The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy is starting to preparing for Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which starts July 11 in Washington, D.C. No doubt, Microsoft’s new channel chief will face plenty of questions from the software giant’s customer and partner base. But before thousands of us converge in D.C., here are six channel partner blog entries The VAR Guy and his team didn’t have time to write for the week ending June 25, 2010.

7. Red Hat’s Biggest Channel Challenge: Plenty of things are going right at Red Hat. The company’s latest financial results prove that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), JBoss Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) continue to catch on with customers. And RHEV represents an opportunity for channel partners to topple VMware, asserts Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. Still, there are some channel conflict challenges involving JBoss middleware. The VAR Guy will have more details soon…

6. Hosted Exchange Gains More Partner Momentum: Intermedia, which claims to be the world’s largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider, has launched an affiliate track within its partner program. The move allows resellers to earn recurring commissions on new accounts plus additional revenues as the account grows over its lifetime. Plus, affiliates who prefer upfront commissions retain that option, Intermedia says.

The VAR Guy is watching to see if Microsoft adjusts its own Exchange Online partner program (part of the Business Productivity Online Suite push, known as BPOS) during WPC conference.

5. Partner Promotes Oracle SaaS: Oracle doesn’t appear to be building its own cloud. Instead, the company continues to promote SaaS licensing to partners. True believers include NaviSite Inc., a managed hosting specialist that recently achieved Platinum partner status within the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) program.

Still, some critics are taking aim at Oracle’s partner program. ServiceKey, for one, is reaching out to VARs to ensure they understand Independent Service Maintenance Organization (ISMO) opportunities on customers’ Sun hardware… More details in a few days…

4. How HP Plans to Beat Cisco Systems: The VAR Guy had a lengthy briefing with Hewlett-Packard last week. The discussion focused on a range of new HP servers, networking devices and storage offerings. Now here’s the challenge: HP and Cisco are competing for the same market as storage, servers and networking converge. So how does HP plan to win the battle? One opportunity involves the applications layer. HP insiders are quick to note that HP has more experience than Cisco rolling out and managing specific server-centric applications — including SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Oracle.

3. Help Wanted: EMC’s channel chief apparently has existed the company, according to Everything Channel. The VAR Guy (known by some as Everything Else Channel) has not submitted his resume for the position.

2. Microsoft Channel Chief – Up to the Cloud Challenge?: MSPmentor identifies five areas where new Microsoft Channel Chief Jon Roskill can show channel partners some SaaS love. But does Roskill have deep SaaS and cloud experience? Microsoft says yes. The VAR Guy will probe that a bit more closely soon.

1. Check the Headline: After writing a few thousand blog entries, The VAR Guy still doesn’t play by the rules. This remains a top-six list every week. Hence, there will never be a No. 1. The approach improves productivity on this blog entry by 1/7 every week. Amazing.

Thanks for reading and for engaging in a dialog with a blogger who may — or may not — really exist.

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