The VAR Guy

Call it a sign of things to come: Salesforce.com says it intends to raise $500 million for acquisitions. While many small VARs continue to struggle with basic financing requests, Salesforce.com’s news reinforces the fact that investment money continues to flow into the cloud and SaaS (software as a service) markets.

If you think security is important for businesses, imagine what would happen if someone cracked the network passwords for the infrared tripwire you have on the back door that leads into the family room. As advanced A/V and security setups join data networks in the home, VARs can potentially focus their business uptime and cybersecurity expertise on the consumer market. Here’s how.

Rumors persist that Microsoft is launching Windows Mobile 6.6 in February. The big question: Can Microsoft energize the Windows Mobile effort amid such fierce competition from Apple iPhone, Blackberry and Google Android initiatives. With so many great contenders, can the mighty Microsoft muscle its way back to relevance? Here’s some speculation on the future.

Of course it isn’t VAR related, but who can’t stop wondering about the mythical tablet from Cupertino. Early on January 14th, 2010, Valleywag.org offered $100,000 to anyone willing to let them play with a prototype for just an hour, and $10,000 for mere photographs. Needless to say, Apple was not amused. Here’s the scoop:

Dear Firefox: It’s not me, it’s you. Our courtship began a little over four years ago when I realized that I was doing myself a disservice by limiting myself to the slow and bare-bones Microsoft Internet Explorer. There was a whole new world of open source for me to discover, and I thought I’d be happy installing extensions and opening tabs forever. After the last couple of releases, though, our relationship turned sour, and yesterday I had to break it off. Here’s what I hope the open source community learns from my unluckiness in love.

Skype – usually regarded as a single-user, computer-based solution to cutting communications costs – is now taking its place among the business market as a viable alternative to traditional PBX calling. And Sunnyvale, Calif.-based VoSKY is helping Skype get there. Here’s how.

Once again, The VAR Guy’s sources were right. Canonical, as our resident blogger expected, is set to announce some Ubuntu news at IBM’s Lotusphere conference in Orlando the week of January 18. The effort — which includes channel partners — will involve Canonical countering Microsoft’s Windows 7 push. Here’s the scoop.

VIA is releasing a new offering called the AMOS-3001. Is it an industrial PC, or is it more? It’s designed to take a beating in extreme temperatures, but it’s a bit more nifty than that. Here’s the scoop on something VARs might want to keep there eyes on.

The blogosphere is buzzing about the latest partnership between Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. No doubt, the duo has a longstanding relationship in the IT market. But The VAR Guy has to ask: Is there really anything all that “new” here? Or was the Microsoft-HP announcement a preemptive response to anticipated competition from Cisco Systems and Oracle-Sun, respectively?

I just finished configuring a Vista laptop for my brother, who needs to run some Windows-only applications for college. Whenever I find myself compelled to deal with proprietary operating systems, I’m reminded why I use Ubuntu. Here’s a short list of some of those reasons.

Although it may not be news to many Ubuntu users, I recently discovered the Disk Usage Analyzer tool, which has proved enormously useful. Here’s why I think it’s so great.

When Lucid Lynx ships in April, it will come with a video editor installed by default, which will be a first for Ubuntu. With this in mind, I decided to test drive OpenShot, an open-source, nonlinear editor that reached its 1.0 release very recently.

I recently tested the open-source video editor OpenShot, so I thought it would only be fair for me also to play around with PiTiVi, the editor that at this point is set to come installed by default with Ubuntu 10.04 when it debuts in April 2010. I found some time to do so today. Read on for the details.

Open source appliance maker Vyatta has unveiled the 3500 networking appliance family, which combines routing, firewall and VPN functionality.  Vyatta claims the appliance offers 10 Gbps networking capability at 1/20th the cost other ‘name-brand’ networking appliances. But are solutions providers and their customers really ready for open source network?

The major Linux distribution providers — Red Hat, Novell and Canonical — are preparing to attend IBM’s Lotusphere 2010 conference (Orlando, January 17-21). The VAR Guy is keeping a particularly close eye on Canonical, backer of Ubuntu. Here’s why.

At first glance, Vu Technologies is a telepresence upstart that has very little experience in the IT channel. But take a closer look and you’ll discover that Vu Technologies apparently is a sister company to Zenith Infotech — a backup and disaster recovery specialist that serves thousands of VARs and MSPs worldwide. Here’s the scoop.

Rumors of Google getting into the cloud storage game with a so-called “GDrive” have been floating around since at least 2006. While we may have to wait a little longer for a real enterprise-level storage solution from the search giant, the house that search built is making moves in the right direction. One example Google says users will soon be able to store and share any kind of file on their increasingly popular Google Docs browser-based productivity suite — and VARs are going to be able to leverage it.

Everyone is looking to integrate touch these days, and HP is no slacker. Their new AP5000 is looking to be an all-in-one point of sale device. But is it the right move for VARs that promote POS offerings? Read on for the details on the new system and a little speculation about the future of computerized sales.

Yet again, Lenovo is busting down the gates of boring consumer electronics and pushing the envelope here with the LePhone. It’s not officially launched yet (just in China), but it has the potential to shake up the way we look at phones, especially Android offerings. Not convinced it’s something different? Read on.

We already heard rumors about Apple entering the point of sale (POS) arena, but now there are whispers that Apple is looking to break into the health care vertical. With what? Why, none other than their alleged tablet, of course. Think it’s far-fetched? Don’t be too surprised. Read on for the details.

Good news and bad news seem to be spreading across the IT channel. Hardware sales are picking up. But companies such as Dell Inc. (as well as Dell’s components suppliers) are having a difficult time fulfilling partner and customer demand. In particular, the supply chain issues seem to be impacting selected Dell PowerEdge server shipments. Here’s the scoop.

When it comes to Microsoft Office sales, there are rumors and then there are facts. Some blogs are reporting that Microsoft had to halt Office sales on January 11 in order to comply with a recent court order. But before you press the panic button take this piece of advice: Ignore the rumors and check out Mary Jo Foley’s report, which includes proper context and comments from Microsoft.  That’s all The VAR Guy has to say about that.

I’ve read a lot about Google’s Chrome browser in the blogosphere, but have yet to see it being used in the wild. Given this observation, and my increasingly strained relationship with Firefox, I decided to give Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, another try.  Here’s what I found.