The VAR Guy

When the sun was shining in the summer of 2011, The VAR Guy was soaking up as many rays as possible at Dell’s inaugural Storage Forum in Orlando, Fla. Dell has since taken the Storage Forum show on the road to foggy London town, where the company has unveiled a new set of storage solutions under the “Fluid” moniker. Here’s the rundown …

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 …

Welcome to 2012. The first IT trend of the New Year:  Many high-tech companies enter 2012 with new or recently named CEOs (examples include AMD, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard and IBM). Plus, a lengthy list of prominent CEOs (representing Cisco Systems, Dell, Microsoft, Oracle and Research in Motion) are under pressure to boost sales, profits and channel partner success. Here’s what channel partners should expect.

In recent weeks Canonical has announced major initiatives to sell Ubuntu PCs in Asia and Europe, just like it tried — and mostly failed — to do five years ago in the United States. But will things be different this time?  Here are some thoughts.

The VAR Guy spent most of this week failing to follow up on some great news leads and story tips. In fact, here are five high-tech news tips The VAR Guy failed to pursue and confirm for the week ending November 18, 2011.

What do you do when your partners also become some of your most important customers? That’s a challenge Canonical executives grappled with recently as they moved to restructure Canonical’s relationship with OEMs. Here’s what’s changed at the company, and what it means for the open source channel.

At Citrix Summit 2011 this week in Barcelona, Spain, Citrix renewed its focus on SMB with a new version of Citrix VDI-in-a-Box. Version 5 combines Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and the Citrix GoToManage cloud based support ostensibly to make it super-easy, super-quick and super-affordable for SMBs to add virtualization. Here’s the scoop on how partners can dive in and how SMBs can benefit.

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.

While at Interop New York 2011, The VAR Guy sat down and spoke to Larry Hart, Dell’s senior director of worldwide networking marketing, about Dell’s position in the networking space. In a nutshell, Hart said Dell’s presence in the data center has never been more prominent, especially with its expanding data portfolio and recent acquisition of Force10. Here’s The VAR Guy scoop on where Dell is headed and how the channel can go there with Dell …

Dell is showing the love for its European customers by offering multi-vendor PC support, expanding the services benefit it U.S. customers currently enjoy. The VAR Guy sees the move as an attempt by Dell to streamline its customers’ services by offering one-stop shopping, so to speak. If you live in Europe and you use a non-Dell PC, Dell will now support that hardware to make your life, or your IT admin’s life, much easier. Read on for the quick rundown on Dell’s lovefest with competitors’ products …

The VAR Guy spent a lot of time listening to HP Chairman Ray Lane this week. Our resident blogger is a bit tired from trying to track all the changes in the old HP garage.  All the HP chatter caused The VAR Guy to overlook some other high tech news from this week. In fact, here are six blogs The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending Sept. 23, 2011.

SUSE Linux, now owned by Attachmate, will unveil some partner and customer surprises at Novell BrainShare (Oct. 10-14, Salt Lake City), the company confirms. Meanwhile, Michael Miller, VP of global alliances and marketing, has been polishing partner and cloud services strategies for SUSE. And Miller has been busy meeting with strategic SUSE partners like Microsoft, SAP, VMware, IBM, Dell, HP and Fujitsu. So, what’s the message from Miller to SUSE Linux partners and customers? The VAR Guy got the answer.

Dell Global Channel Chief Greg Davis (pictured) has been on the phone with partners in recent days, discussing Hewlett-Packard’s decision to try and sell off or spin off its PC business. Based on that news, Dell is preparing to put some messaging out to HP partners. Here’s a preview.

The news that HP is set to sell or spin-off its consumer electronics division has rocked the industry, fueling an onslaught of speculation and commentary. But for The VAR Guy, here’s one question comes to mind: Will Microsoft be able to work as closely with Hewlett-Packard’s PC division as the HP seeks to either spin-off the PC business or sell it to a third-party?

Dell is furthering its commitment to the channel and the expanding needs of the IT market with an update to its EqualLogic storage solutions that include firmware updates and deeper VMware integration. Travis Vigil, executive director at Dell Storage, provided the low-down on the new updates and Dell’s storage channel.

So much for home field advantage.

Most VARs in the open source channel are happy just to get free code contributions from their users. Canonical, however, has taken community engagements one step further with the announcement of a user-driven hardware-certification program. Will it work?  Here are some thoughts.

I’m eating my words. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do that often. So here goes: Back in my global channel professional days I worked for EqualLogic. I was one of those channel folks who ate, slept and breathed the channel (still am). So when I got the news in 2008 that Dell (one of the less channel-friendly companies) was buying EqualLogic I couldn’t get my resume updated quickly enough. “They just don’t get it and they never will,” are the words I’m about to eat, just in case you were wondering.

Fresh off HP’s recent thin client announcement comes another one: the company has announced what it is calling ‘smart’ clients, designed to be affordable and powerful, Dell, meanwhile, is countering with its latest OptiPlex thin clients. Tech specs, price tags and channel implications are all here, so read on for the details …

Like Lenovo before it, Dell is making sure the PC isn’t dead yet. The company has released a line of robust workstations that reportedly can handle the heaviest of processing tasks, providing “uncompromised” performance and scalability. Read on for the details on the new machines …

Dell has made some sweet moves in the channel space over the past few years, not the least of which was its acquisition of KACE in February 2010. The VAR Guy was bullish on the buy then, and the subsequent increase in channel partners and customers alike gives our resident blogger reason to believe he was right. Part of its success so far is due to Dell’s nurturing of the KACE network and systems management family. Read on for the latest on the company and the technology …

Dell is pushing into some interesting territory with a recent promotion of the “phone company in a box” solution by netTALK DUO. It’s available now on Dell.com, and carries with it some implications for VARs not just as resellers, but also as users themselves. Everyone’s phone bill could use a little trimming, so read on for the details …

Google has reached out to major carriers of Android phones and asked them to stop tweaking the Android software. The company is also ceasing early access to the latest Android release, implementing a new approval process for carriers and developers. Read on for the details and perspective on what is turning into a bloody mobile device war …