The VAR Guy

The Super Bowl is nearly here — but The VAR Guy can’t say much about The Big Game since some of our blog team members are lifelong New England Patriots fans. And other bloggers here are far wiser New York Giants fans. (Guess which camp the always-wise VAR Guy belongs to?) While you’re weighing the answer to that question, here are the nine most read technology news and channel partner stories from our blog network — The VAR Guy, MSPmentor and Talkin’ Cloud — for the week ending Feb. 3, 2012.

If you’re a ShoreTel partner and you’ve been feeling a little neglected, buck up. The company has taken the wraps off a brand new reseller program replete with enhancements, designed to simultaneously help partners push unified communications (UC) solutions and improve their partner status and training. Short and sweet details follow …

Nimbus Data Systems Inc., a storage company, has launched the FlashPoint Partner Program and is seeking partners that need alternatives to traditional disk storage arrays.

Here’s another 2012 C-level executive switch-up: Paul Bell, president of Dell Public and Large Enterprise, has announced his retirement, and Steve Felice has been slated to be president and chief commercial officer, commanding of all the customer business segments currently under Bell’s leadership. More details coming right up …

Data mobility software provider AutoVirt has gone out of business just months after the company launched its channel partner program for value-added resellers (VARs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system integrators (SIs).

Despite the challenging U.S. economy, Red Hat sure sounds optimistic. The open source company plans to hire roughly 1,000 people in 2012. And this isn’t a pure Linux strategy. Red Hat also continues to invest in virtualization, storage, middleware and cloud computing. Here’s where channel partners fit into the strategy.

When Autotask sold VARStreet back to VARStreet’s employees today, The VAR Guy reached out to VARStreet to learn how the company plans to march forward in 2012. Shiv Agarwal, VP of sales at VARStreet, says 2012 plans call for a new online store; stronger integrations with ERP systems; and a push into Canada. Here’s the update.

Join our next webcast today at 2:00 p.m. eastern. We’ll cover five best practices for selling cloud services. Confirmed speakers include Savvis VP Martin Capurro, Mycroft CISO Liz Mann, and CA Technologies Senior Advisor Wendy Petty (CA is the event’s sponsor). We’ll take your questions throughout the webcast. Register now and pose your questions at 2:00 p.m. eastern today.

When Hewlett-Packard announced Q4 2011 financial results on Nov. 21, The VAR Guy was pleasantly surprised and somewhat disappointed. Simply put, HP’s PC business held up remarkably well and networking sales continued to grow. But HP’s server and printer businesses are under serious pressure. Here’s a closer look at HP’s Q4 2011 results. Plus, an HP reality check — as only The VAR Guy can deliver it.

This month, the Dot Hill channel team interviewed Charles Bass, vice president of alliances and strategic accounts at Promark Technology — one of the premier value added distributors in the United States, who had some great advice for resellers when evaluating vendor channel programs.

So you bought a list of leads in your target market. You may be tempted to simply begin calling those leads and trying to sell your products. Not so fast; there are many ways VARs can nurture those leads, improving your chance of obtaining a successful closure. To get started, I’ve got five tactics to help you weed out the uninterested leads while allocating resources to the good ones — thus preventing your sales force from wasting time.

Join our next Webcast (this Wednesday, November 2, at 2:00 p.m. eastern) to learn how to adjust your to adjust your service level agreements (SLAs) for managed and cloud services. We’ll share SLA best practices from both the MSP and customer perspective. Register now to join us for this Channel Expert Hour webcast.

My time here at the McAfee FOCUS 2011 Security Conference is just about over. I leave you with the details on two major McAfee announcements around partner profitability and network security before I pack up and hit Dallas for the 2011 Tigerpaw User Conference.

How are top MSPs adjusting their managed services and cloud services business models for 2012? Find out today (Wed., Oct. 19 at 2:00 p.m. eastern) during our next webcast. Two MSPmentor 100 companies — Kevin Crowe from Long View Systems and Tim Hebert from Atrion — will describe how they maximized their recurring revenues in 2011, and where their respective cloud and MSP strategies are heading in 2012. Instead of writing your 2012 business plan from scratch, borrow some great ideas from two top MSPmentor 100 companies. Bonus: Nimsoft CEO Chris O’Malley will join in to answer your questions live.

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.

If you’re an OEM and you want the coveted Windows 8 logo on your new Windows 8 machines, you’re going to have to do a few things to satisfy Microsoft. No big deal, right? Just a few minimum RAM and CPU requirements, right? Not this time. According to some recently surfaced BUILD slides on Windows 8, machines now must use UEFI with “hardened boot” certificate authentication. And that might mean no alternative OSes can boot …

Our next webcast is today (Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2:00 p.m. eastern). We’ll cover Five Steps to Building Winning Sales Proposals. The five tips are designed for VARs and MSPs that want to win more business and speed their sales pipelines. Our guest speakers will include two leading IT solutions providers and Quosal (the event’s sponsor). I’ll be on hand to moderate. Please register now.

E-mail and web security vendor M86 Security is leaning more on its channel partners to help it move deeper into the enterprise, and as such has redesigned its partner program in the Americas with a slew of new tools and incentives to jumpstart the process.

Juniper shares fell a whopping 20 percent today after the company issued a weak earnings outlook. But here’s the bigger question: Do earnings concerns at Juniper, Cisco Systems and Extreme Networks signal broader troubles in the networking industry? Before you answer consider this: The VAR Guy is starting to hear from channel partners who say their networking profits are getting pinched.

When The VAR Guy last checked in with Merchant Warehouse in October 2010, the company was refocusing its channel partner program. Fast forward nine months and The VAR Guy notices something interesting: It looks like Bob Cellucci has succeeded Jay Chaudhry as VP of business development for partner channel. Here’s the details…

Apple reported record-breaking results for its third quarter of 2011, showing the world it remains a force to be reckoned with in the IT space, thanks to ongoing love from the consumer space and a growing infatuation from the business market. Read on for the details and the perspective you can only get at The VAR Guy …

Back in 2009 when I was first cutting my blogging teeth under the watchful eye of The VAR Guy, I wrote about the opening of the first Microsoft Store, in Scottsdale, Ariz. I was skeptical about its success and cited a bevy of problems with running a store that is supposed to emulate Apple’s model. But Microsoft has announced it plans to build more of them. What is Microsoft’s goal, and can the company succeed? Here are my thoughts on the idea …

The VAR Guy originally predicted Sage Summit 2011 would be buzz about opportunities in booming vertical markets and the future of tablet-based CRM and ERP. But as it turns out, Sage is in the middle of a large branding transition. Its focus is more inward, which also includes changes to Sage’s partner program. The VAR Guy spoke to Sage’s Channel Chief Tom Miller for the details.