IT channel products and technologies

Open source meets economic stimulus

We’ve all heard about the nightmare mishaps in hospital surgeries — doctors look at the wrong charts and you come out of what was supposed to be routine surgery with missing limbs. What would happen if you presented them with a complex electronic system of health records?

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McNealy on IBM rumors

What is Scott McNealy’s take on the much-reported IBM/Sun combo under discussion? According to Alex Barrett, pretty much what you’d expect.  As in:

“I can’t comment, but if we were to buy IBM, I can tell you that we would open source AIX, DB2 and all that proprietary mainframe stuff…..But we only have $3 billion in the bank, and I’d want to keep at least $1 billion, so I don’t know about the ROI.”

Barrett attended an executive breakfast in Boston Wednesday featuring the recently elusive Sun chairman. You can bet when Sun planned this little lovefest, it didn’t expect to be facing the IBM tsunami. The subject, after all, was supposed to be Sun’s big bet on open source technologies and solutions blah blah blah. But of course what everyone wanted to know was all about IBM. And Scooter didn’t disappoint.

Websense gives partners more reasons to say “yes” to its program

One of the philosophies that I really appreciated out of former Intel Chairman and CEO Andrew Grove when he was still active was his staunch belief that investments in the future should not be sacrificed for the short-term good of a company’s stock price. This is not something that many high-tech vendors usually pay much attention to when the economy is all whacked out (like right now), so it’s refreshing when I hear about a company that subscribes to that notion, especially when the investments are focused on solidifying and supporting its channel relationships.

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Storage virtualization is hot. Ingram snags DataCore, too

Server virtualization is soooo last year.

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Who needs IBM? Synnex gets nod for new Fujitsu enterprise storage

After being dissed by IBM last fall, which took away its System x distie business, Synnex got a boost this week for its midrange and enterprise storage practice when Fujitsu Computer Systems tapped it to handle several new products typically reserved for closed-distribution model industrial distributors.

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Google reseller program on the way?

A Google reseller program seems to be in the works, according to this video posted Friday on YouTube.

The 14-second video features Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise president, and 10 Google employees standing behind him. Girouard says, “On behalf of the Google Apps reseller team, I want to say thank you for taking the time to learn about this exciting new program.”

The employees then yell, “Go Apps resellers!”

Google Apps Education Edition, which offers email, word processing, instant messaging and other programs for college students and faculty, is already gaining some traction in the channel. But there’s also concern that Google’s focus on Web-based applications could take away on-premise sales opportunities for solutions providers. Maybe this “Google Apps reseller team” will help address those issues.

UPDATE (7:04 p.m. Eastern): The owner of the video has removed it from YouTube. 

Tech Data extends data center virtualization play

Hmmmm. First, virtualization management software, now a play in storage virtualization.

Distributor Tech Data has signed up DataCore Software, which provides a series of enterprise applications that can be used to manage and provision storage devices attached to a SAN. So, instead of requiring a one-to-one relationship between servers and different storage devices, virtual disks can be created that serve multiple masters. Tech Data says the DataCore products address the following areas:

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Dell’s New Year’s Eve surprise

Dell Inc. launched a major reorg on December 31. The move “globalizes” operations around three major customer segments — large enterprise, public sector, and small and medium businesses (SMBs). The press release posted quietly on Wednesday morning, making the Dell just the latest tech vendor to attempt to bury major news that could be construed as negative, before a holiday. Or so it seems. (The consumer segment was already handled globally.)

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Jobs, Apple, bow out of Macworld

There will be no more Steve Jobs keynotes at Macworld Expo. Ever.

In fact, Apple is out of the Macworld Expo keynote business, it said. Phil Schiller’s keynote will be the last Apple keynote at the show, which kicks off January 5 in San Francisco.  Schiller is Apple’s executive vice president of marketing.

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Now that you’ve helped your clients go virtual, how can you help manage it all?

A vendor agreement announced last week by distributor Tech Data is definitely a sign of things to come in the virtualization space. That is, a move to manage and secure all the virtual environments that have sprung up all over your clients’ data centers.

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