November 2009 Archives

Syncsort Inc., a maker of data protection and recovery software, said it has initiated a new channel partner program to lift sales of its Backup Express (BEX) line and associated services.

Through its Partner Edge Reseller program, the Woodcliff Lake, NJ developer intends to expand its sales strategy by providing resources and tools to channel partners selling its portfolio of data processing, integration, protection and recovery software.

The channel initiative, which the vendor said will help resellers to increase profit margins, protect sales opportunities and create recurring revenue, will be implemented on a global basis and customized locally. It is framed by three levels--authorized, select and elite--based on sales training, sales volume and meeting goals.

"With greater focus and commitment to the reseller channel we expect to create more value to end customers and partners, as well as accelerate our ability to broaden our market reach," said Flavio Santoni, Syncsort chief executive.

The developer currently maintains contracts with about 200 resellers worldwide, said Mike Kuehn, Syncsort director of channels for the Americas. Syncsort expects to add about five percent to that total each quarter, depending on geography, he said.

Kuehn said that the BEX line, which currently is sold exclusively by channel partners in the Americas, will be available only through resellers worldwide beginning in the first quarter of 2010.

Syncsort does not work with any distributors at this point but is "in the discovery phase with respect to distribution," he said.

Channel partners gain access to the vendor's web-based portal, called iSync, through which sales and technical support is available, including leads, market development funds, deal registration, marketing materials and training.

In addition to selling the BEX line, channel partners also will be able to leverage the vendor's new MVP (Migrate, Verify, Protect) service offering.

The MVP service is aimed at helping channel partners customers migrate data and applications from physical to virtual environments, officials said.

One industry analyst touted Syncsort's channel program and its benefits to channel partners.

"Profitability is by far the most important element in any partner supplier relationship which hinges on a lot more than just the sale," said Janet Waxman, vice president, infrastructure channels and alliances at International Data Corp.

"Syncsort's data protection sales organization is focused on helping partners find and close sales opportunities. Their services team trains and support resellers ensuring that the client's service and maintenance needs are met before and after the deal is closed," she said.

Company officials said that the vendor currently maintains about 12,000 deployments for its products and services worldwide.

European Union regulators have complained about Oracle Corp.'s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc., suggesting in an initial review that the combination of Oracle database products and Sun's MySQL database could tilt that segment's competitive landscape and result in higher prices.

Oracle, which received regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Justice in August to proceed with the $7.4 billion acquisition, has until January 27 to address competitive concerns raised by the European Commission, a unit of the EU comprised of 27 commissioners that handles the Union's day-to-day affairs.

Last week, the EU extended Oracle's deadline from the prior January 19^th date, responding to the database maker's request for more time to prepare a rebuttal. Oracle has made it known that it will earnestly contest the EU's objections.

Commission officials said that its objections were based on anti-trust issues and that its evaluation of the deal was ongoing, Reuters news service reported.

The Associated Press reported that Oracle had thus far failed to offer any remedies for the EU's anti-trust charges.

The EU can block the acquisition should Oracle not present a compelling enough case to offset its anti-trust concerns.

Sun lost $120 million in the quarter ended September 27 and in the last year has seen its share of the market significantly pared by rivals IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

Prior to the EU issuing its statement of objections, the Department of Justice took the unusual step of posting a statement re-affirming its approval last summer of the acquisition.

"After conducting a careful investigation of the proposed transaction between Oracle and Sun, the Department's Antitrust Division concluded that the merger is unlikely to be anticompetitive," said Molly Boast, the Department's deputy assistant attorney general.

"At this point in its process, it appears that the EC holds a different view," the Division's statement said.

"The Division concluded, based on the specific facts at issue in the transaction, that consumer harm is unlikely because customers would continue to have choices from a variety of well established and widely accepted database products."

Microsoft Corp.'s chief executive Steve Ballmer told shareholders at the company's annual meeting this week that unit sales of Windows 7 have more than doubled that of any previous operating system the vendor has released in a similar time period.

The company launched its Windows 7 operating system on October 22^nd.

"Since launch, we've already sold twice as many units of Windows 7 than any other operating system we've ever launched in a comparable time," Ballmer said.

Ballmer offered that the quality of the Windows 7 operating system was driving sales.

"Windows 7 is simply the best PC operating system we have ever built," he said. "It enables people to do more of what they want to do more easily and more quickly, and customers are responding."

The surge in Windows 7 sales can be traced partially to pent-up demand from PC makers such as Dell Computer Inc.

"The launch of Windows 7 is being very well received by SMBs and consumers and we'll see the benefits of that more fully in our fiscal Q4," said Michael Dell, Dell Computer chairman and chief executive.

Another incident of food-borne illnesses arose this week when two people in the Northeast died from ingesting E-coli contaminated beef that so far has sickened more than two dozen people.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the outbreak may be linked to ground beef packaged by Fairbank Farms in upstate New York. In response, Fairbank, while not acknowledging responsibility, has recalled some 272 tons of its ground beef products.

Last July, H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, cleared the House of Representatives and went to the Senate for approval. Among a host of requirements, the Act requires food facilities to implement a safety plan including taking preventive measures in response to a set of science-based standards established by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Whether this current Act or another piece of legislation fills the bill, it's clear that applying some technology to upgrade safety standards and practices in the nation's food industry is well beyond obvious.

Now, IBM and two of its channel partners are trying to do something to improve food safety, working with food distributors to upgrade systems and performance levels. Officials said that the goal is to modernize the global supply chain to advance the distribution, production, safety and quality of food.

Skidmore Sales and Distributing, an Ohio-based distributor of industrial food ingredients with nine warehouse locations, recently contracted with IBM Business Partner DPS Inc., a specialist in wholesale distribution, and software provider RJS Software Systems to enhance the accuracy and timeliness of Skidmore's quality documentation which ships with every order.

The resulting solutions, which not coincidentally run on IBM's Power Systems servers, upgrade customer order processing, purchasing, receiving, inventory control and warehouse management applications.

The idea, according to Skidmore chief executive Doug Skidmore, was to create greater efficiencies at every point in the process to track each ingredient, and correspondingly, ensure better quality and safety.

"We've been able to improve productivity along with the accuracy and completeness of the quality documents our customers require with every shipment," Skidmore said.

"The ingredients we supply will ultimately end up in restaurants, institutional kitchens and on the family dinner table at the end of the day. I feel confident we've gained greater intelligence, insight and efficiencies through this technology solution," he said.

Another IBM Business Partner, MSI Systems Integrators, a specialist in data center optimization, recently provided a consolidation and virtualization solution to Perishable Distributors of Iowa, a wholesale distributor of fresh and frozen food with 210 store accounts in seven states.

PDI officials said that the nature of their business mandates that they avoid any system downtime and turn inventory at maximum every two weeks.

The IT solution is aimed at giving PDI--which maintains 350,000 feet of warehouse space to house mostly refrigerated or frozen food--higher availability and more redundancy with its IBM Power Systems, Blade Center, Storage Systems and DB2 Database.

Officials said that the system uses analytics to automate inventory turnover to bring perishable goods to market sooner and more safely.

"Working with MSI and IBM, we've been able to create a seamless operation with effectively zero downtime," said Scott Hamilton, PDI vice president of information technology. "I can't overemphasize the importance of that in our industry, where a window of even a few hours can ruin perishable food inventory and render it unfit for sale."

Enterprise businesses have quietly taken to cloud computing in big numbers, according to a recent study conducted by researcher Kelton Research for IT consulting specialist Avanade Inc.

The study's findings, gleaned from surveys with 502 top executives, business leaders and IT decision-makers across 17 countries, showed a 320 percent increase in the past nine months among enterprise level businesses either to test or employ cloud computing applications.

Promos from the industry's top players hasn't hurt the cause. Google chief Eric Schmidt recently told a gathering of 900 executives at an event sponsored by the Utah Technology Council that the dawn of cloud computing carries more weight than the arrival of personal computing.

In examining the study's findings, Kelton concluded that the recession hasn't made much of a difference to adopters of cloud computing. More than half of the respondents said the economic downturn didn't matter at all, and a few even said it helped.

The results also indicated that the rate of adoption for cloud computing in the U.S. is double what's occurring elsewhere.

Despite the move by big businesses into the cloud, there's little support for relying exclusively on it. Only five percent of the participants said they use cloud-based applications exclusively.

Survey results also pointed to a groundswell of support for SaaS. Two-thirds of U.S. respondents are currently using SaaS applications. Most of them have been using SaaS for less than a year.

The study's sponsor, Avanade Inc., is an IT consulting specialist founded nine years ago as a joint venture between Microsoft Corp. and Accenture, an outsourcing firm. In addition to Microsoft, Avanade's IT client list includes McAfee, Logitech, Samsung as well as behemoths Pfizer, NBC and Bank of America.