The VAR Guy

Chalk up another win for Apple in the POS column. Sears is going all-out on the Apple devices, bringing iPads and iPod Touches into department stores for both customer and employee use. Here’s the scoop on how Apple is silently making serious waves in the retail industry …

Surprise surprise, Apple is doing extremely well. For Q4 2011, Apple has broken a few new records, including number of Macs sold and iPads sold. What’s more, Apple’s astronomical growth isn’t just happening here in the United States — overseas sales are becoming the majority of Apple’s revenue stream. Despite this, Apple missed its revenue and iPhone goals. Does this portend slower growth for the technology behemoth? The VAR Guy has your answer …

The VAR Guy is always glad to see trends turn into opportunities for the channel. These days, mobile device management is the hottest thing since melted butter — remember Symantec’s recently announced DLP for tablets offering? — and now CompTIA has launched new “educational offerings” to help IT channel partners learn about the ways iPads and Android devices can co-exist in the corporate workplace. The VAR Guy has the all-important rundown for you …

Polycom continues to grow ever larger, especially with its latest acquisition of ViVu, whose technology portfolio offers video collaboration inside web applications for quick and streamlined video chatting and sharing of content. It should come as no surprise that ViVu fits Polycom’s needs perfectly. Acquisition details follow …

VMTurbo, famous for its free virtualization management offering, has expanded its footprint with four new partners. Here’s the rundown on how VMTurbo will be looking to turn new partners wins into expanding channel opportunities …

As promised, day two of the McAfee FOCUS 2011 Security Conference featured new partner agreements and security solution announcements.

While mobile device management continues to take the channel by storm, there’s another data center item that requires some reining in: the ever-expanding virtual data center. As VM and mobility needs increase in complexity, new approaches to managing all that will be necessary. Enterasys says it has the solution in OneFabric. Details follow …

No product announcements during the first day of the McAfee FOCUS 2011 Security Conference in Las Vegas, but Intel and McAfee did set the stage to talk about channel partnerships and upcoming solutions throughout the rest of the week.

As salespeople, we often push products and services that we feel are best in class or are the latest and greatest.  In most cases this works very well, but sometimes we don’t completely resolve the customer’s pain points as well as we could have.  Instead of trying to sell, we need to focus on helping our customers buy.  To accomplish this, it’s important to take a few extra steps and deliver the right solutions that help our customers grow their business and be successful.

At Symantec Partner Engage 2011, The VAR Guy spent time at a few roundtable discussions featuring some of Symantec’s top brass, CEO Enrique Salem and Channel Chief Randy Cochran. Here’s the scoop on their thoughts regarding everything from McAfee to mobile device management …

Now that iPhone 4S has been released into the world, hackers finally have their hands on the swanky new iPhone with the sexy new assistant. And that means hackers have gone from figuring out where Siri’s code lives to running a fully functional port of Siri in a short time. But Apple’s servers won’t respond to Siri if it’s running on the iPhone 4. Conspiracy?

At the Windows 8 BUILD event, Microsoft unveiled most of the nooks and crannies within Windows 8, but there were plenty of questions and criticisms about a variety of things, from ARM-based Windows tablets to Metro-style applications. One such criticism was the apparent non-Metro style of the Windows Task Manager. But as it turns out, Microsoft has put a lot more effort into redesigning the Task Manager than initially noted …

The VAR Guy spent this week covering Dell World, Symantec Partner Engage, N-able Partner Summit and a Synnex partner gathering. Forgive our resident blogger if he didn’t have time to cover every piece of high-tech gossip this week. To appease you, here are six piece of high-tech news for channel partners that The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending Oct. 14, 2011.

Symantec President and CEO Enrique Salem took the stage at Symantec Partner Engage 2011 to talk about a lot of things, but there was one singular uniting theme: It’s about rethinking — everything. Salem and the entire Symantec team are taking partners to task, asking them to how they plan to grow and rethink their solution strategy amid “megatrends.” Here’s what our resident blogger thought about all that …

If Partner Engage 2011 had any sort of underlying theme, it was change. The VAR Guy discerned that bit of information quickly, especially after Symantec invited Gartner analyst Tiffani Bova to discuss the future of security services. Are you ready to start offering Cloud Services Brokerage?

The VAR Guy’s brain has been treated to a tour de force of partner advice. Aside from “megatrends” and cloud brokerage, Symantec’s Channel Chief Randy Cochran offered up some advice to partners on future customer relationships with future technology at Partner Engage 2011. Here’s the scoop …

Looks like the Ice Cream Sandwich party is back on. After cancelling the original Ice Cream Sandwich launch, Google and Samsung have picked a new date in October. And this time, there’s a little whipped cream on top: Google CEO Larry Page dropped hints that Android 4.0 will truly surprise users …

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard plan to ship a SQL Server database appliance in November. The Microsoft-HP database appliance, announced at PASS Summit, sounds a lot like a recent Oracle Database Appliance launch. Is The VAR Guy imagining this database appliance feud or is it real? Here’s the update.

Canonical, as expected, launched Ubuntu 11.10 today. Although it seems like just yesterday that Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement of the codename for Ubuntu 11.10 had me googling the terms “oneiric” and “oncelot,” the development cycle of the latest Ubuntu release is officially complete as of today.  That means Canonical has introduced the 15th iteration of the world’s most popular Linux distribution has debuted.  What does that mean for us users?  Here’s a look.

RIM says its BlackBerry services have been restored. But here’s the problem: The biggest threat to RIM’s BlackBerry business continues to grow in strength. The obvious threats are Apple iPhone and Google Android adoption. In reality, the biggest BlackBerry killer is BYOD — bring your own device to work. Here’s why.

Proper communication is the answer to most issues that arise between vendors and VARs, yet many people from both sides of the aisle forget this simple fact. What’s more, vendor-VAR communication is important, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Here are some ways communication can help improve a partner relationship.

Calling it a “strategic alliance,” Citrix and Cisco Systems have become buddies to “accelerate mainstream adoption of desktop virtualization.” Can Cisco’s networking prowess coupled with Citrix’s virtualization skills bring something uniquely special to the virtualization scene? Here’s the scoop on the “high-definition” VMs coming to a desktop near you …

The VAR Guy has already outlined his predictions for Symantec CEO Enrique Salem’s discussion at the Symantec Partner Engage keynote. But what else is coming out of the Phoenix oasis that is the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort? Our resident blogger would love to tell you. Read on …