Good week/Bad week

We round up who's had a stinker and who's had a stonker in the last seven days in the channel

Good week

Assurix
In truth, it was a week that started badly and got a lot better for the Newbury-based security VAR. Assurix slid into administration just under two weeks ago, but the Check Point, Blue Coat and Cisco partner was quickly bought up by Pervasive Networks.
The HP, Mitel and Aruba VAR claims the deal will take its staff numbers to about 40, with turnover rising to north of £14m. All Assurix's customers are included in the acquisition, and staff will be transferred under TUPE regulations, although senior exec duo David Lannin and Adrian Bishop are understood to have moved on.
Pervasive MD Ashley Langley asserted that the integration will be relatively straightforward and that it should be business as usual.

Bracknell estate agents
The pockets of Bracknell estate agents will be jangling in the coming weeks following Avnet's announcement that it is moving newly acquired Magirus employees into its own offices nearby.
Before the year is out, dozens of Magirus staff will move from their existing Bracknell base to join employees of their new owner in the Sterling Centre office down the road.
Bracknell obviously holds a special place in the hearts of Avnet's facilities management team as the acquisition left the distributor with not one, not two, but three office locations in the charming Berkshire town. In more good news for local realtors, extra floor space is set to open up in Avnet's satellite office as it looks to focus its Bracknell love on its HQ.

Folding chair salesmen
The memo that sitting cross-legged on the floor is only acceptable during a yoga class, at primary school or on a camping trip was clearly missed by Fujitsu last week. Its Forum event in Munich was so over-subscribed that delegates wound up having to perch wherever they could in order to listen to the keynotes and partake in the breakout sessions.
So while Fujitsu may have been pleased that so many partners and customers had flocked to hear what news it had to share, our guess is that weary-legged attendees may have been more receptive to a pitch from a roving pack of folding chair salesmen.

Bad week

The UK PC market
The UK PC market must be getting as used to bad news as that other great British institution, the BBC.
The gathering gloom for the client channel was added to this week by Gartner which reported that Q3 shipments fell 7.2 per cent, with the
consumer and B2B segments posting respective declines of eight and six per cent.
Moreover, the analyst now believes the embattled market may be in "an ever-declining trend" and vendors will face a struggle to reignite demand in the coming months, even with the launch of Windows 8.
Meanwhile, if the Beeb wants to get back in the public's good books, might we suggest that An Ever-Declining Trend sounds like a delightful Sunday teatime sitcom starring Bill Nighy and Julie Walters?

Dixons' HR department
The workload of Currys' and PC World's HR bods is set to go into overdrive as Dixons announced last week that it would be offering up to 3,000 staff at fallen rival Comet a job for Christmas.
Dixons' chief executive Sebastian James told the BBC that some 500 Comet staff had already shown an interest. But, in worse news for an already frazzled HR team: "We have delayed our recruitment so that Comet colleagues who want to join our stores can get a chance to do so."
We just hope for their sake that he doesn't try to lift their spirits by handing out free Santa hats and pumping in a bit Shakin' Stevens.

Microsoft customers
Christmas may just be a mere six weeks away (we're not counting, honest) but the festive spirit appears to have evaded Microsoft, as this week it announced a far-from-merry price increase on a variety of its business applications, due to come into force on 1 December.
The price increase affects a range of programs including Lync Server 2013 - the price
of which will rocket by up to 400 per cent compared with Lync 2010 Standard, as well as SharePoint 2013, Visio 2013 and Project 2013.
It's our guess on the CRN newsdesk that resellers might take the extra moolah from their account manager Christmas pressie fund.