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9. Think Again: What’s the one trait most VARs and MSPs lack? Sales skills? Marketing skills? Actually it’s something far more basic, according to ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini. Here’s his answer.

8. The Cloud War: Everyone is taking about the Citrix CloudStack vs. OpenStack battle. But is the open source cloud battle real or perceived?

7. Google Chromebooks vs PCs: What’s the total cost of ownership of Google Chromebooks vs traditional PCs? Google offers a pricing calculator that generates an alleged answer. But what’s the bigger story with Chromebooks? Talkin’ Cloud offered an update.

6. Big Box Challenge: As Best Buy closes some stores, can the company’s managed services business — mindSHIFT — thrive? We’ve got some exclusive insights.

5. Nimsoft CEO Exits: Changes are afoot within CA Technology’s MSP software division. MSPmentor had the original story here. But the follow-up just went live here.

4. Ten Best Cloud Stocks: When 1Q 2012 ended, Talkin’ Cloud disclosed the 10 best-performing cloud computing and cloud services stocks for the quarter. The data is from the Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index, which rose 26 percent in 1Q 2012.

3. Attacking IBM: Dell’s Clerity acquisition is all about “application modernization.” Or is it more about migrating IBM mainframe customer applications to Linux and Windows? Here’s The VAR Guy’s educated guess.

2. Move Over, Microsoft Skype: It sounds like Cisco Jabber could be an emerging alternative for video conferencing and instant messaging. Here’s why.

1. That Old Ubuntu Magic: Quite a few VARs are still wondering if Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution, has a place in corporate deployments. Here’s the latest chatter.

That’s all for now. Thanks for your readership.