Everything crossed for industry recovery

Guy Matthews is optimistic that the long-awaited business revival is around the corner. But the industry must show that it deserves to recover.

With only 88 shopping days until Christmas, and indicators popping up of an industry in recovery, the channel waits with bated breath for a bumper harvest.

Hopefully, with the product announcement and vendor conference season well under way, there will be good cheer for us all come December.

The past few weeks have seen a run of initiatives unsurpassed in recent years. There has even been a strange bout of entente cordiale between Microsoft and IBM.

Elsewhere normality reigns, with HP's Carly Fiorina verbally attacking Michael Dell from the stage at OracleWorld in San Francisco.

She had a pop at him about being a one-trick pony just because he fell off his horse and hurt his foot. At least she would have done if I were writing her speeches.

Instead, in a reference to grid computing being the future, she said: "Some people are trying to ride the horse before they're ready. That's a good way to hurt your foot."

We are all looking forward to grid computing as the next technological leap. As Victor Hugo said: "No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come."

But then as someone else said: "Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when you only have one idea." So, we'll see.

Of course, in the meantime people still have to sell IT for a living. But don't worry, help is at hand.

SmartOffice from HP is 100 new products and services. So if you are not sure what HP's PartnerOne means to you, call them up and start asking which product grouping each of their new products fits into.

But announcements are one thing; forcing the purchase order from a client is quite another.

While the industry has been performing the world's biggest back-pedal since Napoleon said: "You know, I'm not sure this invading Russia plan was such a good idea," resellers, the infantry of the industry, have been paying the price for the past three years.

For all the signs of recovery out there, the only sort of recovery that really matters is that of the confidence of corporate IT buyers.

What the channel, or indeed the whole industry, needs is for a line to be drawn under all the hype, over-selling, over-promising and under-delivering that took place in the late 1990s. Only then can trust be rebuilt between industry and buyer from the ground up.

But let's be optimistic for now. There are signs that demand for innovative solutions is returning. And that's good for everybody.