The VAR Guy

As a VAR or IT service provider, you’re often forced to react to technology trends that seemingly come out of nowhere. But if you slow down just a little and really think about the IT channel, you’ll find some predictable trends that can potentially bolster your business. Here are five such trends for 2012, and potential ways you can capitalize on them.

A month after Sophos announced plans to acquire Astaro, it’s business as usual for the companies’ channel partners. Indeed, Sophos Channel Chief Steve Hale and Astaro Channel Chief Bob Darabant (pictured) seem to be working from the same game plan. The two have been speaking regularly via phone, and they are hatching a plan to help Sophos endpoint security partners sell Astaro unified threat management (UTM) solutions, and vice versa.

The VAR Guy is just about ready to wrap up another week of blogging. But before our resident blogger takes a brief break here are six blogs The VAR Guy didn’t have time to write for the week ending June 17, 2011.

The VAR Guy has been keeping close tabs on Internet security company Astaro. Although recently purchased by  Sophos, Astaro remains a standalone channel-focused company, and it’s latest announcement that RackForce has joined its partner community is further proof of that. RackForce is part of Canada-based service provider ICT, providing IaaS and now, apparently is one of the first companies deploying Astaro’s portfolio in an IaaS fashion. Details follow …

On the job for only a week or so at Sophos, Global Channel Chief Steve Hale has some clear thoughts on Sophos recently acquiring Astaro, a channel-centric security company. During a quick phone chat with The VAR Guy a few minutes ago, Hale made some clear promises to Astaro channel partners. Here’s the update.

Sophos has named Steve Hale as its new vice president of global channel sales, The VAR Guy has heard (and LinkedIn has fully confirmed). Hale is a familiar name to savvy channel partners — having held key channel posts at Novell, F5 Networks and Microsoft. Hale joins Sophos at a rather intriguing time. Here’s why.

It has been a few months since Novell launched the SUSE Appliance program. So we checked in with Novell to see how the effort was going so far. Matt Richards, director, emerging technologies, and Steve Hale, VP and worldwide data center channel lead, offered me a few updates on Oct. 30. Here’s a recap of my conversation.

Dean Darwin knows how to play an encore. Back at F5 Networks for the second time as channel chief, Darwin today described an expanded F5 relationship with Hewlett-Packard’s ProCurve ONE team. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Hello again Dean Darwin, goodbye Steve Hale. Darwin (not pictured) has rejoined F5 Networks as channel chief, replacing Hale (pictured), according to The VAR Guy (not pictured). Details about the change are sketchy but here are some early details.