Good week/Bad week
We round up who's on top of the podium and who's at the foot at the table in the channel this week
Good week
Softcat
The reseller's recently retired founder-chairman Peter Kelly may be one of the industry's most colourful characters - both metaphorically and literally (in terms of his wardrobe choices) - but he's no slouch when it comes to the business of building up a company.
Just as Kelly skipped off into the sunset Morecambe-and-Wise style, the reseller announced it has burst through the £300m turnover mark for its fiscal year to the end of July. That's more than double the £146m it recorded in 2010. It's a success story as glittering as the jacket he wore to last year's Channel Awards (pictured).
Kcom
There are high hopes for the integrator's new enterprise sales manager Max Harding after the firm snared him from competitor Cable&Wireless (C&W). Kcom sales director - and former C&W channel chief - Elizabeth Bramwell pinched former colleague Harding from a 13-year stint with the telco.
Harding is said to be settling in to his new role by getting to know his team and the company. But he'd better not spend too long meeting and greeting, as Bramwell plans for him to double the company's enterprise business in just two years. No pressure there, then.
Some Juniper disties
Corks were being popped at the offices of Avnet, Arrow and Westcon after the trio were informed they would be handed a three-way split of Juniper Networks' $100m (£64m) UK distribution jackpot.
The vendor kicked off a review process in May and - given that its current line-up looks more crowded than the Central Line at rush hour - was always likely to move from five to three distributors. More shocking was that Computerlinks - said to be its second-largest distributor - is apparently among the casualties, alongside Azlan.
Juniper stressed that it has not yet dotted the Is or crossed the Ts on the process, so watch this space.
Bad week
Wintel
The symbiotic vendor duo that has bossed the PC world for so long could see its empire begin to crumble, if market watcher Canalys is to be believed. The rise and rise of the tablet has left Microsoft with an all-time low 73 per cent share of the client compute market (pah - how puny!). Meanwhile Intel chips are now present in less than 70 per cent of devices.
The analyst expects the pricing of the Surface and Windows 8 machines to be prohibitively high, and believes Microsoft's hardware play will damage its OEM relationships. Wintel's dominance is forecast to continue to erode until Q3 2013, at least.
Zombies
The undead had their name further tarnished this week after insolvency body R3 branded struggling UK firms "zombies".
These are businesses that are teetering on the edge of insolvency, and R3 estimates that there are a whopping 146,000 of them across the country.
So, how do you know if your company is at risk of zombification (we think that's the technical term)? Well, the thorough methodology applied to the research shows that if you are failing to pay your debts on time and frantically renegotiating your supplier payment terms, you are at risk of insolvency, and hence, becoming a zombie. Er, thanks, R3. We'll be sure to apply that sophisticated algorithm to our own research.
Traditional VARs
UK channel delegates at the CompTIA Breakaway 2012 event in Las Vegas last week were given a worrying glimpse of what their future might hold if they don't get cracking on this cloud malarkey.
Numbers from research outfit IPED show that US end users are shunning VARs and turning to telecoms and hosting players to fulfil their cloud needs. Usage of both types of company in the cloud world has grown 40 per this year, while VARs' cloud business has sunk 84 per cent. Ouch.
However, deal sizes and profitability for straight-up on-premise resale projects compare favourably with as-a-service options. So maybe resellers just need to convince customers this cloud nonsense isn't for them?