Good week/bad week
Who was on form and who was infirm in the channel last week?
Good week
Speaking out
Some may say that storing a batch of laptops until they're no longer in warranty is a
bad thing, but hats off to Torfaen Council for coming clean and admitting that £1m worth of publicly funded kit remains unused in its warehouse.Owning up to something like that is no mean feat.
If more of the public sector ‘fessed up to the amount of waste going on in its organisations, we'd be in a much better place. Maybe we should send a few MPs to Wales to learn how it's done.
Australia
Do you come from a land down under - where women glow and men plunder? If so, it's been a bonzer seven days for you. Well, at least it has if you work in the IT channel.
A brace of top execs this week revealed they are departing this sceptred isle and heading for the sunnier climes of Oz.
Ingram UK boss Matthew Sanderson is going back to Australia after three years back in Blighty, hopefully in time to have a Christmas barbie on the beach.
Meanwhile, AV distie Midwich is sending Mark Lowe down under for an indefinite period of time to have a fair dinkum burl at overseeing the integration of recent acquisition IDT.
In their new roles the pair will be based a few miles apart in New South Wales, so we can't help wondering if they'll end up living near each other. After all, everybody needs good neighbours...
Seven inchers
Oo-er missus. Fnarr-fnarr! As Finbarr Saunders (he of the double entendres) would say - there's plenty of punnage in the old seven-inch gag. However, we're talking about tablets here, you dirty-minded bunch. Since the recent launch of the iPad Mini, analysts have gone into overdrive predicting a seven-inch race and growing uptake of the pocket-sized devices (if you have unusually capacious pockets, anyway). We're off to sit in a darkened room to calm down.
Bad week
Box shifters
The government has continued to push its commitment to embracing cloud services with the unveiling of the second iteration of the much-vaunted G-Cloud framework.
The first incarnation had 280 firms, with 180-odd more players this time. Channel mainstays including Trustmarque, Computacenter, Kelway, Bytes and Softcat all feature.
Cabinet office mainman Francis Maude said: "Part of this is about levelling the playing field for small and medium-sized firms by making it simpler, quicker and cheaper for them to compete for government business."
Competing for business is one thing, but with just £2.2m having been sold through G-Cloud so far, actually winning it is quite another.
IT teachers
"We don't need no (IT) educashun" was the first line of the old Pink Floyd classic - well, give or take a couple of letters. But think again. A group of 1,000 13-to-17-year olds was questioned by Logicalis recently, with 60 per cent saying they felt their IT education was not up to scratch, and they want more from their IT teachers.
In encouraging news, 23 per cent want a career in IT. So it may be time for IT teachers to shave off their ‘taches, ditch the patched tweed jackets and get on down. IT is getting cool.
VAR accounts teams
The channel's accounts payable clerks let the side down this week, with the IT industry being one of the few sectors to see its prompt payment performance worsen in 2012's third quarter.
According to stats from credit junkies Experian, the average UK business was paying its bills 24.88 days late in Q3, down from 26.17 in the corresponding period last year. But IT firms are now worse than the overall average, having seen their performance slip from 22.73 days in Q3 2011 to 25.19 days this year.
We'd like to remind the channel of the importance of settling bills on time. You don't want a visit from the surprisingly heavy-handed debt collectors hired to collect unpaid magazine subscriptions. For example.