Good times, bad times
Who has been on top of the world and who has been down in the dumps over the last fortnight?
Good Times
Channel comebacks
Since selling Dabs to BT 10 years ago for a reported £30m, Dave Atherton (pictured) has acted as an angel investor to a pub chain and a toy company, built up a property empire, been involved in a high-profile court case and even appeared on Homes Under the Hammer.
But the lure of the IT channel eventually proved too great. The colourful entrepreneur has returned to the bosom of the industry after a decade, accepting a role as chairman of distie Entatech.
"It's remarkable how a lot of things haven't changed", he told CRN.
"I assumed dealers would place all orders on a website, and that there wouldn't be any office salespeople any more, but there are," he said.
Just don't ask him how much he made from Dabs - he still won't say even now.
Microsoft has revealed plans to purchase professional network LinkedIn for a cool $26.2bn.
The deal for the "fantastic business" (according to Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella) will apparently help grow Microsoft's Office 365 and Dynamics offerings.
Despite the site's professional aims, it has come under fire recently as its 433 million users inundate the platform with brainteasers, viral posts and inspirational quotes from questionable sources.
We've always wondered what CEOs do all day...
Philip Hulme
If you're anything like certain members of the CRN team, your experience of charity will be reluctantly donating a fiver to a colleague who's done a sponsored bike ride.
Computacenter co-founder Philip Hulme has gone a step further by ploughing £35m into good causes through his Hadley Trust, it emerged as he received a knighthood in the Queen's birthday honours.
Hulme's charitable and philanthropic work were recognised as he knelt before the monarch last week. Husky-voiced crooner Rod Stewart was among the other 18 subjects knighted, presumably for services to tight trousers.
Bad Times
Direct sales
The channel scored another significant victory over direct sales last week when Dell signed up Currys PC World to carry its PCs.
The Dixons Carphone-owned retailer will stock the Dell XPS, Inspiron and Alienware ranges in its UK stores after Dell admitted its reliance on direct sales had left it languishing on three per cent market share in the UK consumer PC space.
"There was a clear need for them to develop channels and it started off in the enterprise space and is now happening in the consumer area," said Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics.
Outsourcery
After a rocky few months, Outsourcery's fate was finally sealed when it appointed administratoy EY. The firm announced on the London Stock Exchange on 15 June that an agreement had been reached to sell "substantially the entire business and assets" to GCI Network Solutions.
The cloud services provider's future had been questioned when it announced in April it had made a £4m loss in the year ending 31 December. But Vodafone appeared to throw the firm a lifeline in April with a new financial facility.
Outsourcery suspended trading of its shares early in June when it said that selling all assets could leave little or no value to equity shareholders.
We wish the firm and its staff well.
Vendor handbags
A war of words erupted in the channel last week between the respective CEOs of Kaseya and SolarWinds that made Trump versus Clinton look like a playground squabble.
The slanging match began when SolarWinds claimed its acquisition of LogicNow will allow it to steamroller competitors such as Kaseya.
This followed comments from Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola, who said he would be "scared to death" if he was a LogicNow customer, and questioning SolarWinds' financial position.
It then got personal when SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson joined the fray, saying Voccola has "no ability to compete against us" and that Kaseya was "struggling". Miaaow - someone order a saucer of milk.