The VAR Guy

Open source operating systems, applications and middleware continue to disrupt and infiltrate the IT channel. But which open source companies are truly committed to VARs, solutions providers and managed service providers? You’ll find out in December when The VAR Guy unveils The Open 50: the top companies — from across the world — building the open source channel.

CA Inc. (formerly Computer Associates International) is in Las Vegas this week, hosting its CA World partner and customer conference. It’s an opportune time for The VAR Guy to ask: Can partners trust this latest iteration of CA — which includes a new managed services and SaaS (software as a service) push? The VAR Guy sure seems to think so. Here’s why.

Attention bargain bin shoppers: Software as a Service (SaaS) stocks have declined more than 50 percent from January through Nov. 14, 2008, reports MSPmentor — The VAR Guy’s sister site. Our resident blogger doesn’t make buy, sell or hold recommendations. But isn’t SaaS supposed to be the future of software???

Lenovo has an offer for VARs, solutions providers — and small businesses — that want to give the company’s new ThinkServers a try. It involves a 60-day money back guarantee when the servers are purchased through Synnex, The VAR Guy has learned.

Openbravo, the open source ERP and POS specialist, at LinuxWorld shared plans to offer better native support for MySQL, the wildly popular open source database. Well, The VAR Guy just got an update on the effort. Here’s the scoop, straight from Openbravo Chief Products Officer Paolo Juvara.

Once again, financial analysts are a day late and a dollar short. Google’s stock has fallen sharply in 2008, and now Wall Street bulls are finally turning bearish on Google’s stock, according to Barron’s.

As Microsoft debuts Windows Small Business Server 2008 today, The VAR Guy is flashing back to a recent conversation he had with a top Microsoft partner in Australia. During that chat, our resident blogger was converted from an SBS 2008 skeptic into a true believer. Here’s why.

Novell is reaching out to Red Hat customers and Microsoft channel partners with a new offer. The strategy: Train Microsoft solutions providers to replace Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Novell SUSE Linux. Here’s the scoop on the strategy.

The VAR Guy has spent the last two years evangelizing software as a service (SaaS) and open source as a killer combination that VARs need to master. But now Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research says SaaS and open source companies will suffer greatly amid the economic turmoil. Here are Chowdhry’s perspectives and The VAR Guy’s observations.

Unison Technologies, which develops unified communications software for Linux servers, is gearing up to launch a partner program for solutions providers and managed service providers. Here’s the scoop, only from The VAR Guy.