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 March 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 March 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.
Novell had announced enhancements to its channel program in February, including a deal registration program, extended training offerings, and consolidated product SKUs and a single price list, both aimed at simplifying the ordering process and holding partners' costs down.
But there's more to Novell's new partner plan than just a few tweaks. There is, to hear the company's channel executives talk about it, a renewed and very genuine commitment to partners, led in part by former Microsoft channel executive Steve Hale, now Novell's vice president for the global datacenter channel, and by 15-year Novell veteran Scott Lewis. Lewis, vice president of partner marketing and enablement for the company, said that Novell is looking for partners not just to sell and implement SUSE Linux, the company's flagship product, but also to sell and support its other offerings, as well.
"We go to market in datacenter, end-user computing, and identity and security," Lewis told RCPU. "We generally are looking for partners in one of those solutions."
Or more than one, he said, noting that expertise in multiple products is a positive. Those offerings include the PlateSpin product line, which encompasses datacenter management, server virtualization and disaster recovery, among other categories. Novell acquired the vendor for $205 million about a year ago.
That datacenter management category is where a lot of recruitment is taking place, Lewis said: "If you look at our end-user computing, there's much more of a push to grow the partners we have. Those products have evolved in recent years. If you look at identity and security, there is a push for recruitment there, but it's not massive. If you look in the datacenter space, there's an overlapped set of needs there. That's not Novell's historic partner base. We're recruiting there."
Partner recruitment isn't just a numbers game, though. Lewis said: "When we look at partners, it is a quality not a quantity game. We're not looking to radically increase the number of partners we have."
And the company's also looking to increase the amount of revenue it derives from the channel. Partners account for more than half of the company's revenue now, according to Lewis, and Hale said that figure is increasing. It'll keep going up, too, he said, as Novell continues to reach out to the channel in more deals.
"That number continues to increase, and it's one of [our] directives to be inclusive of a partner in every opportunity we go after," Hale said, noting that the company is looking to get partners involved earlier in the sales cycle. "Ideally then you've already got the partner ingrained in the whole process."
Some of that business includes services, something Novell already provides its customers. Hale notes that the company is looking to make Novell services complementary to partners' service offerings while recognizing that many partners now make the bulk of their revenues through services.
"We want to engage with [partners] to make sure that they are as good as any of our Novell services people," Hale said. "Novell services is really there to be the expert of experts around Novell technology, and we will be there to deliver great services, but very clearly a part of the charter is to do partner enablement."
The company wants to "pair up Novell services with our partners," Hale added. "We want to encourage that kind of behavior so that our partners understand there's a market and Novell will be there to help [them]."
The company is also trying to tailor its program to different categories of partners, and if some of what Novell is doing sounds similar to Microsoft's current and forthcoming partner efforts, that's no accident: The recently appointed Hale said he has taken lessons from Microsoft into his new gig.
"What we're trying to do is get a very crisp taxonomy of the different types of partners out there," he said. "In general, there's about six or seven different profiles of partners, all the way up from ISVs to SIs."
For his part, Lewis added that Novell won't shut partners out of bigger -- or smaller -- deals. "We expect partners to play in every size account we deal with," he said.
Hale and Lewis hope to bring a new channel focus to a company that has seen its share of transition over the years. Partners shouldn't lack for opportunities with the new, channel-centric Novell.
"We're starting to turn business over to partners that they wouldn't have seen before," Hale said.
What's your take on Novell's channel overtures? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 24, 20090 comments
Good news for Cisco channel members from Ingram Micro
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 19, 20090 comments
Another one is biting the dust. As you know if you've been reading industry news at all this week, IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems.
The Wall Street Journal, as it tends to do,
broke the story -- but if you want to read the whole article, you'll have to subscribe online. There's no need at this point, though, because there are
plenty of takes floating around on the proposed acquisition. And we
do mean plenty. That's just a small sample. Really small.
Just what the tech world needs, of course, is another one...so we'll keep it (relatively) short. Rumors, speculation and general buzz about IBM setting its sights on Sun have been around for a while. And the two really could be pretty good for each other. Sun, from which a cloud platform rose just this week, could provide a spark for IBM's cloud strategy. Beyond that, IBM has long been a proponent of Sun's technology, and both companies seem fairly enamored with Linux.
Sun has long been a classic old-school tech company: innovative and interesting but not particularly well-managed. Its current CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, even has a ponytail, which gets a "thumbs up" from your editor but which also perpetuates the tech-first, money-second stereotype.
Sun has been on shaky financial footing for a while and, before finally going through with layoffs in the last couple of years, was unbelievably fat for a company whose best days, revenue-wise, are getting to be a good decade behind it. IBM, of course, despite its ups and downs in the early 2000s, is still a fairly financially disciplined organization and has recently reported impressive earnings. And it has some pretty useful technology, too.
So while some see a clash of cultures, we see opposites potentially attracting. IBM could be the financial savior that keeps Sun's technology shining bright, and Sun could illuminate IBM's cloud plans as well as warm up Big Blue's button-down ethos a bit and provide some rays of technological innovation. (And we're just about out of plays on the word Sun, thank goodness.)
For Microsoft partners, an IBM-Sun combo could be a little scary. Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, arguably not off to the best of starts, would have a major competitor in an IBM-Sun combination. And a Sunnier IBM (you knew there'd be another one) might very well continue the growth of Linux in the enterprise, which wouldn't necessarily be the best of news for Windows.
Then again, putting companies like IBM and Sun together, or absorbing one into the other, isn't the easiest thing to do. (Right, HP and Compaq?) And acquisitions can sometimes lead to less innovation, not more, as the act of squashing two companies into one takes precedence over actually cranking out great new stuff.
Of course, at the time of this writing, the buyout wasn't official yet, so anything can happen. But it looks as though Sun might be the latest big, formerly influential vendor to fade to...well, in this case, Blue, within another organization. And it's probably about time.
What's your take on IBM potentially buying Sun? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 19, 20090 comments
Apparently, Chrome
isn't exactly polished and Firefox (your editor's choice) isn't burning as brightly as it once did. Oh, and, uh, not many people are going on Safaris or listening to Opera, either.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20092 comments
Yeah, times are sort of tough, but not as tough as analysts thought they would be...which is
good news for Adobe.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20090 comments
If cloud computing in the enterprise were, well, a cloud, it would be forming in the distance, just coming over the horizon. Sure, some companies are making money with it and others are saving money by using it, but it's still an evolving model.
Two pieces of news this week showed the negative and positive potential of cloud computing. Let's start with the bad news, or at least with the negative-potential bit. Azure crashed late last week.
OK, we know -- it's still a work in progress, and cloud computing as a model is prone to outages. But this was a 22-hour outage, a disaster-level interruption in service, and it occurred just days before Azure was to be the star at this week's MIX conference in Las Vegas.
That won't do much for confidence in cloud computing, confidence that remains shaky in a lot of enterprises and even in many smaller businesses, as well. People like to be able to get to their stuff whenever they want it, which doesn't seem like an unreasonable request and is pretty much what we've been used to with client-server computing.
Of course, the outage makes both Microsoft and the cloud model look pretty bad, perhaps unfairly, no matter how early Azure is in its evolution. There will no doubt be some pressure on partners to reassure customers who've bought into or were thinking of buying into Microsoft's Software Plus Service plans that this sort of thing is unusual and is the result -- probably, since nobody seems to actually know yet -- of a fledgling platform hiccupping.
We at RCPU would not want to be in the role of providing that reassurance right now, frankly. And while we believe in cloud computing as a concept, we understand that it has its potential pitfalls. Inability to access, say, a critical ERP application for 22 hours could cripple some companies. That's why the cloud is still the horizon right now; companies might dip their toes into a cloud app here or there, but few are ready to dive into the model head-first. And that's OK -- smart, actually -- as long as partners and customers keep an open mind and remember that this stuff is still in development and could still end up being incredibly useful and reliable in lots of scenarios.
And then there's the other side of cloud computing, the cool stuff it produces. Here we come to the new baby of tech hype, Hadoop, which is now available in open source commercial form by a company called Cloudera. Companies like Google and Yahoo use Hadoop to mine massive amounts of data from the Internet and sort it, delivering targeted content and advertisements and the like. Now that capability is coming to enterprise datacenters in the form of a product that costs nothing. Read (a lot) more about it in the old gray lady herself, which could probably benefit from this technology.
The bad news for partners might be that since Cloudera plans to make its money off of services, add-ons and the like with Hadoop, it's hard to see a clear channel play right off the bat. But the cool news -- we won't call it "good" necessarily -- is that this thing sounds really powerful and should give companies the ability to actually make use of petabytes (but only if they want to be petted...) of information and build really useful apps in the cloud. We just hope partners can find a way to get a piece of this action. How that's going to work, we're not sure.
We're also not sure when, or if, cloud computing will feel as normal in the office as cubicle walls and water coolers, but we can see something on the horizon. Exactly what it's going to bring, we're not sure. But it's coming this way.
Where do you stand on the cloud model? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 18, 20090 comments