The VAR Guy

A dollar. One buck. One hundred cents. No matter how you say it, $1 doesn’t buy much these days. But apparently it can buy you security software for your Windows PC.

Susan Heystee likely has the toughest job in the software business. Novell has named her to oversee the company’s relationship with Microsoft.

Oracle is a channel-friendly company. No matter how many times he reads that first sentence, it’s still hard for The VAR Guy to believe. But it seems to be true.

Microsoft will officially launch Windows Vista and Office 2007 November 30 in New York.

The VAR Guy opened this morning’s newspaper and read about the latest controversy at CA Inc. Apparently, employees are upset about CA purchasing a helicopter (list price: $12 million) even as employees are forced to pay more for health care and child care services.

The VAR Guy has been watching Lenovo — maker of ThinkPad laptops — and scratching his head in confusion. While HP has successfully targeted small and midsize businesses, Lenovo has remained focused almost exclusively on large enterprises and corporate executives.

Selling Linux-based servers is old news. The VAR Guy is telling solutions providers to move up the software stack. It’s time to focus on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and other related open-source applications.

The VAR Guy was walking through Websense’s halls earlier this week at 8:30 a.m. Despite the early hour, the place was already buzzing with employee activity.

Intel is making a big Web 2.0 push that has caught The VAR Guy’s attention. The initiative includes a new Internet suite comprising software from Six Apart, Socialtext, NewsGator, SimpleFeed and SpikeSource.

While most eyes focus on the Microsoft-Novell Linux deal, The VAR Guy is keeping close tabs on another Linux provider that is quietly gaining momentum: Collax Inc.