Six Channel Blog Entries The VAR Guy Didn’t Write: Jan. 22

The VAR Guy is on a road trip today… wearing his $10 jacket and exploring rumors involving a software company pumping $20 million into the managed services market. In the meantime, here are six blog entries The VAR Guy didn’t have a chance to write for the week ending Jan. 22, 2010.

7. Hit Redial: Whatever happened to Unison, the unified communications software upstart that offered a free, ad-based system? The VAR Guy expects his phone to ring in February with an update.

6. He’s Easy to Find: Long-time solutions provider Stuart Crawford is betting his career on search engine optimization. Crawford has joined Ulistic Inc., which helps small businesses in Calgary to master the Web.

5. Who Writes This Stuff?: F5 Networks has joined the NetApp Alliance Partner Program. The companies say F5 is collaborating with NetApp to provide customers with unified application and data delivery solutions to enable more agile and dynamic data centers. Agile… Dynamic… Do CIOs really use those words to describe their data centers?

4. The Volvo of SaaS: Back on January 4, The VAR Guy stirred some debate by asking readers if any SaaS company could match Volvo’s reputation for safety. Intermedia, promoter of Hosted Exchange, promptly reached out to The VAR Guy and reminded him about Intermedia’s five-nines reliability guarantee.

3. Small Business, Big Opportunity: Can VARs push VoIP into small business? SMB Nation’s Harry Brelsford sure thinks so. He’s preparing to host the SMBVoIP2010 show this March.

2. Open Ethernet?: Vyatta, the open source alternative to Cisco gear, is partnering up with Ethernet specialist Extreme Networks. Hmmm…

1. Check the Headline: If you know The VAR Guy, you know he doesn’t play by the rules. There is no #1 on this list, because it’s a top six list.