January 2009 Archives

It seems to me the smartphone sweepstakes are getting a bit crowded. Just a few days ago, Acer revealed plans  to announce its entry into the market. Now the Wall Street Journal has set the blogosphere aflame with its report that Dell is set to jump into the field. 

Acer is set to announce the launch of its first smartphone at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain next month. Acer has been about the most committed channel vendor there is, so could this event finally scatch the channel's long-time itch for a smartphone to sell?

Everyone knows Google has big plans for the cloud (including an important role for the channel), but now the company sounds like its planning something really big: Launching a service that would allow you to access your computer from any Internet connection.

Here's news that should really get the open-source community flapping: President Barack Obama is supposedly studying the benefits that open source might bring to the U.S. government. According to this online report, Obama asked Sun Chairman Scott McNealy to author a white paper about the subject.

Channel networking giant Cisco is supposedly preparing to enter the $50 billion server market, which would greatly round out its product strategy and propel it into new competition with vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM. According to this report, Cisco's new server would come with virtualization software, setting it apart from the other hardware competitiors.

One of the interesting facts lost in the debate following Google's recent decision to launch a reseller program for its Apps Premier collaboration and communication suite is that the action validates the notion that you can build profits through partnerships and collaboration.

Good news for Apple resellers used to seeing Macintoshes exalted in the education, graphic design and publishing markets but rejected in many others: The Mac is at last making inroads into the enterprise and being embraced by corporate IT departments.

American companies may finally be reassessing their need to outsource to India, a step that I believe is long overdue. Last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai caused some firms to think twice about moving their operatiopns offshore, according to this report.

There's a awful lot of confusing debate about just how the economy will play out this year, and I don't believe the economic pundits are going to be any better predicting economic developments in 2009 than they were in 2008. Even so, there's a surprising amount of optimism in the channel.