The VAR Guy

Last week, The VAR Guy outlined six trends he expected to generate some buzz at this week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas. Now that the show is in full swing, let’s take another look at those six trends to see how they’re shaping up.

The buzz involving Interop Las Vegas (April 27-May 2) is building. The VAR Guy has received briefing requests from Adtran, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and other networking vendors. Here are three messages he hopes to hear, and three messages he intends to ignore.

Dell. Resellers. Unified communications. Open source. A small software company has found a way to roll up those four ingredients into a very successful IP PBX solution that’s now going global. Here’s the improbable story of Fonality, which is selling its IP telephony software on Dell servers by the truckload.

Watch out, Cisco. Move over,  Microsoft. Unified communications and the Asterisk open source platform are on a collision course. In fact,  a startup called Worxbox hopes to accelerate that convergence. Here’s why anyone interested in the unified communications market should care.

These are strange times at 3Com. Gloom-and-doom press reports focus on the company’s failed plans to go private. And more recently, 3Com has dissolved (i.e., shot) its worldwide channel organization. Business must be pretty darn bad at the networking company, right? Actually, that’s not entirely the case.

Forgive The VAR Guy if he says “I told you so.” Earlier this month he predicted that Asterisk — the open source IP PBX — would win a global distribution deal. He was right. Specific details about the news, involving Digium — one of the top Asterisk companies — emerged today. Here’s the scoop.

VoiceCon kicks off March 17 in Orlando. But tech vendors are getting a jump on the event with unified communications announcements this week. Here are seven unified communication trends that will emerge at the show, The VAR Guy predicts.

Greetings and sorry I’ve been offline a few days due to extended travel. After the Ubuntu LIVE event in Portland, Oregon, I headed to the Cisco Networkers Live event in Anaheim, California. Now I’m in Las Vegas with about 1,000 VARs (value-added resellers) and integrators for the CompTIA Breakaway conference. While I’m here I’ll be sure to ask VARs if/how they’re embracing Ubuntu in their business practices. I know a few Asterisk resellers are here, but I don’t think Ubuntu has caught on yet in the channel — with the possible exception of the higher education market. More Ubuntu coverage from Vegas to follow this week.