Six Channel Blogs The VAR Guy Didn’t Write: Dec. 17

The VAR Guy is dragging a bit today. No coffee and no sleep are not a good combination for our resident blogger. Still, The VAR Guy is hearing plenty of chatter across the IT channel. In fact, here are six channel partner blog entries The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending December 17, 2000 2010.

7. Silence Is Golden: December 15 marked two months since the old Sun Microsystems partner program ended. Oracle encourages those legacy Sun partners to join the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partner program. Privately, some partners miss the old Sun partner program. But publicly, former Sun partners have been largely silent on the issue. Translation: Perhaps the end of the old Sun partner program wasn’t that big of a deal after all…

6. Nearing 7th Heaven: Logicalis, one of HP’s largest national solution providers in North America, has earned HP Solution Elite status for the sixth consecutive year.

5. Rival Views: Jaspersoft and Pentaho compete with one another in the open source business intelligence market. And now, they’re hosting partner conferences within days of one another. The Pentaho Global Partner Summit is January 19-20 in San Francisco. And the inaugural  JasperWorld conference is February 7-9 in San Francisco.

4. Shameless Plug: Thanks to those who visited TalkinCloud — The VAR Guy’s new sister site. Traffic on TalkinCloud during its launch week was 65 percent higher than traffic on The VAR Guy during his launch week. The seven most popular blogs on TalkinCloud this week were:

• Living In the Cloud: A JoliCloud-Chrome Experiment
• Is the Cloud Already Killing the Small Business Server Market?
• Red Hat and Eucalyptus Counter OpenStack Clouds
• Oracle Cloud Office: SaaS Productivity for Cloud Service Providers
• Distributors Still Sorting Out Cloud Channel Strategies
• IBM: Channel Partners Have 3 Cloud Opportunities
• Truth be Told: Small VARs and MSPs Already Live In the Cloud

3. Say What?: InfoWorld says 2010 was the year of Ubuntu as the de facto cloud Linux distribution. Sure, hosting companies like Rackspace say Ubuntu is the most popular platform for running cloud applications. But has Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud really taken off? The VAR Guy is poking around for more answers.

2. Cold Hard Cash: The VAR Guy is hearing more reports about Microsoft paying developers to port their applications to Windows Azure, the public cloud platform. Instead of paying ISVs, Microsoft should work harder to promote its own successful applications on Azure — thereby creating demand within customer and ISV markets.

1. Check the Headline: This remains a top-six blog. So there never is a number one. Never has been, never will be.

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