Good week/bad week

We look at who is riding high and who is feeling low this week

Good week / bad week

Hangovers

We're willing to bet that on 16 November there were more sore heads than in the aftermath of Pete Doherty's post-prison homecoming bash. Yes, the UK channel showed everyone how to par-tay in style at the 19th Channel Awards on 15 November - and paid for it the next day. Writing on his blog, one US-based attendee - analyst Larry Walsh - admitted he was blown away by the endurance of his British channel brethren. "Was the after party that lasted until 6am a bit excessive? Perhaps. But the channel doesn't always get the recognition it deserves and is entitled to the occasional over-the-top indulgences."

PaaS

Just a couple of years ago, no-one had really heard the term PaaS, which of course stands for Platform-as-a-Service. Now it is flying up the radar.
According to number crunchers Gartner, the market is set to double within three years. Cripes! By the end of this year the global PaaS market will reach $1.2bn (£750m) and in 2016 will reach $2.9bn. Of course, some people won't get out of bed for less than that amount, but surely it is too good an opportunity to PaaS up? Sorry, we couldn't resist.

CEO wannabes

After 40 years of working at the same company, and eight years at the top, Intel's Paul Otellini has finally decided to hang up his boots and step down as chief executive of the world's biggest chip maker. He will be sticking in the role until May next year (and staying on in an advisory capacity for a little longer) while the bods at Intel frantically try and find a replacement.
Meanwhile, all those CEO wannabes are dusting down their CVs and brushing off their interview suits in the hope that they can fill his boots. With a track record like Otellini's, they had better be an extra-large shoe size. Those boots are gonna be huge!

Bad week

HP

'Bad week' just doesn't seem to cover it. It's been such a massively, monstrously, monumentally awful week for HP that we wouldn't be surprised if all the senior execs went home to find their house had burned down, their credit card had been cloned and their spouse had run off with the milkman.

Possibly the only good thing is that much of the bad news - the seven per cent Q4 revenue decline, the annual operating losses of $11.1bn, the 12 per cent share-price drop - was overshadowed by the Autonomy farrago.

Much like Jack's mum being handed a set of magic beans, HP is feeling a bit short-changed by its acquisition of the software vendor and has accused the firm of overvaluing itself via "serious accounting improprieties".

An Autonomy-related goodwill impairment charge of $8.8bn was booked in Q4, following an $8bn charge on its misfiring services business in Q3. Ouch.
Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch has "flatly rejected these false allegations".

Established distributors
Former Fortinet UK boss Paul Judd may have manoeuvred his way off the Christmas card lists of the major distributors after launching his own VAD.
‘Heatherside' is designed to fill the void left by the sale of several independent distributors - including VADition - to larger rivals by seeding the market for start-up security and networking vendors. Judd will initially direct his cow eyes at reseller partners of FireEye, Palo Alto and Fortinet - the main rivals of Heatherside's first vendor signing: anti-malware start-up LastLine. Less importantly, Judd's new venture sees him join that elite band of industry veterans to have completed "channel bingo" by working in all three tiers of the channel.

Comet
Each week keeps getting worse than the last for the fallen retailer, with administrator Deloitte outlining plans to shut more than one in six stores. A total of more than 1,000 redundancies are now expected across the business.
The chances of finding a buyer for the entire business now appear increasingly remote (unless someone has bought it by the time you read this). But, on the plus side, the closing down sales have begun in earnest and there's a top-of-the-line Hoover we've had our eye on for a few months. Cashback!