Good times, bad times
Who was a hero, and who was a zero, in the channel last week?
GOOD TIMES
Softcat
All eyes were on Softcat as the £600m-turnover company took the plunge on the LSE in the first UK reseller flotation of its scale since Computacenter in 1998.
Would the Marlow-based outfit's "SCT" ticker soar like an eagle, or collapse like a bad soufflé on Masterchef?
Fortunately, Softcat got off to a flyer as investor clamour saw its share price boom from 240 pence to 289 pence, at the time of writing. But whether the wider public has grasped that Softcat is an IT supplier and not a pet grooming retailer is another question.
EMC partners
Letter writing is something of a lost art, with the only things to land on the nation's doormats these days being bills, takeaway menus and leaflets from overzealous estate agents.
But EMC's chief executive David Goulden has put an end to that and penned a missive to his company's partners to allay any concerns they have about Dell's plans to acquire EMC. He insisted that EMC's commitment to the channel will not waver once the deal goes through.
"EMC recognises the investments partners have made in EMC technology and the programme, and assures them it will become better and more expansive - in effect allowing them to focus on selling more comprehensive technologies and solutions faster," he wrote, in his best handwriting.
The United Kingdom
This sceptered isle got a boost last week with news that networking kingpin Cisco has begun making good on its pledge to invest $1bn in the UK over the next five years. The vendor has kicked off its Blighty-backing bonanza by expanding its office space in Finsbury Square in the City of London, where it now has a monster 27,320 sq ft in which to do its thing.
Cisco UK head honcho Phil Smith claimed that the new digs "will function as an important hub for the development of innovative products".
It's enough to engorge any patriotic Brit's chest with pride.
BAD TIMES
Livers
In horrible proof that ‘what goes up, must come down', there were as many tired eyes, vacant expressions and sore heads in the channel on 20 November as there were revellers at the 22nd CRN Channel Awards the previous evening.
Yes, it's that time of year when sales of aspirin go through the roof as vendors, distributors and resellers up and down the country strive to overcome their collective hangover following the channel's answer to the Oscars.
As for the CRN team, being ambassadors for the brand we drank only water all night and were at our desks the next day by 7.30am sharp... in an alternative reality, that is!
Dell laptop users
Eager to show that Johnny American can still keep up with the Asian giants of the PC market, Dell proved recently that anything Lenovo can do, it can do better, as it replicated the Chinese vendor's trick of selling computers pre-packaged with gaping security flaws.
The Texan vendor was forced to admit that its most recent machines were made with a security certificate that, although intended to form part of a support tool, made it far easier for hackers to access users' data using a so-called ‘man-in-the-middle' attack. Which surely calls for a rousing chorus of: ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!'.
‘The channel'
Write the word ‘vendor' in a box; connect that box via an arrow to one below containing the word ‘distributor'; repeat that process twice with boxes for ‘reseller' and ‘end user'.
That's an exercise probably more than half of you reading this will have undergone as you attempt to verse a junior colleague in the mysterious ways of the IT channel.
But according to NetApp's UK boss, it's time to rip up that flipchart and discard the word ‘channel' altogether because the image it conjures up of a pipeline carrying product no longer reflects the reality of the industry.
"The customer is left, right and centre to everything we do and our partners wrap themselves around the customer," said Elliot Howard. He may be right, but we'd like to see him represent that concept on a whiteboard.