Monday just wasn't a day for sun. Or for Sun. Here in Greater (and wetter) Boston, dark skies and drenching rains
washed out the season opener
for the Red Sox. (For our non-U.S. readers, the Red Sox are the local baseball team.) And over on the other coast, Sun Microsystems saw talks of a possible acquisition by IBM fade like...well, like a sunset, we suppose.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/07/20091 comments
This one
's for teeny tiny businesses that might otherwise be looking at (gasp!) open source.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/02/20090 comments
In our continuing series of the
best "other" partner programs
for Microsoft partners to work with, we come to...wait, what? That can't be right. Dell?
Yes, the former titan of direct sales turned channel champion scores well in our survey, despite some of the comments we've received about the company at RCPU over the years. Read more about Dell's successful partner play
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/02/20092 comments
We're going old school -- like, long-before-your-editor-was-born school -- to
set the mood
for this one. Microsoft's been talking open source again, which usually leads to anger in the open source community, double-talk from Redmond and confusion for the rest of us.
Not long ago, Microsoft dropped a white paper on how great a job it's doing of "actively participating in open source." You can download the white paper here, but we'll warn you that the PDF crashed your editor's Firefox browser multiple times but worked fine in Internet Explorer (seriously). That's just a word of warning. That's all we're saying. Any irony you might derive from that little revelation is purely your own and not the responsibility of RCPU.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/02/20092 comments
It's no surprise that HP scored well in the reader survey for the inaugural
RCP Platinum Partner Program
, an awards program for channel programs that are a good fit with Microsoft solutions. Microsoft and HP have been strategic partners for decades, and HP carries many of the product categories partners are looking to sell -- from PCs to servers to storage to printers to software. In addition, Microsoft and HP have a joint program called the HP/Microsoft Frontline Partnership specifically for their joint partners.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/01/20090 comments
A couple of things before we start. First off, your editor isn't the biggest of April Fool's fans, so you won't be getting any fake news today. Second, we've promised this before, but this time, we mean it: Due to, well, lots of stuff, RCPU is going to get shorter...pretty much starting today. Try to keep the cheering to a minimum, please. Anyway.
A new -- or ostensibly new -- computing model is always a wonderful excuse for an old-fashioned slap-fest between mega-vendors. And so it is with cloud computing. When something called an Open Cloud Manifesto, which didn't even appear to be supported by the organization that sponsored it, appeared Monday, Microsoft immediately (and perhaps unnecessarily) slammed it.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/01/20090 comments
Think Microsoft's in a hurry to get this thing
out the door
? Yeah, so do we.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/01/20093 comments
We're always encouraged here at RCPU when vendors talk about cozying up to partners, so we welcomed Novell's recent revelation that the company is trying to
get partners more involved
in deals. But, clearly, there are still some details to be worked out, as reader David points out:
"Next time you meet with Novell, find out what they plan to do about companies that use SUSE for their solutions. I see a big push for existing partners; if you look at the channel, most of the partners are service-based and rely more on partner consulting services than on new product sales. We have the only FIPS 3 identity-based encryption appliance available that utilizes a Novell solution stack, and yet since we are new to the market we can't get any help from Novell. I would be very interested to hear Novell's take on assisting new companies that bring their product to market utilizing a Novell stack. Are they only committed to companies with a customer base, or are they willing to incubate and assist companies coming to market? What kind of incubation assistance from Novell is available? SUSE is still new to them, and if Novell doesn't step up and do like Oracle, which provides incubation assistance for companies, how will Novell entice companies to risk bringing new products to market on SUSE? I'm not knocking Novell; we are just struggling to gain customer acceptance all on our own and feel our investment has been all one-sided and haven't seen support that we had hoped for."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/26/20091 comments
Just to show how sometimes the industry gets ahead of itself in terms of hype (ahem), there's still plenty of news and wrangling over the old-school mainframe, a pretty good synopsis of which is
here
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/25/20090 comments
Want to know what your customers are saying about you in 140 characters or fewer? Salesforce.com is
all over it
. Seriously, this new app is supposed to "monitor and analyze" Tweets. Monitor, we can understand...but analyze? Sentences of 140 characters or fewer? Really? Is Dr. Freud the newest executive at Salesforce.com? Sometimes a Tweet is just a Tweet.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/25/20090 comments
The news today is that Novell released the latest version of its operating system aimed at datacenters,
SUSE Linux Enterprise 11
. But what might be news to partners is that Novell has seriously increased its commitment to the channel in recent months, and it's not just about SUSE Linux anymore.
Your editor traveled approximately five minutes by car from his home in Waltham, Mass. to Novell's headquarters in Waltham, Mass. last week to chat with a couple of Novell channel executives. Their message was loud, clear and repeated more than once: The company wants partners in on deals -- every deal, even -- early in the sales cycle and will rely on the channel to serve customers after the sale.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/24/20090 comments