The VAR Guy

Oracle President Mark Hurd and Channel Chief Judson Althoff are set to rally and educate 100 Oracle Specialized channel partners tomorrow at the company’s Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. The gathering, set for February 2, will include product roadmaps and strategies to help partners leverage Oracle as a partner growth engine. Here’s some insight from The VAR Guy.

McAfee has named Gavin Struthers senior VP of worldwide channels, succeeding former channel chief Alex Thurber, who resigned last week to join Tripwire.

Dot Hill Systems, which develops storage solutions, has bolstered its Connections Partner Program. The enhancements specifically target VARs that are seeking to promote enterprise-class storage solutions into the SMB market, according to Brad Painter, VP of worldwide channel sales at Dot Hill.

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.

It’s Columbus Day here in the U.S., which means many businesses are closed for the holiday. But The VAR Guy is plugging away and in catch-up mode. In fact, here are six pieces of high-tech news for channel partners that The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending Oct. 7, 2011.

Avnet Technology Solutions has ordered 100 Oracle Database Appliances (ODAs) and expects to receive Oracle shipments in mid-October, according to Chris Swahn, VP and GM of Oracle solutions at Avnet. Meanwhile Avnet’s entire vertical market leadership team — across health care, government, retail, energy and financial services — is attending Oracle OpenWorld to build deeper Oracle relationships, The VAR Guy has learned.

Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz today said Hewlett-Packard may be a “former” partner, claimed Microsoft is distracted by 16-year-old consumers, and said IBMers should hide under their desks in Armonk, N.Y., as Oracle’s Exadata business marches forward. Catz’s comments, some tongue-in-cheek, surfaced at Oracle OpenWorld today in San Francisco. Here’s the blow by blow.

Oracle is taking aim at Hewlett-Packard, promoting Exadata, Exalogic, Exastack and Oracle Database Appliance initiatives against HP’s traditional ProLiant server business. Oracle Channel Chief Judson Althoff and President and CFO Safra Catz (pictured) started the fireworks during Oracle PartnerForum, part of Oracle OpenWorld, in San Francisco today.

At Oracle OpenWorld, Channel Chief Judson Althoff said he wants to boost Oracle’s partner ranks to 25,000 companies, up from 20,000 today. To do so, Oracle will likely raid the Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft partner channels. Althoff didn’t exactly mention those rivals by name, but he said enough to put both companies in Oracle’s crosshairs. Here are nine highlights from Althoff and Oracle Partner Forum, part of Oracle OpenWorld (Oct. 2-6, San Francisc0).

Oracle President Mark Hurd offered some hybrid cloud computing teasers ahead of Oracle OpenWorld 2011 during a phone call with The VAR Guy today. Among the highlights: Hurd compared Oracle’s best-of-breed integrated stack strategy to the Apple iPad, insisting that corporate IT departments want simplified offerings that they don’t need to integrate on their own.

In my June post, I mentioned information volumes grew 62 percent to 800,000 petabytes last year. This means that protecting, storing and managing all of this information is becoming an even greater challenge for your customers. Some companies approach the issue of information management indiscriminately, with no organization and little thought for what should be kept and what needs to be thrown away. But given the current emphasis on compliance and risk reduction, we’re seeing businesses become increasingly concerned about their level of preparation for eDiscovery (electronic discovery) requests.