Author Archive

Newly released documents in the legal tit-for-tat between Hewlett-Packard and Oracle reveals HP once considered buying Sun Microsystems to replace its Itanium servers. The ongoing court battle is showing the channel how important published technology roadmaps are.

Unified communications – the integration of various forms of digital messaging in a single platform – remains of high interest among businesses, but adoption is still relatively low. A new CompTIA study finds the attachment of cloud and managed services may open the door for greater unified communications adoption.

Spiceworks, the IT professional social network glued together by management tools and peer collaboration, recently added its 2 millionth member and saw user activity time jump more than 200 percent. This social network may be a tempest in a teapot for how its changing the way IT buyers and sellers interact.

Cisco is planning to roll out more cloud products, including its new Cloud Connect in June, to capitalize on this ever-expanding opportunity. However, its recently pessimistic outlook, says one insider, has more to do with cloud disruptions to its core networking business than global economics. It’s a rationale, noteworthy counterargument.

Lenovo has claimed the number two spot in the PC manufacturing market and is looking to dethrone rival Hewlett-Packard by attacking the SMB market with new products and partner sales support. Driving this activity are incentives that just might work.

Forbes names Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer as the worst CEO in America, and Cisco CEO John Chambers isn’t far behind on a list of five corporate head-honchos that “should have been fired already.” There’s a strong argument for why they’re on the list. There’s also a strong counterargument.

Printer vendors are pushing their managed print services (MPS) hard to what is often a reluctant market. Could the secret to managed print finally taking off be a trickle-down effect from large enterprises and organizations adopting first and inspiring SMBs to follow?

LifeSize is looking to disrupt the telepresence video conference market with its new Unity line of high-definition products that provide “telepresence-like quality” at a fraction of the cost and deployment hassle.

In the first credit extension to storage partners, Dell is offering zero-percent financing on SMB purchases of its EqualLogic products. The program is a sign of Dell getting more aggressive in the SMB market and staking out greater storage market share through solution providers.

Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab is looking to top the $1 billion sales-bookings mark by 2014 and, soon after, become the world’s second largest security vendor. It’s an ambitious goal supported by near-fanatical partners. The lingering question: How will Kaspersky fuel this growth with only organic product and market development?