Six Channel Partner Blogs The VAR Guy Didn’t Write: March 11
The VAR Guy is gearing up for more technology conferences. On his radar are the Channel Partner Conference and Expo in Las Vegas and the Intermedia Partner Summit — heavy on cloud discussion — in New York. But before our resident blogger packs his bags for another road trip, here are six channel partner blog entries The VAR Guy didn’t write for the week ending March 11, 2011.
7. D-Day Approaches: Attachmate‘s pending buyout of Novell is expected to be completed within a matter of days — or weeks. The VAR Guy is watching the countdown closely and hopes to speak with the Novell channel team the moment the deal is official.
6. Cloud Beta for VARs: WorkMarket, the online channel marketplace launched by former OnForce CEO Jeff Leventhal, is looking for beta testers. Solutions providers can find the beta test information here.
5. Growth Mode: TeamLogic IT, a provider of computer services and network support, has opened its sixth San Francisco Bay area location. The franchise is owned by Dave and Wendy Thompson and located in San Ramon. Three of the company’s six locations opened in 2011. The other San Francisco Bay area locations include Campbell, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Menlo Park and Santa Rosa.
4. Cloud Billing: More and more sources tell The VAR Guy that Microsoft will likely change its cloud billing policy for VARs and channel partners late this year. As you’ll recall, Microsoft doesn’t allow VARs to managed cloud billing for end customers. But Channel Chief Jon Roskill has been listening closely to the debate. Best guess: Microsoft makes an adjustment after Office 365 — the forthcoming successor to Business Productivity Online Suite — arrives sometime in 2011.
3. Time for a Spin Off?: Is it time for Cisco Systems to sell off its consumer products offerings? That’s the speculation from Motley Fool, a widely read financial blog. Skeptics think Cisco’s consumer electronics efforts — such as the Flip video camera, home Internet stereos and the Umi consumer telepresence services — hurt Cisco’s margins and distract the company from core enterprise offerings. The VAR Guy is on the fence with this one…
2. Smart Guy?: The VAR Guy has to spend some more time writing about new Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker. Earlier this week Apotheker said HP had lost its soul, but new innovations like WebOS (from Palm) running on all HP PCs are in the works. Plus, it’s a safe bet Apotheker will discuss some sort of HP Cloud Strategy during the upcoming HP Americas Partner Conference in Las Vegas.
1. Check the Headline: This remains a top six list. Always has been, always will be.
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#7 As Attachmate completes its buyout of Novell it raises some questions. 1) How much of Novell’s existing management will stay in place? I think most of it for the time being. Attachmate may not be prepared to actually run their Novell and SUSE divisions by themselves from the get-go. 2) Will the identities of the 800+ Novell patents being sold to a consortium being led my Microsoft be revealed? The answer to this question has been of interest to the open source community as the members of this consortium are not terribly sympathetic to open source software. 3) Will Novel’s BrainShare conference continue? This was answered in the affirmative the other week when Novell announced that BrainShare 2011 will be held in October. The question is what if they gave a BrainShare and nobody came? For all of the work Novell has been doing on re-tooling their virtualization management, workload management and identity management service portfolio for the cloud, they seem to be not getting much buzz. This seems to be a problem other incumbent vendors are having with trying to generate some mojo in the cloud…HP, IBM, Cisco, CA, Oracle, Microsoft are not being thought of as doing anything really “exciting” in the cloud, just jamming their existing product offerings into the cloud. On the other hand, companies like Google can sell-out a technical conference in 60 minutes. One thing we can be sure of, it is not going to be your father’s Novell anymore after Attachmate completes the sale. Too bad Chris Stone never got his chance to sit in the “big seat” during one of his stints at Novell.