Plane crazy

Dave hears of a Czech flyboy with a canny way of promoting his vendor partners

Ah, there was I thinking the days of resellers ostentatiously displaying our (frankly enormous) wealth had died out along with the Sinclair C5, Kajagoogoo and any remotely successful Amstrad computing platforms.

So imagine my delight to read this week that a Czech VAR has been flaunting his vendor's wares On. His. Own. Plane.

Reseller boss Martin apparently runs a channel business across the Czech Republic and Slovakia and is also a qualified pilot.

The VAR chief frequently takes out planes from his local airfield and scoots around
the Czech skies. The aircraft sometimes even nip over to Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy or Croatia.

Unlike most channel execs, Martin is seemingly a bit of a blagger and an opportunist, and convinced the plane owners to put the logo of his fave vendor partner - GFI Software - on the tails of the planes. And so the GFI snake (no, I'm not quite sure of the link between venomous vipers and hosted IT solutions either) now adorns a number of the aircraft.

I think I've been missing a trick here, so I've bought Gordon a company BMX and set him up as our IT Bicycle Man. Perhaps this'll convince IBM to reinstate Dodgi as a partner after last year's "unpleasantness".