is ready to grow by acquiring other companies.

The world's leading public cloud is approaching a $10 billion run rate and 30 percent margins.

On its Q4 and year-end earnings call, the network security vendor said it had reorganized its sales force in a move toward better profitability and better management of multinational accounts.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Xerox will become two firms and activist investor Carl Icahn, who recently announced an ownership stake of more than 7 percent, will get three board seats on one of those firms.

Avnet's technology sales drop for the second consecutive quarter due to what executives say was difficulty in closing legacy storage deals and a shift away from low-margin computing components.

Verticals represent a 'deeper set of capabilities' for solution providers to further transform their businesses, according to market research firm IDC.

Dell segment teams can begin selling VMAX on Feb. 1, and the company is in the process of evaluating pushing the EMC solution through the channel.

The smartphone market grew 5.7 percent during the holiday quarter versus the same quarter last year, according to IDC. Here are the five companies with the most smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter.

Check Point is on the hunt for an acquisition and is open to either a blockbuster buy or a small technology tuck-in move, CEO Gil Shwed said on the year-end earnings call Thursday.

Proofpoint's Tracey Newell talks to CRNtv about the biggest threats in the security landscape in 2016.

Samsung unveiled an educational and marketing resource blitz as part of an effort to amp up its channel program.

The acquisition will add high-performance storage that includes dynamic tiering and performance adjustment to provide flexible quality-of-service capabilities to Pivot3's hyper-converged infrastructure appliances.

VMware's 2012 acquisition of software-defined networking startup Nicira is now paying off, but some partners are eager for the vendor to take its NSX tech down-market with smaller SKUs.

As Facebook enlists telecom giants to its Open Compute Project for low-cost, energy-efficient data center design, IT hardware vendors like Cisco are feeling the pressure.