Time’s almost up for your data-center customers who still run older Microsoft server software.

Support for SQL Server 2008 ends on July 9 — just a couple of weeks off! And support for Windows Server 2008 ends in January. That’s a bit longer, but still awfully soon.

What to do? Start by watching this short video highlight.

In less than 2 minutes, you’ll learn why legacy infrastructure is a problem — and why now’s the time to get modern:

Serving customers — a key task for nearly every business owner — is now also one of the biggest jobs for software.

For example, did you know that large organizations now spend more money on customer relationship management (CRM) software than they do on any other kind of enterprise app?

Or that three-quarters of organizations increased their spending on customer-experience (CX) tech last year?

Or that cutting-edge organizations are preparing now for what they call the autonomous virtual customer?

The needs of workstation users are changing. These workers are getting a lot more mobile. For them, innovation can happen wherever, whenever.

To meet their changing needs, Lenovo this week introduced 5 new members of its ThinkPad P Series of mobile workstations.

Your customers now have two great ways to deploy the Intel Unite solution.

Intel Unite is a wireless collaboration solution built on the Intel vPro platform. It’s easy to use, cost-effective and secure.

Your customers can use Intel Unite to seamlessly share content across collaboration spaces while remote users and guests connect with ease — and without dongles, adaptors or cables. Additionally, Intel Unite’s open platform enables the easy integration of other collaboration tools to enhance the overall user experience.

If you're finding it difficult to hire IT talent, here's some consolation: Technology professionals, especially those in hot specialties, are harder to find than they’ve been in over a decade.

Unemployment among IT pros in the United States fell last month to a 13-year low of 1.3%, according to tech trade group CompTIA. The last time unemployment among U.S. IT pros was this low was back in January 2000.

Your data-center customers are ready to modernize their tech. Are you ready to help them?

Get help from a new CRNtv video podcast, “Pardon the Integration: Accelerate IT Modernization with Intel and Microsoft.”

In this podcast, you’ll hear and see two knowledgeable and well-connected speakers:

> Jason Kennedy, data center group senior director at Intel

> Carter Wilson, Windows Server specialist at Microsoft

Here’s some good news about 5G, the forthcoming wireless-networking standard: It’s probably not going to cost you or your customers much more than you’re paying for 4G now.

That’s the silver lining behind an otherwise cloudy forecast from consultants and market watchers Strategy Analytics.

Chatbots are getting the answers. Servers are getting expensive. And AI is getting free from its biases.

That’s the latest from top IT researchers. And here’s your tech provider’s roundup:

Chatbots have the answers

How good are chatbots at answering customer inquiries? Pretty good, finds a new survey.

In the last 6 months, chatbot-using companies had 65% of their customer inquiries effectively answered by the chatbot. Only about one in five queries had to be transferred to a human agent.

Project Athena 1.0 is an advanced laptop target spec and design preview that Intel announced last week at the big Computex conference in Taiwan.

It’s coming soon. Intel says its hardware partners — including Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo — will offer Athena-compliant laptops in this year’s second half.

Now you do. CRN has just published its latest list of the 25 top solution provider companies. These integrators, service providers and IT consultants — all based in North America — are ranked by service revenue.