The VAR Guy

Don’t tell Stephen Hall there’s no money in Windows 7 deployments. The CEO of District Computers LLC, a Microsoft Gold Partner, says his team is booked solid with Windows 7 deployments every weekend (except holidays) through January 2010. Why is Hall seeing so much demand for Microsoft’s new operating system — even before Windows 7 ships on Oct. 22? Here’s the scoop.

Google Wave — Google’s heavily hyped unified communications effort — continues to generate a ton of buzz all over the Internet, despite only being in semi-open beta. Wave sounds promising but it won’t be a part of the Google Apps reseller program, at least not at launch.

The practice of putting Mac OS X on your vanilla computer is kind of old news. Since 2005, Intel code has been hacked and executed on gray boxes all over the world. But the Dell Mini 9 netbook falls into a special category of this kind of hacking. The Mini 9’s 8.9 inch form factor and expandability deliver something that Apple fanatics — and perhaps even some mobile executives — would buy in a heartbeat. Here’s why.

Whether you’re a managed service provider or VAR, Cisco Systems CIO Rebecca Jacoby (pictured) is offering up some tips to help channel partners sell into CIOs. Sure, the following video with Jacoby has a few self-serving Cisco statements. But The VAR Guy also heard some valuable nuggets of Info.

“I’m a trusted advisor.” The VAR Guy hears that sentence over and over again from VARs, resellers and managed service providers. Frankly, the term has become meaningless in the past year. Here’s why.