August, 2008

Jobs’ obit posted

It’s an editor’s worst nightmare: An obituary hits the wire before the subject is, well, is actually dead. (Insert Monty Python Holy Grail joke here.) 

It happened yesterday when Bloomberg posted its Jobs obit. Gawker managed to find and post the copy before it was retracted.

 To re-clarify: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is still among us.

Avnet/IBM and the importance of being certified

By Elaine Hom, Associate Features Editor

SAN ANTONIO — At Avnet/IBM’s Ignition ‘08 Conference in San Antonio, the word of the day seems to be “certification.” Every time I sit down at a table, I get asked, “so what are you certified in?” They seem pretty crushed (and/or scornful) when I sheepishly admit that I’m not certified in diddlysquat.

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CompTIA security-certified professionals now top 50,000

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) says it has certified more than 50,000 IT professionals with its vendor-neutral CompTIA Security+ designation. How many individual vendors can say the same thing?

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Microsoft recruits Jerry Seinfeld for Mac attack

We now know how Microsoft is spending $10 million of its $300 million campaign to combat Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads: by hiring Jerry Seinfeld.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Seinfeld will be “one of the key celebrity pitchmen” in the campaign, and he will appear in ads with the master of Microsoft’s domain, Bill Gates.

By now you probably know the basics of the saga: Apple bombards the airwaves with commercials about how Macs are cool and PCs are lame, now everyone thinks Vista stinks, yada, yada, yada, Microsoft’s finally fighting back. But so far, the Seinfeld news is going over about as well as George Costanza’s conversion to Latvian Orthodox.

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HP strips partners of their “metals,” revamps partner designations

So, the word is out: Hewlett-Packard is collapsing its PartnerOne program for resellers, VARs and other IT solution providers, stripping it of all those precious metals designations and creating, instead, new labels that it thinks will mean something more to potential customers.

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Regulatory compliance: Getting customers to look at the big picture

Regulatory compliance has driven a whole lot of business for security resellers in the past few years. But that doesn’t mean you can just walk into a customer site, say “compliance” and successfully sell whatever you want.

Security experts Anton Chuvakin and Rich Mogull both recently wrote about the “checklist mentality” that most customers take when addressing regulatory compliance. What that means is, CSOs have a list of what they need to be compliant, and if what you’re selling isn’t specifically on that list, they don’t want it.

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Tandberg receives takeover bid, but is another major prospect lurking?

Last week videoconferencing company Tandberg confirmed that it had received a takeover bid by an unnamed private equity firm. Since then rumors have been flying that major networking equipment manufacturers — Cisco, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Ericsson — could step up with competitive bids.

Only one of those companies seems an obvious bidder. Continued »

Vista downgrades can’t really be this rampant, can they?

A recent study — albeit a highly unscientific one — has found that 35% of business users who bought PCs with Windows Vista licenses have downgraded to Windows XP.

The study comes from InfoWorld’s Windows Sentinel, which collects system statistics from more than 3,000 PCs — including the system’s manufacturer, the system’s product name and the version of Windows it’s running. The study identified the number of systems that typically ship with Vista, then found out how many of those were actually running Vista. Only 65% were.

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SAP reorganizes SME channel, expands partner system

SAP has reorganized its SME channel to improve partner recruitment, enablement and marketing.

Patricia Hume, senior vice president of SAP’s global indirect channel unit, stopped by SearchITChannel.com world headquarters today to tell us about the reorganization. She explained that the basic org structure before consisted of a sales team and a marketing team. Now, there are more subsets designed to meet specific goals.

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Cisco-Linksys SMB combo not so pretty for partners yet

Wow, poop rolls downhill really quickly at Cisco.

It’s just been a few days since the company officially announced it would fold its Linksys small business staff and channel into the Cisco small and medium-sized business (SMB) practice and already there are complaints coming from partners. Continued »