The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy loves a good crime drama, especially when it involves technology. Have you heard the one about the Cisco reseller who turned to the dark side? The Bad Guy (no relation to The VAR Guy) allegedly used false identities in 39 states to order networking gear from Cisco since 2003.

The VAR Guy has a confession: He barely knows how to use the IP phone sitting on his desk. Basic features like call forwarding and voice conferencing are complete mysteries to him. It sounds pathetic, but there are thousands of IP phone users just like him. Small business and enterprises often don’t have the time or money to offer IP phone training. And users like The VAR Guy are too lazy to seek out phone instructions on their own.

The VAR Guy is often skeptical of software partnerships, especially when the relationships are little more than glossy press releases and empty marketing promises.

The VAR Guy doesn’t blog too often about executive changes. But Patrick Fetterman is one of his old sources from the early 1990s networking industry. Fetterman is also one of the few executives who has mastered managed services.

The VAR Guy stumbled onto a mystery today. During a chat with a 3Com manager, he asked if the company had any plans to support Asterisk—the open source IP telephony server.

As part of an open letter to Michael Dell earlier this month, The VAR Guy strongly recommended that Dell focus on the open source community to jump-start sales. Plenty of people are now echoing that advice.

Microsoft is making numerous moves at this weeks HIMSS conference in New Orleans. The VAR Guy thinks the most interesting initiatives involve SharePoint.

The VAR Guy couldn’t make it to New Orleans this week for the big Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference. But vendors are launching a healthy number of channel solutions at the event.

The VAR Guy has had to remain mum about this next piece of news for more than a week. It wasn’t easy. He has a big mouth, a broadband connection and a blog. That’s a dangerous mix.

If you’re about to sell your company or acquire another solutions provider, congratulations. But The VAR Guy also offers this timely warning: Never forget the implosion of marchFIRST, a failed solutions provider formed by the merger of Whittman-Hart and USWeb/CKS.

The VAR Guy will be watching closely when Dell announces quarterly earnings on March 1. Just about everyone is expecting the company to deliver poor results. But here are the five questions The VAR Guy hopes Michael & Co. will answer during the earnings call:

1. Services: Will Dell partner—say, with a company like OnForce—to connect Dell’s SMB customers with regional solutions providers?
2. Servers & Software: Can we expect Dell to preload open source solutions such as MySQL on Dell servers, much in the way that the company already resells Oracle databases? Also, anything knew brewing with Microsoft with Dynamics?
3. Networking: Is Dell staying the course or will the company OEM solutions from Linksys and Cisco?
4. Intel vs. AMD: What’s the sales mix between the two processor platforms?
5. Windows Vista: How’s it selling and what issues are customers having?

HP’s OpenView is a reliable, scalable option for enterprise network management. But for some VARs and many midsize businesses, it’s either too expensive or too complex to deploy. In fact, 60 percent of customers are using less than half of the features found in traditional IT management suites, according to Enterprise Management Associates.

If The VAR Guy was building an online marketplace for solutions providers, he’d tap the eBay talent pool for help. That’s exactly what OnForce is doing, having recruited former eBay CTO Marty Abbott to its board of directors.

Universities like Apple. Universities like open source. The VAR Guy wonders: Is there a potential solution stack here for VARs?

The VAR Guy picked a great week to visit Silicon Valley. First, some trusted local sources described how Cisco’s presence technology may support Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones. Now, he’s hearing chatter about a possible Cisco-Microsoft partnership in the unified communications space.

The VAR Guy has learned what’s next from Cisco and Apple. But before he spills the beans, he wants to brag a bit. Critics called him crazy, but The VAR Guy predicted on January 12 that Cisco and Apple would settle the dispute over the iPhone name. He also described six reasons why the the duo needed to partner.

Memo to all vendors and VARs:

Due to bad weather and poor communications at JetBlue, The VAR Guy was among the passengers stranded at JFK Airport in New York last week. But The VAR Guy remains loyal to JetBlue.

Seven printing and document imaging companies—from Canon to Xerox—are working with CompTIA to design a new vendor-neutral certification for VARs and integrators.

Microsoft has managed to crush most of the “PC software utility” companies from the 1990s. One major exception is Diskeeper, the defrag specialist.

VARs can’t survive on hardware margins alone. But perhaps they can make a healthy living charging a monthly fee to manage, service and support customers’ hardware.

If you want to understand where open source is heading next, visit Indiana University. During a recent chat with The VAR Guy, the university’s CIO described why the days of commercial ERP and CRM applications are limited.

Ray Lane, the former president of Oracle, has spent recent years as a venture capitalist. But The VAR Guy just noticed that Lane is co-founder and chairman of SpikeSource—one of Silicon Valley’s most interesting startups.