The VAR Guy

As CEO of Hewlett-Packard during the biggest scandal in the company’s history, Mark Hurd’s natural instinct is to try and save the day. But The VAR Guy has a bad feeling in his stomach. He’s starting to think HP made a mistake when it gave CEO Hurd the additional title of chairman.

Oops. The VAR Guy didn’t post his daily blog this morning because he was editing content for that old, reliable media format called a magazine. The paper edition, he’s proud to say, enjoys a growing following.

The VAR Guy must be getting a little older. He has taken far too long to solve a simple riddle: Where is Novell NetWare Pioneer Drew Major, the father of network operating systems? Has Major retired? No. Is he running another startup? Sort of.

Nortel is taking a close look at the world’s top 10 enterprise application providers and mulling new Unified Communication partnerships, The VAR Guy has learned.

The VAR Guy spent Tuesday at Interop in New York. Although smaller than the monster conferences from the 1990s, this Interop was a solid event with good mix of vendors on hand.

It’s been more than a decade since Novell’s glory days in the early 1990s, when the company promoted training, partnerships and its Yes campaign to achieve server software dominance.

During a consulting call on Friday, somebody asked The VAR Guy the following question: “What is CDW? A distributor? An online reseller? Something else?”

Symbol Technologies has put itself on the auction block. Motorola has apparently placed a bid. The VAR Guy suspects someone from Symbol leaked the story in order to bring other bidders to the table–fast.

Some name changes work out splendidly. Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. Andersen Consulting to Accenture. The Highlanders to The New York Yankees. Great moves.

From its small but growing offices in Manhattan, Xandros is taking aim at Microsoft. The upstart Linux provider tells The VAR Guy that its channel program, launched in June, has attracted hundreds of VARs. Xandros VP Todd Kanfer expects “thousands” of partners to promote the company’s Linux offering as a reliable, secure alternative to Microsoft on the server … and even the desktop.