The VAR Guy

In recent months, The VAR Guy has heard rumblings from some solutions providers struggling to upgrade customers to Small Business Server 2008. But then The VAR Guy heard from Gaeltek LLC, a solutions provider that has managed five migrations to SBS 2008 in the past six weeks. Here’s the scoop.

I spent some time on the phone June 5, learning how Frontpoint (a managed service provider) supports Global Medical Staffing (a 40-person small business). If you’d like to learn about their business relationship — directly from Frontpoint CEO Dan Stanford and Global Medical Staffing COO Alan Lakomski — then join us for next MSPmentor Live webcast, scheduled for June 10 at 2:00pm eastern.

With an alpha version of Google’s Chrome web browser recently released, I’ve been using it on Ubuntu for a few days.   Below are some thoughts on the new browser and its ability to improve the Ubuntu experience.

Rumor has it The VAR Guy is heading to court the week of June 8. Has our resident blogger finally crossed the line and been served with a lawsuit? Time to pay up for high-tech dumpster diving? Well, not quite. It could be a simple case of jury duty — 12 angry men and one crazy blogger. Either way, don’t worry. The VAR Guy will keep telling you what’s next in the IT channel — even if he has to blog from outside a courthouse…

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano is set to host his first webcast of 2009 with Big Blue’s global community of business partners.  The VAR Guy hears the webcast will occur Tuesday, June 9. Our resident blogger plans to find a way into that virtual room with Palmisano to listen to what he has to say.

Cisco CEO John Chambers’ closing keynote at Cisco Partner Summit has started. Here’s a point-by-point recap, including Chambers’ best guess for the timing of a significant economic recovery.

The sleeping giant has awakened. It looks like Cisco Systems is addressing the potential Asterisk open source IP PBX threat — and opportunity. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy at Cisco Partner Summit.

The VAR Guy is rather enjoying his ringside seat at this week’s IT prize fights. Cisco Systems started things off by attacking Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. And now, IBM is jumping into the mix with a press release alleging channel partners face “waning demand for Microsoft products.” But that’s not all.

When The VAR500 (formerly VARbusiness 500) was announced recently, Dell found an interesting statistic: 437 of the solutions providers on the VAR500 list have relationships with Dell. But that’s not all. Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis shared a few more partner program milestones with The VAR Guy on June 3. Here’s the scoop.

At the Cisco Partner Summit in Boston, Cisco continues to rally partners against Hewlett-Packard. The three latest words of war allegedly come from Cisco’s Chuck Robbins (pictured), senior VP, U.S. Commercial Market. Here’s the scoop.

The VAR Guy is seated for a press briefing with Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and Executive VP Rob Lloyd. Here are the top eight highlights from the discussion, which focuses on collaboration, competition with Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, and what Flip video represents to Cisco going forward. For those who haven’t been keeping score, Cisco has fired three bullets at HP in recent days.

The server war is on. Cisco Systems CTO Padmasree Warrior says two-thirds of enterprises expect to embrace Cisco servers (um, unified computing system…) within the next two to three years, according to a Goldman Sachs report. Sounds impressive. Or is it?

Sure, Cisco spends billions of dollars acquiring companies and billions more on research and development. But for a scant $312,400, Cisco may have found a way to drive enterprise demand for new switches, routers, storage, servers and collaboration software. Indeed, that $312,400 investment is driving viral buzz across the Web — and will ultimately push more folks to Internet video. Here’s the scoop.

Today’s Cisco Partner Summit keynote focused on collaboration. But the bigger theme was Cisco Systems attacking (and dismissing) Hewlett-Packard’s unified communications partnership with Microsoft. Cisco Senior VP of Software Don Proctor took a number of shots at the HP-Microsoft deal. Here’s the scoop. Plus, HP’s previously stated views on this matter.

The drive to create faster, cooler, and more energy-efficient CPUs has led to a diversification of processor architectures recently, with the venerable x86 facing competition it hasn’t seen in years.  If this trend continues, it will assure Ubuntu and other Linux distributions a substantial advantage over Microsoft, which so far has announced no plans to build Windows for chipsets that are not x86-compatible.

During Cisco Partner Summit in Boston, the company outlined its revamped managed services partner program — which will now be available to VARs and solutions providers that don’t have their own NOCs (network operation centers). Surinder Brar, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s worldwide channels, offers an overview of the revised managed services partner program, in this video…

The VAR Guy must concede: He wasn’t overly impressed with former Motorola CTO  Padmasree Warrior (pictured) when she presented at a municipal wireless event back in 2007. She gave a classic product pitch instead  of a thought leadership presentation. Fast forward to the present and Warrior — now CTO of Cisco Systems — is talking vision instead of products.  And it’s a welcome improvement. Today, she offered up a preview of voice-enabled search. Should Google worry?

During some brief but revealing remarks, Cisco Channel Chief Keith Goodwin conceded that he’s heard from partners who are increasingly concerned about potential services conflicts with Cisco.

During Cisco Partner Summit 2o09 in Boston, Channel Chief Keith Goodwin said more than 3,500 partners are participating in the event’s virtual component. But that’s not all. Here are nine highlights from Goodwin’s keynote, including key thoughts on Cisco financing programs for partners and end-users.

When I was a kid I played cops and robbers (or some form of good guy vs. bad guy) with my little brother. Funny thing is now I do the same for a living; well, kind of. I work for a security company and try to offer our partners the products they need to keep their customers protected. OK, guess you could call me a cyber arms dealer for the good guys.

A ton of partner relationship management (PRM) tools  and other technologies claim they can make your life easier and bring you closer to your partners. But are the tools intuitive and do they work? I’ve spoken to several companies about their offerings, and here’s a sampling of my findings.

The old debate about lack of standardization among different Linux platforms flared up on Slashdot this weekend.  It’s a complicated topic, with complex arguments both for and against greater consolidation among Linux programming interfaces and distributions.  It’s also something that would be a nonissue if developers could find the courage to declare certain subsets of the Linux community more worthy than others of support, based simply on their size.