The VAR Guy

Roughly two months after Autotask acquired VARStreet, the online product sourcing system is showing momentum with solutions providers. To wit: VARStreet’s user base has doubled in the past six weeks or so, according to Autotask Chief Marketing Officer Bob Vogel. Here are some more insights, based on an email exchange with Vogel.

Looking forward, Juniper Global Channel Chief Frank Vitagliano will be spending more time closer to home — working with partners across the Americas. Specifically, Vitagliano is transitioning from Senior VP, Worldwide Channels to the new position of Senior VP, Partners-Americas. The move comes as Juniper prepares for its Americas Partner Conference (May 24-26, Phoenix, Ariz.). Here are the details.

When The VAR Guy arrives at SAP’s Sapphire customer conference on May 17, our resident blogger will be armed with plenty of questions about SAP’s proposed $5.8 billion buyout of Sybase. Assuming the SAP-Sybase marriage receives regulatory approval, here are four key business questions facing the SAP-Sybase nuptials.

After months of buildup, Microsoft has released SharePoint 2010, the latest version of their collaboration platform. It’s garnering praise for tight integration with the new Office 2010, but SharePoint 2010 seems to otherwise be a fairly incremental release. And some folks are concerned about SharePoint 2010′s SaaS challenges. Here are the details for your potential customer migrations.

What a difference two years can make. At least, that’s what Dave Ehrhardt, president and CEO of hosted communications company Apptix, tells me. When his executive team came on in 2008, Apptix was a company in crisis, struggling to grow its business even as Apptix tried to figure out exactly what market it was servicing. Today, they’re providing messaging for 100,000-seat enterprises and making money amid a mixed economy. Here’s how Apptix apparently got back on track, and where VARs fit in.

Rewind about five years. eWeek Technology Editor Peter Coffee (pictured) was on stage at a CIO conference. The VAR Guy was in the audience taking notes. Plenty of technology editors step into conference spotlights. But few have mastered public speaking as well as Coffee. Faster forward to the present. So, where is Coffee these days? The VAR Guy has the answer.

Let me start out by saying those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and all security vendors live in glass houses. We are all one bad update away from crippling our customers. Every major antivirus vendor has at one time put out one of these bad updates which did more harm than good. It is our worst nightmare.  As a great 21st century philosopher once said, “Stuff Happens.”  The question is how do we make sure it doesn’t happen to us or our customers?

The VAR Guy recently highlighted why Linux has failed to infiltrate small businesses. Now, eBox Technologies is the latest company hoping to change that fact. eBox, developer of a Linux small business server platform, is launching a subscription service for VARs serving SMBs and MSPs targeting larger customers. It sounds like the effort also involves Ubuntu Linux. Here are the details and some observations from our resident blogger.

The CPU wars never seem to end. And now, AMD is looking to escalate the battle. The AMD 8-Series chipset is out, and with it comes newer ATI Radeon HD cards and Athlon II CPUs. Here’s the scoop on AMD’s more cost-effective 2010 offensive…

A few days ago, Canonical announced the release of a new desktop environment for Ubuntu, called Unity, targeted at netbooks and touchscreen devices.  I’ve been using it since then, and have found some time to write about my experience so far.

New Jersey-based Phone.com is the latest company to target the increasingly crowded SMB VoIP channel. Specifically, Phone.com has officially launch a partner program, giving VARs a potential option for customers with less than 40 phone lines. Here’s the scoop.

For months now, we’ve been watching the back-and-forth as Google and Microsoft ramp up their respective Apps and Office productivity suites. Now, the drama intensifies. As Microsoft launches Office 2010 today, Google posted a blog entry that says that if users really want to upgrade, they’d complement their existing Office deployment with Google Docs. Here’s the scoop.

At first, The VAR Guy doubted that the world wanted yet another Linux distribution. But Cloud Linux Inc. seems to be proving The VAR Guy wrong. Based in New Jersey, Cloud Linux seems to be catching on with several hosting companies. Here’s why.

CommVault has just signed a strategic distribution agreement through Avnet Technology Solutions. Here’s a look at the relationship and the potential implications for Avnet’s channel partners.

RIM’s Blackberry remains the most popular smartphone operating system. But the real battle is for the No. 2 position, where Google’s Android OS has overtaken Apple’s iPhone, according to the NPD Group’s research. What do the numbers mean for software partners and VARs? Here are some clues.

The Google I/O developer conference kicks off May 19 in San Francisco. It’s the search giant’s big chance to show how mature their cloud platform is, and to prove it, Google has recruited a who’s who of ISVs large and small to show off what they bring to the house that Google built at the Developer Sandbox. Here’s a quick overview of the projects that will likely catch our attention.

Here’s a little bit of Google chatter ahead of next week’s Google I/O developer conference: Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas isn’t merely a cloud integrator. The company also is a software developer that promotes its own SherpaTools administration application. The Cloud Sherpas strategy highlights how resellers and solutions providers are trying to generate SaaS application revenue in the cloud. Here are details.

Over at the Microsoft Online Services team blog, there’s a post called “Help us continue to improve BPOS,” which outlines the top 12 BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) features customers are requesting. Microsoft says user feedback will help to shape the company’s ongoing SaaS strategy. But based on rumors we’ve heard, we wonder if the Microsoft SaaS strategy includes a BPOS App Store for third-party developers. Here’s why.

This blog entry has been floating around The VAR Guy’s head for about six months. But several recent developments prompted our resident blogger to finally take a look at the looming data center battle involving Red Hat and VMware. Here’s some perspective.

A former CEO of videoconferencing vendor Tandberg is returning to the top spot, this time at Polycom, as speculation abounds the company is positioning itself for acquisition.

Hosted storage vendor Nine Technology has announced a partnership with channel reseller association NASBA to offer “Powered by Nine” online backup and recovery solutions to their membership. For Nine Technology, the partnership enhances and reinforces their play for the channel. For NASBA, it’s an opportunity for their membership to potentially see the kind of recurring revenue the cloud can bring. I spoke to both parties about the announcement.

Late last year, we told VARs about ParaScale, a cloud vendor with a platform that lets VARs turn legacy Linux hardware into a storage cluster. Today, they enhance their value proposition with the launch of ParaScale Cloud Storage 2.5, with new features designed to make the platform more reliable, more accessible, and, most importantly, more secure. I spoke with ParaScale VP of Marketing and Business Development Jack Norris about the announcement. Here’s the scoop.

Big Blue is doing something a little different, and a little new. IBM is opening their software labs to global business partners in effort to help partners drive growth. The announcement was made at the IMPACT 2010 conference in Last Vegas, as IBM looks to make moves to stay fresh in the partner arena.