Good week/bad week
Good week
Aspiring sales staff
If you've ever thought of yourself as a young Del or Rodney Trotter, there has never been a better time to try your luck in the channel.
Kelway has launched its Academy, which aims to pin down 16 of the brightest sales staff from a shortlist of 200 (which seems like a pretty long list to us).
The VAR said it was time to shake up the system and allow fresh blood into industry. Fellow reseller Trustmarque also recently announced its search for 30 new staff, 20 of whom will be in sales, while ANS Group announced it will hire an additional 50 staff which will include both sales staff and apprentices.
VMware partners
Angry VMware partners were tamed this week as the vendor announced it was backing down on its controversial vRAM licence scheme. The "vtax", as it was not-so-affectionately known, placed a limit of 96GB on the amount of memory
that could be used, causing annoyance among customers who previously enjoyed an unlimited amount.
Following a swathe of complaints, VMware admitted defeat and changed the licence structure back to the way it was, seeing users pay per CPU socket instead.
Who said stamping your feet and complaining never got you anywhere in life?
Channel democracy
Ever wanted to voice concerns about your vendor partners, but been too scared of the repercussions? Well never fear, CRN's recently launched Vendor Report allows you to do just that, without revealing your identity!We are giving VARs the chance to say exactly what they want about all the top vendors, from the quality of their channel programmes to satisfaction with the level of support they provide their partners. We have all the bases covered. So come on, don't sit there stewing, fill in our vendor report and let them have it both barrels. Or not, as the case may be.
Bad week
Channel M&A
After a long, lazy summer slumped in front of the Olympics, some reseller bosses would be forgiven for wanting to jack in this ol' channel game and sell up. But, hold your horses, finding a buyer may prove a tough task.
According to integrator giant 2e2, which has bought nearly everything that moved over the past five years, banks are much less willing to back M&A deals in the channel than they once were. We on the CRN newsdesk hope they're wrong - after all, what would we have left to write about?
Zoho
Zoho may be one of the few cloud vendors to emerge from an outage in some credit. The CRM specialist's service was down for several hours due to "data packet loss across network access paths" - right you are. But the company's efforts to blog throughout the outage and post news on Twitter repaired some of the damage.
"Twitter updates [from Zoho] saved me the inconvenience and shows how social media savvy they are, and from our perspective, it was a tick in the box," gushed one partner. The saying "it's not the mistakes you make, it's how you deal with them" has never rung more true.
Samsung
Apple and Samsung are still engaged in their legal spat after a court ruled it has to pay the iPhone maker $1bn (£631m) for infringing patents.
Of course, this legal tit-for-tat battle has only just begun as Samsung is bound to lodge an appeal on the ruling. But Apple's hearing over getting several models of Samsung's phones banned in the US was delayed last week until December, giving Samsung a little respite in the onslaught.
The legal case has prompted cries of corporate bullying and stifling innovation, and also claims that Apple itself could be had up for infringing IP, but we would never suggest such a thing here at CRN. Oh no. Not us.