Channel Marker

With Cisco-EMC pairing, what’s up with VMware?

Barbara Darrow — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:42:53 +0000

The HP vs. Cisco/EMC/VMware hype fight this week re-emphasized that Cisco and EMC (and its subsidiary VMware) are joined at the hip in their aggressive grab for data center share.

Recurring rumors have Cisco giving up all pretense at some point (John Chambers: ” Ah heck, let’s just get this over with!”) and buying EMC outright.

The newly-announced hydra-headed Cisco-EMC-VMware alliance wasn’t THAT but it was still pretty interesting. All I could think as the channel chiefs from the three companies did their best to position this thing as good for VARs, was that if I were HP, I’d sure as hell start pushing Microsoft Hyper-V with both hands. HP and Microsoft are clearly best buds again even though HP still counts VMware as a strategic partner–at least on paper.

After all, Cisco started this mess, when it decided to jump into the middle of the data center server business–basically slapping HP with a white glove.

EMC, Cisco, VMware put their channel guys on the phone yesterday to pitch how this joint effort really does require partners to put the solutions together. VMware’s Ben Matheson did his best to say that VMware’s position with other hardware partners will be unaffected.

“We have great partnerships with HP, Dell, NetApp and otehrs. This [deal] won’t impact those at all. We want to continue to parnter with them. vBlock is very exciting but it is in no way exclusive and we won’t ignore partners,” he said.

We know they have to say these things, but the closed-captioning was “Yeah, right.”

Both parties in this food fight are contorting themselves to have it both ways.

HP claims its tightly converged computing gear brings the benefits of that integration but does not foreclose use of third party components. VMware says little things like corporate ownership and a very special relationship with Cisco does not mean it will stint Cisco competitors.

Google and Microsoft trading places in mail

Barbara Darrow — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:25:59 +0000

So, Google wins a big, prestigious $7.2 billion email account –for 30,000 Los Angeles municipal workers . Google Apps Premier is displacing Novell Groupwise there. But Google beat out the Microsoft Exchange-Outlook combo even though by most accounts the dollar difference between bids was itty bitty.

What’s big here is that if the implementation–to be performed by CSC –goes well, Google will have a response to naysayers who say it can only do beta-ware and has no cred in business. Such an account could show that Google can hold its own against not only Groupwise but Exchange. A bonus would be if those LA Google Apps users get a taste for the Google spreadsheet, word processor, presentation software and might even opt for them over Microsoft Office apps. That is what you call a toehold.

Google got the big nod Oct. 27. On Nov. 2, Microsoft sliced the price on its hosted Business Productivity Online Suite –which including Exchange–from $15.00 per user per month to $10.00 per user per month. Coincidence? Is anything a coincidence when it comes to Microsoft’s reaction to Google?

Some background, BPOS has gone over like a lead balloon with channel players. Not that it wasn’t productive or a good product, but because Microsoft insisted on owning any BPOS customer. What self-respecting VAR wants to turn over a customer to a vendor partner? The answer is, none.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Vblock done, Cisco to launch new unified collaboration attack

Barbara Darrow — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:22:39 +0000

Cisco and its best friends forever EMC and VMware finally came clean about their Vblock plans on Tuesday.

Now watch for Cisco next week to shift gears–a tad–and unveil a slew of unified collaboration gear from phones to new unified communications servers–or is it now collaboration servers? Big news on deck on that front for Nov. 9 when Cisco CEO John Chambers will talk up the products. They will probably also include additional new ISR G2 routers on the infrastructure front.

But back to vBlock: Don’t expect HP and IBM to lay down. In fact, you won’t have to wait long for them to up their competitive responses to Cisco’s aggressive data center push. HP will talk up it’s “converged infrastructure” approach and will say–truthfully–that it, unlike Cisco or EMC–has all the pieces for a converged data center system. Servers? Check. Networking hardware? Check, check. Storage? Check check check. It’s already down the road with some converged products and probably put pedal to the medal after Cisco’s first unveiled its Unified Computing Systems news last spring.

Cisco is now opening up its UCS servers to channel partners which is bound to further incite HP .

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Oracle addresses Glassfish, other Sun software futures

Barbara Darrow — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:57:04 +0000

Oracle execs up to and including Larry Ellison have been vocal about their plan to continue, even boost, support for Java and Solaris. This week the company started talking up plans for some of Sun’s more niche software products, albeit in a very general way.

Check out the updated FAQ on Oracle.com, which says that Glassfish will also be safe and sound.

“Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.”

Of course, given the hesitance of the European regulators, Oracle has to make nice. To that point, the FAQ’s reiterate Ellison’s Oracle OpenWorld promise to treasure and nurture MySQL.

“Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now. Oracle expects to continue to develop and provide the open source MySQL database after the transaction closes. Oracle plans to add MySQL to Oracle’s existing suite of database products, which already includes Berkeley DB, an open source database. Oracle also currently offers InnoDB, an open source transactional storage engine and the most important and popular transaction engine under MySQL. Oracle already distributes MySQL as part of our Enterprise Linux offering.”

Netbeans? Safe.

“NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.”

More on this on Savio Rodrieques’ blog.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Results of Symantec SMB disaster recovery survey suggest upside for channel

Heather Clancy — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:21:58 +0000

The good news is that you have a lot of prospects in small-business disaster recovery solutions, according to a recent survey by Symantec. The bad news is that most of your prospective customers don’t understand just unprepared they are, so your sales cycle isn’t likely to be easy.

The company’s 2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey included roughly 1,560 responses from 28 different countries. A full 82 percent of the SMBs said they were satisfied with their disaster recovery plans. At the sime time, however, the average respondent reported at least three outages in the past 12 months. What’s more, only 23 percent back up their data. Even those businesses aren’t backing up their COMPLETE data set, since most of the SMBs that ARE backing their data are backing up only about 60 percent of what they have.

Here’s the complete press release about the survey. And here’s a presentation that details the results specifically for the North American market.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Economic woes linger, but it’s time to plan for growth

Heather Clancy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:50:29 +0000

OK, so not every economic indicator we’re seeing right now is positive, although the revelation today that GDP grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter (instead of the 3.2 percent predicted) is definitely cause for at least a “Woo-Hoo!” (Here’s Reuters article analyzing the data.)

And for many different reasons, members of the IT channel are starting to sound like parrots: saying NOW is the time to really start planning for growth.

Microsoft hopes to ride on this interest by offering up a new “economic impact” report that it has produced in conjunction with the channel researchers at IDC. The report is called “Aid to Recovery: The Economic Impact of IT, Software and the Microsoft Ecosystem in the Global Economy.”

The data suggests IT spending will grow at 3.3. percent worldwide between now and the end of 2013. It should come as little surprise that the report really underscores the role that software will play in the rebound: The prediction is that spending on software will grow 4.8 percent annually between now and 2014. This could be the foundation for substantial IT services growth, the study suggests. Services revenue should outstrip revenue product by Microsoft products by a ratio of 1:8.7, according to the report.

This article on the Microsoft Web site details the growth potential that the company’s executive management foresee for partners as the rebound starts to happen. In addition, you can read more about the Microsoft-sponsored IDC study at this link. (A video from Steve Ballmer is one of the items featured.)

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Azure gets eclipsed

Barbara Darrow — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:56:05 +0000

Microsoft continues its push to make its proposed Azure cloud plat form palatable to developers beyond the Windows realm and an embrace of Eclipse is bound to do that.

Toward that end, Microsoft signed two proxies–Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec– to help make the Eclipse software development platform Azure friendly. (Or is it the other way around?) Anyway, the goal is to equip Eclipse to work with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 features.

Part of the deal is to develop updates to the Eclipse IDE so that it can incorporate new Win 7 and WS 2008 R2 features. Another is a planned open source plug-in to let PHP developers use Eclipse to create Web apps that would run in Azure. Also on tap: a Windows Azure SDC for Java.

More details here and here

Ingram Micro VTN gets social

Barbara Darrow — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:23:21 +0000

Ingram Micro today jumped into the social networking pool with a set of tools to help VentureTech Network (VTN) partners collaborate and communicate better with each other and with the distributor itself.

Both Twitter.com/VTNcommunity and Facebook.com were unveiled Monday. The target audience is the 300-plus VTN VAR members in North America.

“We went from an unlaunched Facebook page this weekend and had 100 members and climbing by this morning,” said John Fago, senior director of channel marketing for Ingram Micro.

In fact, for most in IT, a Twitter feed and Facebook page are now just part of the price of doing business. And a low price at that. VARs have their own Twitter feeds and Facebook pages and use them to talk up their client work and prospect for new hires.

“It’s not a huge investment. These tools are free and easy to use. At the click of a button you get access to 30,000 people,” Fago said.

The new tools were announced a the VentureTech Network Fall 2009 Invitational in Denver on Monday.

Turns out it is NOT all or nothing when it comes to managed services

Heather Clancy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:45:46 +0000

Spending a couple days this week at the Fall Invitational conference for the Ingram Micro VentureTech Network where as you might imagine there is a lot of talk and posturing about the role of cloud computing and “IT as a service” in the high-tech industry’s future.

One interesting statistic to share from a keynote this morning by Gartner analyst and vice president Tiffani Bova (actually lots of stats, but that’s for another post or two). Gartner’s recent survey of business models for about 140 or so channel types (call ‘em VARs, technology solution providers, etc.) uncovered the rather intriguing finding that only 19 percent of the respondents were generating more than 50 percent of their revenue from recurring services. So, despite the fact that many companies call themselves managed service providers (MSPs), there actually probably aren’t ENTIRELY driven by that sort of revenue model.

This is music to the ears of Justin Crotty, vice president of services sales for Ingram Micro, and it jibes with his own team is finding. Turns out that some of the most successful MSPs in Crotty’s acquaintance are hybrids. They still have a healthy product revenue stream and, indeed, often use projects involving a combination of products and professional services as the entry point for their managed services engagements, Crotty says. “IT needs to be a balanced approach,” he says.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Top five IT channel lessons for the quarter

Barbara Darrow — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:15:30 +0000

VARs remain extremely cautious on public cloud computing and are obsessed with which vendor giants will remain standing after more expected M&A activity. Those are but two highlights of this quarter’s SearchITChannel.com Advisory Board call. But there more below:

1: Fear the cloud: Okay, that verbiage may be overkill, but the VARs said they spend a lot of time educating customers about when and if public cloud computing will really meet their needs. Vendor hype aside, board members said public cloud scenarios run counter to HIPAA and other compliance regulations.

The rule of thumb seems to be: Unless you, the customer, control the data–encrypted across the wire and in storage–and you control physical access to the servers and storage, you will not be in compliance.

Well-publicized outages including the recent Microsoft-T-mobile Sidekick personal data loss should be a reality check for customers, said George Brown, president of Database Solutions. Customers and the VARs supporting them need to know where what liability issues are involved in cloud-based solutions

Make no mistake: They are all for co-location and other plans to defray costs, but when it comes to regulation, shared infrastructure remains a no-no.

2: While you’re at it, fear Google: Google’s push into business apps should “make everyone nervous,” said Kevin McDonald, executive vice president of Alvaka Networks

It’s difficult to tell how serious Google is in its myriad projects. “I see them putting up all sorts of windmills, and Microsoft is out there tilting at them all,” McDonald said. In that, Google is doing to Microsoft what Microsoft used to do to every other software maker: Distract competitors with promised but distant releases of software that will do everything better, faster, cheaper. Vars said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is as obsessed with Google as CEOs from Borland, Novell, WordPerfect, Netscape used to be with Microsoft. This does not bode well for the Big M.

3: Watch Cisco like a hawk: The consensus is that the network hardware kingpin is the company to watch when it comes to future acquisitions and forays into new businesses. It is viewed as a competitive threat by many VARs. “I’m a lot more concerned about what John Chambers is up to than with whatever the Microsoft CEO is doing,” said one board member.

Several panelists said there is probably truth in the oft-revived rumor about Cisco buying EMC.

4: Keep your eye on M&A: But, Cisco isn’t the only potential suitor for EMC. Other VARs said Microsoft or HP could also do that deal even though Microsoft isn’t much in the way of a hardware company and HP has already bought LeftHand Networks and licenses a lot of other storage.

Brocade appears up for grabs, thanks to a recent Wall Street Journal story citing an unnamed source (probably the investment banker who really, really wants that deal to happen.)

One panelist said Chinese telcom giant Huawei, which tried and failed to buy 3Com, might also be a suitor for Brocade.

5: Don’t equate small with easy:

There is often an inverse relationship between the size of a customer and that customer’s need for IT help. In other words, don’t mistake a small shop with small technology needs. Companies with under 25 people often require the most handholding.

The customer who buys a $1,600 system usually takes up many times the service calls as a larger customer, said Jill Steinberg, president of Value Computing, Inc.

Bonus lesson: Watch Snoracle: Participants seem to think Oracle will take care of the hardware supply chain it is purchasing along with Sun Microsystems. Many think the merger, when final, may force some of the other deals already mentioned in # 3 and 4. HP and EMC could be a formidable counterweight to Sun-Oracle, said one board member.

Click here for last quarter’s IT channel hot spots.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.