RCP: Channel Likes Dynamics CRM

We always love, of course, the content on RCPmag.com, but we really love it right now because news in August -- outside of VMworld -- was slower than an offensive tackle dragging in from a day at training camp. So, if you need some late-summer reading material, check out Jeff Schwartz's story on why Dynamics CRM is popular among partners.

Posted by Lee Pender on September 01, 20100 comments

RCP: A Little Channel History

Hey, another Labor Day reading suggestion! Yes, you can pass the long hours indoors as Hurricane Earl, which must be from Texas and might have grown up in a trailer park, splatters the East Coast. Howard Cohen's piece on the history of the channel will provide you with...well, minutes of reading pleasure -- but it is worth a read.

Posted by Lee Pender on September 01, 20100 comments

VMware Makes its Hybrid Pitch

It's show time in San Francisco, where VMware is holding its annual VMworld conference and possibly stranding East Coast-based attendees through Labor Day weekend. There's a hurricane on the way, you know, and it might just soak the Eastern Seaboard this weekend.

With hurricanes, of course, come clouds -- or more appropriately, a big, swirling storm cloud with an eye in the center. Well, this week, all eyes were on VMware's cloud plans. (Oh, that was a terrible turn of phrase. But give us a break -- it's 95 degrees here in Greater Boston today, and we're not as air conditioning-equipped as some of you folks in other parts of the country are.)

Posted by Lee Pender on September 01, 20100 comments

What Is Wrong with Paul Allen?

He's apparently healthy and not broke, so why is Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and Pacific Northwest sports magnate, suing pretty much the whole technology industry (except Microsoft) for patent infringement? This is as much of a head-scratcher as we've seen lately. Is this just a money grab? Is it an attempt to squeeze something tangible out of the failed Interval Research project, which Allen is using to launch the legal action? Is Allen just bored waiting for football season to start? We have all questions and no answers. And we suspect that Allen's legal action will get about as far in the courts as the Seahawks did in the NFC West last season. (In other words, since Allen hasn't sued the St. Louis Rams, as far as we know, we don't really see him beating anybody here.)

Posted by Lee Pender on August 30, 20105 comments

Microsoft Boxes Up the Cloud

OK, so, since this is a family newsletter, we're not going to make a reference to "that" Saturday Night Live skit when we talk about Microsoft's cloud in a box. But, yeah, we thought of it too.

Despite the notable absence of Justin Timberlake, Microsoft is talking boxes these days, at the same time that it's saying that it's "all in" for the cloud. How does that work, exactly? Well, Microsoft plans to put the cloud in a box (there's that phrase again -- but we're resisting temptation) with the forthcoming Windows Azure Platform Appliance.

Posted by Lee Pender on August 30, 20100 comments

Spend-tel: Intel Dishes Out for Infineon Wireless Business

Well, cash is certainly burning a hole in somebody's pocket. Not long after scooping up McAfee for almost $8 billion, Intel is once again making a b-word acquisition, this time shelling out $1.4 billion for Infineon's wireless business. (The b-word was billion, by the way. You did get that, right?)

Posted by Lee Pender on August 30, 20100 comments

Colorful Battle in Store Between Red Hat and Azure

Red Hat has a cloud platform. It has a target competitor for that platform: Microsoft Azure. And it has a huge challenge ahead.

The darling of the open source world revealed this week that it has developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS, of course -- but not that Paas, or even this one) offering, primarily aimed at companies looking to create "hybrid" clouds, or mixed Internet-service and on-premises IT environments.

Posted by Lee Pender on August 26, 20100 comments

DLLs Gone Wild

Right after Microsoft said that it couldn't patch a problem in Windows involving DLL load hijacking, guess what happened? Attacks involving DLL load hijacking popped up all over the place.

Posted by Lee Pender on August 26, 20100 comments

A Sneak Peek at IE 9?

From Russia with links... Somebody in Microsoft's Russian office appears to have maybe accidentally given the world a preview of the interface for Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft police are still investigating the case, of course, but they have detained two possible suspects. (Just kidding. There's no such thing as the Microsoft police.)

Posted by Lee Pender on August 26, 20100 comments

Microsoft Refreshes Security Compliance Manager

The update came out on Friday for the tool that helps administrators set baseline security policies on a bunch of Microsoft products.

Posted by Lee Pender on August 25, 20100 comments

Microsoft Cloud Goes All Out

If anything is going to derail the cloud-computing train, it'll be cloud computing itself.

Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite -- the cloud versions of Exchange, SharePoint and other tools that Microsoft itself hosts -- went out for a couple of hours on Monday. A couple of hours might not sound like a big deal, but it's a pretty long time to be without e-mail or SharePoint access. And, more to the point, two hours would be a virtual eternity if a truly critical system -- something like an ERP application or suite -- were involved.

Posted by Lee Pender on August 25, 20102 comments

HP Hasn't Scored 3Par Yet

So, we might have called the tournament with the players still on the 18th green. Apparently, HP hasn't quite nabbed 3Par yet (Dell is still in the running), and all of this interest in the company has other firms in the space thinking that they might be some big vendor's next acquisition target.

Posted by Lee Pender on August 25, 20100 comments