The VAR Guy

When the SAP Partner Summit started yesterday, Red Hat had a prime sponsorship position at the welcome reception. Read between the lines, and a quiet battle is brewing between Red Hat and Novell; the two leaning Linux service distribution providers are battling for the love and affection of SAP. Here’s why.

At the SAP Partner Summit in Las Vegas, Senior VP Pat Hume and VP Kevin Gilroy stepped to the stage and addressed more than 1,000 solutions providers that work within the SAP PartnerEdge partner program. Roughly 52 percent of SAP’s small and midsize enterprise sales currently involve partners. Looking ahead, Hume wants to push that SME figure to 100% partner centric — as SAP balances on-premises and SaaS strategies. Here are the details, plus 12 key takeaways from today’s kick-off keynote.

3Com has rolled out a new chassis switch that extends enterprise network security into the core, making even virtual infrastructures more secure. The move could attract interest from Hewlett-Packard solutions providers, amid HP’s pending buyout of 3Com.

Attention all those holding stock with Apple Inc., don’t expect any sort of dividend or buyback. Steve Jobs doesn’t plan on it. All the cash Apple has is staying in the bank, and that’s final. Is that a smart idea for Apple? For Jobs’ persona? Here’s the deal…

There are any number of cloud storage solution vendors out there. So why should a VAR partner with a company like Nexenta and leverage the brand-new NexentaStor 3.0? Nexenta CEO Evan Powell says it comes down to 93 points — of margin. Interested? Here are the details.

Netgear is at it again with two high-performance network storage platforms. The aim? Optimized storage for virtualization applications. Joining the family of ReadyNAS is the 3100 and the 4200. For VARs targeting the SMB space here are the details…

Picking the right hosting partner for your business can be critical to your success. It’s a given that you want a partner with high quality data centers, a low latency network and quality servers.  At The Planet, we can offer you all that.  But you may also want to select a provider with a la carte services that allow you to meet a broad range of customer service needs, without beginning your search anew.

I wrote recently about legal concerns involving multimedia patents on Ubuntu, and how to obtain licensed codecs without breaking the law.  But I didn’t give much thought to the philosophical side of the issue.  That’s an important topic in the Ubuntu community, so I’m catching up with it here.