Big Blue launches cloud and security specializations to help partners differentiate B y J e f f J e d r a s

ORLANDO – There’s no avoiding the cloud, and IBM’s PartnerWorld Leadership con-ference is certainly no excep-tion. With more partners look-ing to ride the cloud wave, IBM announced a Cloud Computing Speciality that can help partners differentiate in the market.

The speciality supports five solution areas for different cloud partner types, from cloud application providers to cloud builders engaged in consultative and solution selling.

For an option with slightly fewer certification require-ments, IBM is also launching a Cloud Computing Authoriza-tion for cloud-focused software business partners.

Cloud computing and se-curity are the first technology-focused specializations under IBM’s software value plus (SVP) program. Shaun Jones, vice-president, business partner marketing in IBM’s software group, said SVP launched two years ago in response to a part-ner desire to differentiate with customers and grow their busi-nesses around skill. Product-group specializations launched a year ago, followed by industry vertical-focused specializations.

“Partners like to be recog-nized for their skills, and cus-tomers like to see this in front of them,” said Jones.

These authorizations aren’t easy to earn, said Jones. A partner needs to demonstrate proven customer and technol-ogy experience to a peer board before getting approved for the specialization.

In addition to the branding,

digital equipment Corp. founder Ken Olsen dies at age 84

B y C d N s t a f f

Kenneth Olsen, the computer industry pioneer who co-found-ed minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corp., died at the age of 84 last month.

Olsen will be remembered for the key role he played in at least one technology revolution: the move from mainframes to minicomputers.

Olsen entered electron-ics school for a year during his time in the Navy. Working as a technician in the service, Olsen’s knowledge and passion for

computer electronics grew.During his time at MIT

after the Navy, Olsen designed the Whirlwind, the first real-time computer. Olsen was on the staff of the MIT Digital Computer Laboratory for seven years.

Outfitted with a $70,000 in-vestment from General Georges F. Doriot at the American Re-search and Development Corp., Olsen co-founded Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) with fellow MIT graduate Harlan Anderson in Maynard, Mass. in 1957. The company began to develop the first small inter-active computer and produced printed circuit logic modules,

B y J e f f J e d r a s

Almost three years after the public sector IT procurement world was shook-up when Ricoh Canada vaulted onto the National Master Standing Offer (NMSO) list for mono-chrome standalone page print-ers, bumping off incumbents such as HP Canada, the latest NMSO list is out and it’s mak-ing waves as well.

The NMSO is a list of pre-

approved vendor suppliers from which federal govern-ment departments can purchase a specific product at a pre-set price. The latest NMSO for monochrome standalone page printers sees HP Canada back on the list again, along with Oki Data Americas, Kyocera Mita Canada, Xerox Canada and Dell Canada. While they’re the winners, vendors not making

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Productivity gapCanada’s IT productivity gap is blamed on a lack of knowledge

Page 4

Cisco Systems has made a change in its senior leadership ranks with the creation of a new position – chief operating officer – reporting directly to CEo John Chambers.

The Coo position will be filled by Gary Moore, a Cisco/Hitachi/netigy veteran who previously ran Cisco’s services business.

c l o s e u p :

Enterprise manCDN goes one-on-one with Kaspersky Americas president Steve orenberg on his plans for growth in the enterprise

Page 26

Digital doctorsHumber river regional Hospital is slated to be the first all digital facility in Canada

Page 19

m a r k e t s :

Cable profitsFind out about the large margins being offered on computer cables

Page 20

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast by Segment ($1503.9B)

Source: IDC’s Worldwide Black Book Query Tool, Version 2, 2010

c a s e s t u d y :

f a s t f a c t s :

The Cloud JuggernautThe most profitable cloud models for VArs Page 16

See Now page 3

See Navy page 3

IT pioneer and legend passes away

IBM wants partners to specialize in the cloud

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano addresses thousands of channel partners at the Orlando event

Printer NMSO shake-up: HP and Oki are in, Ricoh is out

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o Co

urt

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See HP page 3

Services38.2%

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Hardware41.5%

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www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 3

partners with the cloud special-ization gain access to specialized IBM cloud computing market-ing and sales support, road-map and strategy information, busi-ness development funding and increased margin, in addition to other benefits.

Chris Clinton, senior vice-president, global global channel management with TradeCard, a New York-based IBM part-ner specializing in hosted sup-ply chain management, said the cloud specialization will allow his company to get trained up more quickly on cloud tech-nologies.

“This will allow us to take

our sales and marketing folks and get us through all the great training and mentorship that IBM can offer us. We don’t have the resources to do this ourselves,” said Clinton.

He added it’s also really im-portant to get access to insider information on IBM’s cloud strategy.

“This IBM Cloud Special-ization program is by far one of the best I’ve seen,” said Clinton. “Where do you ever find just one program in a cloud special-ity program?”

The specialization is an im-portant step said James Alexan-der, senior vice-president with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, and one he

expects more vendors to follow. It addresses a number of key points, namely how the cloud is changing the economic model for partners, the skills partners need to bring to the table, and the value paradigm around why the cloud model can make sense for certain customers.

“I think there’s a recognition IBM is willing to invest to ad-dress that, and I think there’s a recognition they’re trying to understand the different com-ponents of the ecosystem,” said Alexander. “But at the end of the day, like most things it will only be as good as its execu-tion. A great execution always trumps a great idea.”

In addition to cloud com-

puting, IBM is also looking to help partners tap opportunity around analytics with its new IBM Cognos Express Planner analytics software. Designed for mid-market organizations, it helps users drive a more inte-grated, automated and collabor-ative approach to financial plan-ning, performance and resource utilization.

Finally, IBM launched sev-eral new systems designed to address the growing issue of data centre efficiency and the growing volume of data in or-ganizations.

The new offerings span IBM’s systems portfolio across chips, hardware and software. They include zEnterprise Sys-tem with added support for IBM WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance x150. In storage, there’s the new IBM Storwize Rapid Application Storage solution. There’s a new, ready-to-deploy, pre-configured eX5 Blade System for database applications, and new systems networking offerings through IBM’s acquisition of Blade Net-work Technologies. |

Avaya .......................................................... 8

Cables To Go .............................................20

Citrix .........................................................12

Cisco Systems .......................................4, 10

Digital Equipment Corp.. .........................1, 14

D&H Canada ..............................................10

Dell Canada ...............................................20

Humber River Regional Hospital .................19

HP ............................................................... 1

IBM .......................................................1, 13

Kaspersky ..............................................6, 26

McAfee........................................................ 7

Palo Alto Networks. ...................................21

Solanis ......................................................22

Ricoh ........................................................... 1

SAP ............................................................. 8

Symantec ............................................21, 24

Tech Data Canada .....................................10

| C o m p a n i e s i n t h e n e w s

I N S I D E

n e w sKaspersky and McAfee make some huge deals

page 6

f e a t u r e r e p o r tThere are many options coming from cloud services; here are the most profitable

page 16

p r o f i l eone of IbM Canada’s top channel partners speaks out

page 22

R E G U L A R S

14 Editorial18 Special Feature19 Case Study20 Markets 22 Profile24 Products25 Calendar26 Close-up

For today’s top storiesvisit us on the web:

www.computerdealernews.com

Continued from page 1

which were used to test elec-tronic equipment.

Olsen served as president of the company from its founding in 1957 until his retirement in 1992. In 1960, DEC produced the PDP-1. DEC flourished with the PDP-8, the world’s first mass-produced mini-com-puter, which was manufactured from 1965 to 1984. The PDP-11, produced by DEC in 1970, became the most popular mini-computer line in history.

Olsen left Digital in 1992, forced out as young executives led by Robert Palmer usurped his authority.

Olsen was known to be a blunt speaker on occasion.

As corporate IT spread be-yond the confines of IS depart-ments in the 1980s and 1990s, he could be critical of people who were not steeped in tech-nology.

“The whole world’s gone crazy because all of the soft-ware and all of the marketing is run by people who’ve never operated a business,” Olsen said in an interview with the IDG News Service in 1998, six

years after he left Digital. He advocated a balanced ap-

proach to management, however. “The first problem is to try

to get people to organize (busi-nesses) with wisdom, with com-mon sense,” he said.

Sharing his passion for com-puters with the public, Olsen co-founded the Computer Museum, originally located in Marlborough, Mass. in 1979. The museum later moved to Boston. In 1999 the museum closed, but many of its exhibits are now part of the Boston Mu-seum of Science.

Olsen has received many awards, including the MCI Communications Information Technology Leadership Award for Innovation, the Founder’s Medal from the IEEE and the National Medal of Technology. |

Career HigHligHts:•1944-EnteredtheNavy•1950-GraduatedfromMIT•1957-Co-foundedDEC•1979-Co-foundedBoston’s

ComputerMuseum•1990-InductedintotheNa-

tionalInventorsHallofFame•1992-RetiredfromDEC

Now IBM’s challenge is execution

Navy vet changed the face of IT

the cut this year were Lexmark Canada, Samsung Electronics Canada, Sharp Electronics of Canada and the surprise new-comer on the last list, Ricoh.

Making it onto the NMSO is no guarantee of business, but it does mean the opportunity to carve out a chunk of the lucra-tive federal government printer buy. Getting on the list involves a competitive RFP process by Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC). Once on the list, vendors and their partners need to market their wares directly to the de-partment heads within organ-izations across the federal gov-ernment.

For vendors such as HP Canada and Oki Data, getting a spot on the NMSO is a big win. David Varricchio, business de-velopment manager, public sec-tor with HP Canada, said while it remained on the NMSO in other categories it’s excited to be back on the monochrome stan-dalone list to be able to offer a wider selection of HP options

to its customers.“We’re excited by the news

and certainly for our custom-ers, given that many of them have standardized on HP in the past. We’re glad to be back,” said Varricchio. “I can’t speculate on what we expect to see in sales or revenue, but it gives us a greater opportunity to have more HP solutions available for govern-ment to consider.”

There is a pent-up demand in the public sector said Alec Milne, president of Printers Plus, an Ottawa-based HP re-seller. Many government de-partments have standardized on HP and aren’t keen on manag-ing multi-vendor environments, so they’ve been waiting for HP to come back to refresh. And while the government year-end doesn’t see the sales volume it once did, there is still a ramp-up of activity during this season.

While HP is a veteran of the public sector market, Oki Data Americas is a relative newcomer. Mario Pallotta, Oki Data’s GM for Canada, said the vendor has been on the list before but only

for one product, and it didn’t do that much with it. This time, though, he said Oki is ready to seize the opportunity.

Pallotta said they began the process of competing for the NMSO about a year-and-a-half ago, and made it a company priority. They assigned a team to the project that met regularly with PWGSC, and worked over the weekend and up to the RFP submission deadline to make sure everything was complete.

“The first step is to get on it, and now the work really starts,” said Pallotta. “We’ve been meet-ing with departments ... to (get them to) understand Oki and what we can do. It represents a huge opportunity. On a yearly basis it’s a very large buy, and to take 10 to 15 per cent would be pretty good for us.”

While Ricoh made a splash shooting onto the NMSO with a very competitively-priced bid, observers say their absence this year may be an indicator that the most recent NMSO was based on more than just the lowest price. |

HP gets back into NMSO Continued from page 1

Continued from page 1

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com4

| news analysis

Lack of knowledge to blame for Canadian productivity gapItaC and other industry experts say a lack of knowledge is whytechnology is being underutilized by small businesses

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

A recent Information Technology Asso-ciation of Canada (ITAC) panel discus-sion tackled the alleged gap in labour

productivity in the information and communications technol-

ogy (ICT) industry between Canada and the U.S. Ber-nard Courtois, president and CEO at ITAC, said there’s a productivity gap between Canada and the U.S. of 20 per cent.

“We’re a country that generates a lot of innovation but we have a problem in using technology in mid-size

and smaller businesses,” Courtois said. “Groups

have been trying to address this issue for many years due

to an under investment of ma-chinery and equipment in the

ICT industry in general.” Courtois said there’s no “silver bullet”

to solving this problem because it’s such a common and widespread issue.

Enterprises only account for 10 per cent of companies in Canada, while 90 per cent of businesses are small busi-nesses. That percentage of companies has less than 100 people employed, according to Courtois. The lack of investment in information and com-munication technology is fundamen-tally because these smaller companies simply do not have the money to spend on acquiring good technology. Small-to-medium businesses also don’t have the money to spend on learning how to better use the existing technology to increase their productivity and overall Canada’s profits, according to Courtois.

“Generally, if you’re a smaller busi-ness, you don’t know all the things you can do with technology in order to grow your company faster and be more pro-ductive,” Courtois said. “We have to have a national dialogue to keep focus-ing on this. Getting the word out about technology is key.”

Businesses of similar size to one an-other who share experiences with tech-nology that worked for them are likely to succeed the most as they keep open lines of communication, Courtois said.

Andrew Sharpe, executive director at the Centre for the Study of Living Stan-dards, a non-profit organization that aims to contribute to a better understanding of trends around productivity, living stan-dards and economic and social well-be-ing thru research, said vertical markets in the ICT industry all vary in the amount of monetary spend per worker.

“The financial industry for example

spends about $7000 per worker per year in ICT and in healthcare, it’s less than $500 per worker per year for ICT,” Sharpe said.

Sharpe said that although it’s recog-nized, there’s no definitive explanation for why there’s this gap between coun-tries.

Doug Cooper, Intel Canada’s coun-try manager, was a guest speaker at the event and said the company is hoping to address this issue by shining a light on industry best practices that are making companies successful.

Paul Cooper, country manager at Dell Canada, referred to the world that we live in today as the virtual era. Here, he said there’s a convergence of technol-ogy with devices like smartphones, PCs, notebooks and tablets.

“Consumers seem more willing to take risk and experiment with new technologies than businesses are,” Paul Cooper said. “The biggest and most important thing is knowledge. Having a dialogue is important and the chan-nel plays a large role in the transfer of knowledge.”

Similarly, Doug Cooper said partners play a role in helping customers under-

stand where the costs and inefficiencies are in their organizations.

“Chances are, these small businesses got into business because of a passion,” Doug Cooper said.

“They didn’t get into the business to figure out how specific technologies work inside their organization. Partners need to address how businesses can be more efficient and communicate to their customers on the importance around doing things regular refreshes. Be smart about where the fundamental best practices are and help small businesses understand them. They don’t want cool

technology. They want something that fixes a problem or addresses a business issue.”

To help showcase some of Canada’s business successes, ITAC will host The Ingenious Awards, an awards program on June 14 in Toronto, seeking out en-terprises with productivity improve-ment, revenue growth, efficiency gains and business transformation.

The Ingenious Awards will feature five categories for excellence in large public organizations, large private or-ganizations, small-to-medium private businesses, small-to-medium public businesses and non-for-profit organiza-tions. “We ... know that the most per-suasive way to encourage organizations to use technology is through peer-to-peer exchange of best practices among companies and other organizations,” Courtois said.

To apply, companies are required to give a short project description and evi-dence of how technology has helped to achieve their business goals. Applica-tions are being accepted from now until March 30. For more information visit-www.ingeniousawards.ca. |

–With files from Selena Mann

‘Having a dialogue is important and the channel plays a large role in the transfer of knowledge.’— Paul Cooper of dell

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| news

HPFutura Book (Regular; OpenType), Futura Std (Light Condensed; OpenType)

Hewlett-Packard

None

Pedro Rodrigues Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black

None

HP-003-4C-11 1-11-2011 5:20 PM

Doug Archer

100%

SAFETY: None TRIM: 21” x 6” Bleed: 21.375” x 6.25”21” x 6”

SPEC ORIGINALLY GENERATED: by Operator PAGE: 1

Unflattened

MAC09197-HP Partner ONE-21x6 Eng.indd

You don’t just provide the solution. You are the solution.

You’re an HP Technology Partner—the direct link between the needs of your customers and the smartest possible solutions. With the full portfolio of HP computers, servers, printers, storage and networking products at your command, in this economy, you might even be a hero, too. To see how HP PartnerONE.cacan help you better serve your customers, visit hp.com/go/PartnerONE

.ca

© 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.

T:21”

T:6”

B:21.375”

B:6.25”

F:10.5”

FS:10.375”

F:10.5”

Security vendor gets into managed servicesCanadian solution provider piloting Kaspersky’s managed services solution

B y P a O l O d e l N I B l e t t O

CaNCUN - Internet security vendor Kas-persky Lab is getting into the managed services space, the company announced at its annual partner conference, and is readying a solution for release in the second quarter of this year.

The managed services solution will be called Service Provider Edition and is currently being piloted in Calgary by IT consulting firm ES Williams.

Andrew Leung, vice-president of ES Williams, said that customer value with this solution will be boiled down to the low monthly cost and the flexibility to add and subtract licenses.

“There is no capital outlay or infra-structure cost for clients to acquire this endpoint security solution. It’s a low-cost point of entry for customers and we’ve been able to manage it on our network, which will help them be protected bet-ter,” he said.

Kaspersky partners are encouraged to go after new customers while addressing existing customers with this release.

Gary Abad, vice-president of North American channel sales for Kaspersky, said the reason for initially targeting

channel partners with established man-aged services practices is that they have the security expertise to roll out the solu-tion immediately.

“For the end-user, this is a great ser-vice and for partners, it will try to do things such as scale to smaller customers and get deeper with others,” Abad said.

Since the managed services solution is still in pilot, Abad was unable to provide reccurring revenue stream potential or margin opportunities. He did say servi-ces revenue would be high if the solution provider offers hosting services or if they chose to go through a third partner sup-plier such as Rackspace or Amazon Web Services.

“We’re still putting pencil to paper on that to see what the return is for partners and we want to provide that, as well as infrastructure costs and training costs. Folks who have managed services, we want to go to them first and build with them. As we do this slow roll out we’ll see what the results are,” he said.

Abad added that in phase two of the managed services roll out, Kaspersky will at that point look to partner with either compete partners or those resellers who are putting the finishing touches on their managed services practice.

Kaspersky didn’t release too many de-tails about the managed services offering.

One thing Kaspersky won’t do with its managed services play is try to recreate another Rackspace or Amazon Web Ser-vices.

Abad said that the managed services play will feature solutions for malware, anti-virus and encryption.

Abad believes that the sweet spot for Kaspersky managed services will be in the SMB. He said he expects 45 to 60 per cent growth in the SMB this year. “There’s no doubt about it that SMBs are the sweet spot and we’ll continue

to focus on that market and try to grab marketshare and this product is a natural fit.”

Kaspersky announced its first-ever partner rewards and incentive program for all Green Team solution providers at its annual Americas Partner Conference.

Called Total Rewards, it’s a program to help channel partners get trained and drive more revenue. Channel part-ners who complete the Total Rewards requirements will earn SPIFFS, in the form of $25 gift cards, and be able to re-deem points for debit cards.

Kaspersky’s growth plan for 2011 is to leap from $600 million to $750 mil-lion mostly through regional expansion. Long-term, however, Eugene Buyakin, the company’s COO, said the vision is with cloud computing. He has already made investments in R&D and through new partner General Atlantic that would see the company focus on securing mo-bile businesses.

“We see radical shifts in the IT mar-ket and the security market will be differ-ent because of it. We’re embracing these trends and trying to maintain leadership in this new landscape,” Buyakin said. |

Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky in Ferrari suit

| news

www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 7

HPFutura Book (Regular; OpenType), Futura Std (Light Condensed; OpenType)

Hewlett-Packard

None

Pedro Rodrigues Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black

None

HP-003-4C-11 1-11-2011 5:20 PM

Doug Archer

100%

SAFETY: None TRIM: 21” x 6” Bleed: 21.375” x 6.25”21” x 6”

SPEC ORIGINALLY GENERATED: by Operator PAGE: 1

Unflattened

MAC09197-HP Partner ONE-21x6 Eng.indd

You don’t just provide the solution. You are the solution.

You’re an HP Technology Partner—the direct link between the needs of your customers and the smartest possible solutions. With the full portfolio of HP computers, servers, printers, storage and networking products at your command, in this economy, you might even be a hero, too. To see how HP PartnerONE.cacan help you better serve your customers, visit hp.com/go/PartnerONE

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© 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.

T:21”

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McAfee and RSA team up to form global technology partnershipPartnership will bring integrated and joint security solutions to better serve partners and customers

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

McAfee Inc. and RSA, the security div-ision of EMC, have teamed up to form a global technology partnership which will

offer integrated security-focused solutions for part-ners and end-user customers.

Ashok Devata, senior manager of product market-ing at RSA, said the partnership was created so that

both companies could offer their partner and customer communities integrated solutions to help address security issues, lower risks and help improve compliance.

“The kinds of things customers have on their security radar are hard to solve by a single vendor,” Devata said. “There’s

a requirement for multiple vendors to come together and share their intelli-gence and bring together different silos of information to help connect the dots.”

Devata explained that RSA decided to partner with McAfee because in addition to it being “one of the market leaders in this space,” EMC also has a good relation-ship with Intel (which announced their intention to acquire McAfee last summer). “So everything aligned well,” he added.

The partnership, announced last month, also enables knowledge-sharing and intelligence between McAfee Global Threat Intelligence and the RSA Frau-dAction Research Lab and Anti-Fraud Command Center.

Information that’s gathered from these intelligence feeds will be used in solutions offerings from the companies to better enhance an organization’s infra-structure security and real-time protec-tion against threats.

Today, both McAfee and RSA provide integration between McAfee Vulnerabil-ity Manager and RSA’s Archer eGRC platform.

Through RSA’s participation in McAfee’s Security Innovation Alliance

Program, the companies plan on further deepening the integration with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator and RSA’s Archer eGRC platform.

This enhanced integration is meant to help businesses better manage their organizational risk by proactively iden-

tifying, tracking and mitigating mission-critical vulnerabilities and security issues.

Devata said the companies also plan on developing joint security solutions around areas such as data loss prevention (DLP) and risk and compliance management.

“We’ve developed a DLP ecosystem and partnered with companies such as Microsoft, VMware and Cisco to create best practices for DLP,” he said. “This is now expanding to McAfee also to bring more bundled solutions together to market.”

The McAfee and RSA technology partnership also means the companies

will jointly develop solutions that ad-dress risk and compliance and govern-ance issues using RSA’s Archer eGRC platform and McAfee’s Risk and Com-pliance solutions.

“This is an initiation of a technology and go-to-market partnership across the portfolio with multiple products and also signifies the exploration of what can be done when creating security standards,” Devata said. “This announcement is around two major companies coming together and adding intelligence to help

customers with security solutions.”Dave DeWalt, president and CEO

of McAfee, said in order to address new and constantly evolving security threats, a holistic approach must be taken.

“Our open McAfee platforms enable partners, like RSA, to provide better and more secure customer environments,” DeWalt said. “By partnering with RSA in the areas of security management and risk and compliance management we are fur-ther helping customers to focus on busi-ness and more effectively manage risk, improve security operations and create proactive security architectures.” |

‘There’s a requirement for multiple vendors to come together and share their intelligence.’— ashok devata of rsa

Ashok Devata of RSA

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com8

| news

Web.alive platform will be offered in a quick to use Us$49/month model

B y H O W a r d s O l O M O N

Seriously ill children living in an Ottawa residence during their cancer treatments can escape their condition for a little while by playing in an imaginary virtual computer world. Meanwhile, struggling students at a Wisconsin university are getting lessons in learning from a virtual professor.

What they have in common is a plat-form from Avaya Inc. called Web.alive, which was one of the technologies it picked up from the assets of Nortel Net-works a year ago.

Since then it has been quietly market-ing the platform, which allows the cre-ation of virtual offices for meetings, with people represented by avatars.

However, in announcing version 2.5, Avaya signalled it will be more aggressive in pushing the platform.

In addition to making a number of enhancements, the company said it will start offering a US$49 a month software-as-a-service version for eight participants that can be paid for by credit card for quick use by corporations. It’s also been available as a $600 a port hosted ver-sion for a year for up to 150 people, and organizations can also buy it as an on-premise application.

Web.alive is similar to VenueGen, Second Life, Open Wonderland (for-merly Sun Wonderland), Open Simula-

tor and others which can be used to cre-ate virtual worlds and are touted to be as good, and less expensive, than a telepres-ence or videoconferencing system.

But industry analysts say virtual en-vironments haven’t caught on with or-ganizations. Avaya hopes the latest ver-sion of Web.alive, plus the SaaS pricing, will boost business interest.

“We feel Web.alive is a new way of collaborating and a mechanism that will allow businesses to interact with each other and customers in ways they haven’t been able to in the past,” said Mohamad Ali, Avaya’s senior vice-president of cor-porate development and strategy.

For example, Avaya set up an online demonstration where a group of repor-ters, software developers and customers from across North America - repre-sented by their avatars - gathered in the atrium of a virtual building to hear pres-entations from company executives. The executives could put up slides on screens above them, as one would at a live meet-ing. After the session, people (that is, their avatars) “walked” to one of several adjoining rooms for more detailed con-versations, or stayed in the atrium with execs for one-on-one interviews.

Among the guests was Nuket Nowlan, who in 2009 as a Nortel staff member, led the team that created Tipontia, a virtual adventure island to entertain the residents of Ronald McDonald House in Ottawa, a residence for youngsters receiving cancer treatment in the city.

“Our mission is accomplished when I see them laughing when they’re using it,”

Nowlan said in an interview.Carol Houston, executive director of

the facility, who “stood” beside her, said the application “has given our children the most incredible opportunity to just be a normal kid and take them out of their illness for a little bit of time.”

John Arechavala Car, director of infor-mation technology at Carroll University of Wisconsin, said the institution uses the platform in trials to help improve the learning of struggling students, to con-nect to international students and for student counselling.

However, the demonstration also re-vealed one of the weaknesses of this – and any – online collaboration: the audio.

During the main presentation Avaya executives could be heard clearly. But while version 2.5 has what Avaya calls a new 3D audio engine that’s supposed to help participants better understand

who is speaking, CDN’s sister publica-tion Network World Canada sometimes had trouble hearing Nowlan because of echoes or dropped words.

Industry analysts believe virtual col-laboration applications have a place in the enterprise, but there will need to be

some user educa-tion.

“We view this [Web.alive] as a very interesting way of adding more interactivity to communications,” said Ira Weinstein, a senior analyst at Wainhouse Re-search, which spe-cializes in collabor-ation technologies.

Among the pos-sible scenarios for use are presenta-

tions where social “schmoozing” after-wards is an important element.

On the other hand, he admits that Web.alive’s ability to let two people have a whispered conversation while still lis-tening to the main speaker is a double-edged sword: What if the presenter over-hears?

“The potential’s there,” agreed Zeus Kerravala, senior vice-president of re-search at the Yankee Group. A virtual presentation can be choreographed so a presenter can get an idea of who’s pay-ing attention, he said – for example, how many follow him into a side room. |

Avaya rolls out Web.alive on-demand service

Avaya Web.alive is a 3D environment similar to Second Life but with new collaborative features

SAP brings Business ByDesign to CanadaB y J e f f J e d r a s

SAP AG is bringing its answer to the on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) market to Canada with the Can-adian availability of Business ByDesign.

After several years on the drawing-board and in beta testing, SAP began to roll Business ByDesign out to select geographies last year. The cautious ap-proach can be linked to earlier missteps as well as the current hosting model, which sees all users hosted in SAP’s data centre in Germany.

Chris Horak, global vice-president, head of platform marketing for SAP, said that hosting model will broaden and evolve as the numbers grow.

Along with announcing Canadian availability, SAP also launched a number of enhancements to the ByDesign Plat-form. A new feature pack, 2.6, adds sup-

port for additional mobile devices, name-ly Apple iPads and Research in Motion BlackBerries.

Also new is a software development kit (SDK) for Business ByDesign Stu-dio, which will allow partners to create complete add-ons.

“One of the most significant things with version 2.6 is it’s becoming a plat-form,” said Horak. “We’ve added an SDK because we know our go to market de-pends on partners, and we can’t develop all the functionality ourselves.”

Horak said he sees ByDesign having a different go to market than SAP’s other mid-market offerings. The on-demand model will rely on a central infrastructure with a minimum of customization on premise. SAP sees it as more of life-time, service-based sale, and is focused on de-veloping the ecosystem around vertical

industry solution add-ons.Rene Giguere, vice-president of

small and medium-sized enterprise for SAP Canada, said that ecosystem will be important and will see SAP looking for a new kind of partner, and not the traditional system integrators SAP has worked with in the past.

“We want partners that can ramp-up volume with telemarketing organiza-tions,” said Giguere. “It’s a different busi-ness model. Heavy on marketing and the web. We’re looking at different business models, and some will be new partners.”

Nigel Wallis, research director for IDC Canada’s enterprise software and application solutions research group, said while SAP has had a long road in bring-ing Business ByDesign to market, it en-ters an on-demand CRM and ERP mar-ket that is still an emerging opportunity.

Unlike competitors such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite which just offer the hosted model, Wallis said SAP has some

interesting challenges entering the mar-ket as an incumbent software vendor not wanting to cannibalize its on-premise license revenue.

Wallis sees several opportunities for SAP. There are the companies that have invested in building their own in-house systems that are ready to replace their legacy systems.

There’s also customers who are run-ning one of Oracle’s legacy acquisition systems ready to upgrade but tired of waiting for Fusion. And there are also new greenfield customers who can be attracted into the market by the quicker implementation and lower training costs of an on demand model.

The challenge for SAP, said Wallis, will be building the right partner chan-nel. It does require a different model than the traditional project-based systems in-tegrator. Partners are the trusted advisor for their customers though, so customers will be turning to them first. |

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Hosting solutions company launches new partner programtenzing Partner Program enables company to be “partner-friendly and easy to work with”

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

Tenzing Managed IT Services, a hosting solutions vendor based in Toronto, wants the channel to know it’s “partner-friend-ly and easy to work with” as it brings a new partner program to market.

Raj Atwal, vice-president of engineer-ing and partner development at Tenzing,

said the launch of the Tenzing Part-ner Program rep-resents a shift to a formalized pro-gram from what was previously in place.

“We had an informal partner-ship program be-

fore,” Atwal said. “The last three to four months have been around formalizing the program and putting more aware-ness around it. We’ve made changes to our Web site and internal processes. We want partners to know we’re really part-ner-friendly and easy to work with for 2011 and beyond.”

The company’s sales strategy is a com-bination of both indirect and direct sales, Atwal said.

In addition to its Toronto location, Tenzing has data centres in Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C.

In a previous interview with CDN, Atwal said his goal this year is to have 30 per cent of the company’s overall revenue go through partners.

The Tenzing partner program is made up of two partner levels, Referral and Premier.

Referral partners are typically e-commerce developers, systems integra-tors and consultant partners who refer customers to Tenzing and don’t wish to be a part of the sales cycle and custom-er relationship. Within the span of 24 hours, Tenzing will notify that partner on whether or not they will accept or reject the lead. Once a contract is signed, the Referral partner will receive a commis-sion, Atwal said.

Premier partners are the ones that es-tablish a strategic partnership with Tenz-ing, Atwal said. Premier partners also receive joint marketing resources from Tenzing, in addition to benefits such as sales training and joint collateral.

“We’re not interested so much in the quantity of partners that we’re working with,” Atwal said. “Our objective is to work with quality partners. We have about

40 partners right now that we’re actively working with and we’re trying to under-stand a bit more about their businesses.”

Tenzing has also refreshed its Web site so that communications between them and partners are more efficient and timely.

Internally, the company has trained its sales teams and business development managers to educate its staff on how to better work with and support partners.

Tenzing also recently announced a partnership with a cloud middleware company, Apprenda, to help independ-

ent software vendors speed their soft-ware-as-a-service model migrations and deployment.

“Partners are a focus for us,” Atwal said. “We’re looking for more partners and want to drive more business through them and work more closely with them.” |

Raj Atwal of Tenzing

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com10

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B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

In an effort to drive more business and loyalty with its resellers, D&H Canada has a new Incentives Program in place and has also expanded its existing Busi-ness Assurance program to more part-ners across the country.

Greg Tobin, general manager of D&H Canada, said the D&H Incentives pro-gram is a new offering in Canada, after the distributor realized its success in the U.S.

The program is geared towards in-dependent value-added resellers (VARs)

and smaller solution providers that are 100 seats or less, Tobin said.

“We’re anticipating about 1,500 of our partners will participate in this program,” he said.

The program enables partners to ac-cumulate one incentive point for every $10 of qualifying product they purchase. They can then redeem these points through a D&H online mall for over 800 prizes which include consumer electron-ics, jewelry and furniture.

The program features more than 40 different vendors whose products qual-ify for incentive points such as Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and Sony.

“The Incentives Program is an ex-ample of how D&H takes a concept that is usually targeted at larger enterprise VARs and scales it for the typical pro-file of our own customers,” said Tobin. “The program doesn’t favour big buyers. It offers points based on an equitable percentage across-the-board. We want all our customers to have an opportun-ity to reap these benefits, since they’ve all helped D&H Canada succeed in the channel.”

In addition to the Incentives Program, after seeing success with its Business As-surance program last year in Canada, the distributor has decided to expand it even further this year.

Last summer, the company launched Business Assurance for 300 qualified D&H SMB resellers in Canada. The program provided resellers with $5M per month in additional credit.

This year, D&H is extending the pro-gram to approximately 1000 qualified SMB partners and providing them with incremental credit of $10M per month.

“If you’re one of the larger resellers,

you won’t be able to be able to participate in these programs,” Tobin said. “The pro-grams target the smaller partners because we don’t give exponential growth targets to participate. Every dollar they pur-chase on qualifying products will count for (prize) redemption. This is something smaller resellers want. They want some-thing that’s realistic for them.”

Tobin said the new programs are being made available in the hopes of increasing partner loyalty and to increase the level of business with its reseller partners.

“Anything that gives loyalty helps us increase our percentage of business with that reseller,” Tobin said. “As opposed to having purchases that may be frag-mented at multiple locations, our object-ive is to become that one-stop shop for the small solution provider.”

Customers can sign up for the pro-gram at www.dandh.ca.

Last fall, the distributor also entered into an agreement with SMB Nation, a community of solution providers found-ed by Harry Brelsford.

D&H Canada formed this relation-ship with SMB Nation so that it could develop special distribution services and pricing for that organization’s resellers, in order to make branded technologies more affordable for the typical SMB re-seller, Tobin said. |

Tech Data Canada launches new Technology Services divisionNew group is headed by richard toledo to better support reseller partners

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

Tech Data Canada recently announced a new Technology Services division to help its reseller partners speed up sales cycles and achieve better qualified quotes, its vice-president of marketing, Greg My-ers said.

Myers said over the past several years, Tech Data’s marketing organization has been focused on adding more technical

depth to its existing support services of-ferings.

The Technology Services division, which is led by Richard Toledo (formerly the head of the integration services team at the distributor), serves as a comple-ment to the distributor’s existing Ad-vanced Infrastructure Solutions division, Myers said.

“The Technology Services division assists our reseller partners in putting together an architected solution for their end-customers,” Myers said. “We’ve taken our front-office resources and combined them with our traditional ser-

vices organization.”The new division is an end-to-end

resource for resellers to gain things such as support, training, certification and hands-on lab experience for enterprise computing products.”

The goal of the division is to enable partners to take advantage of first-line support from Tech Data Canada and to also act as an extension of the partner’s own resources to better support config-uration capabilities, Myers said.

Tech Data Canada also has its newly expanded Advanced Technology Solu-tions Centre located in Mississauga,

Ont. which serves as a demonstration and training facility for partners.

“The Technology Services division helps resellers working in the cloud computing, enterprise computing and advanced technologies spaces to better understand (the markets),” Myers said.

“This new division provides our re-seller partners with access to training, certifications and technical resources to help them qualify quotations and con-firm configurations.

It will also help partners speed up their sales cycles and will lead to better qualified quotes.” |

Distributor offers channel incremental creditd&H Canada brings new incentives program and an extended credit offering to resellers

Greg Tobin of D&H Canada

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Citrix partners with Cisco, and why resellers shouldn’t fear the clouda partnership with Citrix could see Cisco partners selling Xen desktop

B y J e f f J e d r a s

saNta Clara, CalIf. – The market reach of Citrix Systems could get a lot larger as a partnership with networking vendor Cisco Systems grows to see Cisco partners selling Xen Desktop software.

Cisco is committed to its VCE Alli-ance with EMC and VMware. But ac-cording to a Citrix executive, a push from Cisco customers led the vendor to approach Citrix and, 100 days later, the two companies had developed a joint ref-erence architecture for Cisco UCS and Citrix Xen Desktop.

Harry Labana, vice-president and CTO of the Citrix desktop virtualization division, said Citrix has become Cisco’s preferred distributor for desktop virtu-

alization. There’s even a single telephone support line jointly staffed by Citrix and Cisco engineers. The longer-term goal is partners trained on both Cisco and Citrix taking Cisco UCS and Xen Desktop to market.

“We’re getting early cus-tomers, testing, making sure the solution is integrated,” said Labana. “From there I think absolutely, the idea is to have a very prescriptive solution that we can go to a channel partner or an SI partner and say here’s a way to implement Xen Desktop.”

While VCE is a strategy Cisco re-mains committed to, Labana said they’re also a very customer-driven organiza-tion and aren’t married to any particular hypervisor vendor. The relationship helps Cisco sell more UCS and broadens their appeal, which is good for everyone.

With partnerships like that with

Cisco, and the long-standing relation-ship with Microsoft, Labana said Citrix is gaining field scale and is evolving from

a tactical company that works with IT managers to a more strategic player that has more C-level conversations.

It’s an evolution that comes as CIOs are thinking more about how desktop virtualiza-tion and cloud computing are going to change IT models and strategies. Server virtual-ization was about lockdown,

workflow and efficiency, while desktop virtualization is about the user experi-ence across any endpoint. It requires completely different skill sets.

The big opportunity for the channel, said Labana, is to develop the expertise on how to help organizations migrate to desktop virtualization successfully.

“I think there’s a lot of confusion out

there in the industry and the customer base about what are some of the benefits, how do you actually get there and when do you do it,” said Labana. “I think there needs to be a lot more expertise in the industry; people who have very smart process, are very efficient with it and can actually help the customer understand the benefits. I think there’s a huge servi-ces opportunity.”

The services opportunity is echoed by Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of Citrix’ data centre and cloud division. He sees many partners that once imple-mented Citrix offerings on premise now evolving into managed service providers.

And while some folks in the channel may be alarmed by the cloud, Crosby said they really don’t need to be. Adoption to the cloud will occur at the pace people are ready to adopt new technologies, and it will be a long-term process.

“There’s a ton of existing stuff out there and it will take forever to go away. Cloud is an evolutionary process; that’s good for the channel,” said Crosby. “Moreover, it’s an evolutionary process in which the cloud can help the customer move for-ward, in a traditional advisory role with skill sets the enterprise doesn’t have, the channel can really help people transform their business.” |

Cloud services model gives Citrix channel new route to marketCloud services model helping Citrix scale deeper into sMB

B y J e f f J e d r a s

saNta Clara, CalIf. – With a new cloud services delivery model, Citrix Sys-tems is leveraging the channel to drive deeper into the small and medium-sized business market than ever before.

Citrix has always been strongest in the

high-end of the market, where its appli-cation and desktop virtualization solu-tions, and network optimization tools, scale well across large enterprises. In Canada, that means a strong presence in financial services and in oil and gas said Fernando Campo, Citrix’s vice-president,

Americas. While Citrix primarily takes the enterprise space direct, it relies on its channel partners for the rest.

Citrix sees the cloud playing an in-creasingly important role in driving desktop virtualization adoption. And it’s a route to market the channel is embra-

cing. Campo said Citrix partners that would once do on-premise installs for customers are increasingly embracing a cloud service provider model that sees them providing those same services not on premise, but through the cloud.

Citrix has launched a cloud service provider program to help support this go-to-market said Tom Flink, Citrix’s vice-president, worldwide channel. It’s designed to help partners build a busi-ness that delivers applications and desk-tops-as-a-service with Citrix technology to their customers, and bill the customer

on a per-user, monthly sub-scription basis.

The over-all channel has he lped dr ive strong growth for Citrix in Canada, said Flink. In fact, he said the Citrix channel in Can-

ada grew faster than the company did itself overall in 2010, and it was a pretty strong year for Citrix worldwide. In 2011, Citrix isn’t looking to add capacity but rather help its current partner base do more.

“We’re very focused on the partners that have grown their experience and ex-pertise with us, and we want to continue to grow and invest in them through our core channel,” said Flink. “We think we have the right partners.” |

Tom Flink

Harry Labana

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www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 13

IBM Global Services to the channel: We need youGlobal services boss has ambitious growth targets to meet, needs channel help

B y J e f f J e d r a s

OrlaNdO – While its Global Tech-nology Services division hasn’t always been seen as complementary to channel partners, IBM is looking to carve out a bigger slice of the global services pie so it’s changing its approach to services to make channel partnerships a priority.

Part of the motivation comes from IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s mandate to double IBM’s earnings per share by 2015. To help meet that goal Bob Hoey, direc-tor of IBM Global Technology Services, global business, needs to grow the per-centage of IBM’s services revenue that flows through partners by 5.5 per cent annually through 2015. Currently, about 20 per cent of GTS revenue is through partners. And the services opportun-ity is not insubstantial. IBM pegs it as a US$450 billion market, of which IBM, although the market leader, can only lay claim to 10 per cent of today.

“The opportunity is enormous,” said Bob Hoey, general manager, IBM global general business, global technology servi-ces. “The reality is we don’t have enough

sellers in IBM to capture more market share and we’re absolutely dependent on resellers to extend our reach into the market opportunity.”

Hoey told partners at IBM’s Partner-World Leadership conference they need to make services a key part of their busi-ness, and their revenue mix.

“As you’re working with customers to put more data into the cloud, for ex-ample, consider what services IBM can bring to the table to complement your portfolio of services and fill gaps in your offerings,” said Hoey. “Look for places where one plus one can equal three.”

IBM’s services arm hasn’t always been seen as channel-friendly, and it hasn’t been seen as overly easy to work with either. That’s something IBM is trying to address, said Hoey. The scope and breadth of the catalogue was just too much, so IBM is moving to standardized offerings that are more easily understandable and repeatable.

“We’re increasing investment in asset-based offerings, and we want to give partners the option to wrap their own service offerings around ours and lead where they’re strongest,” said Hoey. “The bottom line is you can make more money growing your services, and we want to work with you to help you do this. ”

It would be a mistake to think IBM has found channel religion in the services space said Darren Bibby, vice-president, software channels and alliance research with IDC Corp. Partners should be real-istic that IBM does compete in poten-tially hundreds of different service areas and they are going to be competition to partners that do some of the same things. That said, there’s going to be virtually no partner out there that does everything, and IBM could be a great gap-filler.

“Maybe in some areas where IBM has an extreme capability or focus. Some of the cloud offerings, the hosting, things like that, I think there is a good oppor-tunity for partners,” said Bibby.

The key for IBM though, said Bibby, is to be honest with partners about how they see the channel fitting in a services business that will predominately remain a direct-first play.

“The big thing for IBM is they can’t go out and say this is a sea change and we’re ‘partner friendly’ now in services. It’s not a partner business, it’s a direct business for the most part, but there are very good areas where partners can leverage this,” said Bibby. “But if IBM comes out and doesn’t say they don’t think there will be conflict, I would run away. So I think they’re going to be realistic.” |

IBM channel chief Rich Hume

Rod Adkins, SVP, IBM systems & technology group

Robert LeBlanc, SVP, IBM middleware software

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of IB

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Steve Mills, svp & group exec, software & systems

Big Blue revamps co-marketing programs with $100 million investmentIBM has launched a redeveloped co-marketing program

B y J e f f J e d r a s

OrlaNdO – Having heard from part-ners who have called its co-marketing programs too much process for too little money, IBM used its Partner-World Leadership conference to launch a revamped program backed by an over $100 million global investment in part-ner marketing for the mid-market alone.

The new IBM Co-Marketing Centre takes what were several separate, siloed co-marketing programs and brings them together in one integrated tool partners can use to create customized marketing assets such as webinars or flyers.

IBM’s Mike Gerentine, vice-president, marketing for mid-market, global busi-ness partners, said with its decision to

merge partner and mid-market sales organizations and lead with the chan-nel, IBM has been shifting its demand generation programs from IBM-led to partner-led.

The shift began last year when IBM put marketing service vendors, or MSVs, into place. These are strategic marketing vendors, one in the U.S. and one in Eur-ope, with channel marketing expertise that are enabled and funded by IBM on a three-to-one basis to help partners de-velop customized and repeatable market-ing campaigns.

Gerentine said IBM is aggressively investing in co-marketing because it sees large white space opportunity in the mid-market to win new accounts.

While partners without their own marketing expertise may want to go the MSV route, Gerentine said IBM recog-nizes some partners may want to develop their own marketing campaigns or lever-

age the expertise of their distribution partners.

IBM has co-marketing programs for them, but Gerentine said partners said the programs were cumbersome and took too long to see funds approved and transferred.

The new Co-Marketing Centre was designed to meet that challenge. A number of tools are now integrated in one interface, and funds that used to take three months for approval are now promised within 30 days.

“We had partners telling us it’s not worth the hassle for us to do co-market-ing with you if I have to go through these two tools and processes and wait three months for a few thousand dollars,” said Gerentine.

Partners need all the help they can get with marketing said James Alexan-der, senior vice-president with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, and anything vendors like IBM can do to make marketing programs easier to navigate is a must.

““It’s a burning concern for partners,

and all vendors have been challenged in how they implement these programs,” said Alexander

IBM seems to have hit all the right pain-points in streamlining its program with one-stop shopping, but Alexander said he’ll be watching the execution on the payment window commitment.

“I think the commitment to pay in 30 days is a noble one and I hope they can figure out a way to pull it off,” said Alexander.

Gerentine added IBM has an advan-tage in the mid-market with this mar-keting heft and its new organizational structure bringing the channel and mid-market organizations together under one roof. |

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com14

eDitoRiale D i t o R ’ s n o t e | b y p a o l o D e l n i b l e t t o

i n D i R e C t i n s i g h t s | b y j e f f j e D R a s

Ken Olsen was IT’s biggest star a long time agothe passing of time has not been kind to Olsen’s or digital equipment’s legacy

Ken Olsen, the co-founder of Digital Equipment Corp. and mini-computer pioneer, passed away re-cently. He was 84.

If Olsen was running Digital (or DEC as they used to call the company) today he would be right up there in star power with Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft. In fact, that’s what he was in the 1970s. Everyone in Boston knew who Ken Olsen was. He had name recognition in that town similar to Bobby Orr, Larry Bird, Red Auerbach and Kevin White. Digital was the second largest employer in the state of Massachusetts.

I met Olsen once and I treasure the experience. I was only 21 and was asked by ComputerWorld Can-ada to cover the 1990 DEC World Conference in Boston. During the event I introduced myself to Linda O’Bryon, the anchor for the Nightly Busi-ness Report on PBS. Digital was a big sponsor of the telecast and she was onsite to report on the con-ference and deliver a keynote address. Out of pure luck I bumped into her again and she asked me to sit at her table at an invitation-only session fea-turing Ken Olsen, Henry Kissinger and Bill Gates.

I couldn’t believe my eyes that I was in the same room as these people and was going to meet them later on.

After the speeches I called my Dad who is a big political junkie to tell him about Kissinger, Gates and Olsen. My Dad’s response was “Who is Ken Olsen?” I had already told him about Gates and his prominence in the IT industry.

My Dad’s puzzlement about Olsen is a great question even today. Who really is Ken Olsen and why should we remember him? I’m afraid that time has not been kind to Olsen’s legacy. Shortly after this DEC World event, Olsen was pushed out as Digital boss by Robert Palmer. In 1998, Palmer sold Digital to Compaq. It was the biggest acquisi-tion in the computer industry at the time.

I’m afraid the current generation of IT worker will have a tough time remembering Olsen’s ac-complishments. Olsen was a big deal. Olsen is largely credited with creating the mini-computer, which was a machine that competed with main-frames. With this break-through in technology Olsen didn’t just find a niche to compete with the

IBM’s of the world, but basically created a market where there wasn’t one. Digital’s mini-computer, or PDP, was in competition with no one else. Digital owned the market.

Olsen built on that success with the first 32-bit computer, VAX. They were known in the market as Super-Minis. At one point in the 1980s DEC was second only to IBM. But as quickly as the company rose to prominence; its decline was just as sharp. Even in its declining years the company created the Alpha chip, which was clocked as the fastest on the market and AltaVista, an Internet search engine.

Digital wasn’t able to capture any marketshare in the desktop computer market. It’s best known brand, Rainbow, was too expensive and wasn’t ca-pable of running popular software programs.

Except for IBM, Olsen topped his new competi-tors such as HP and Compaq by establishing sub-sidiaries across the globe. One of its bigger oper-ations was in Canada.

I hope you, from reading this, got a sense of why Ken Olsen really mattered in the world of computing. |

The more technology changes, the more it stays virtually the sameafter pitching the thin client model for years, Citrix is hoping the market may finally have caught up

As my career covering the technology sector goes on, I’m increasingly con-

vinced there is rarely very much of anything new in IT; we may get new branding, a new pitch and some evolutionary advancements, but peer under the cov-ers and the fundamental concepts remain the same.

That’s the thought I had last month while visit-ing Citrix Systems at their Santa Clara, Calif. of-fices for a briefing on the software vendor’s 2011 plans. Citrix has found success in recent years rid-ing the virtualization wave, and an executive was discussing how it plans to support the ability to roll out its virtual Zen Desktops to any endpoint device, whether it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

It was the phrase the executive used to describe the endpoints – thin devices – that made my ears perk up, because it’s eerily similar to what Citrix and others in the industry were pushing as the next

big thing some years back: thin client computing. This was a model of computing using early virtual machine technology where end-users would either have a desktop terminal or a dummy PC that was served a virtual desktop from the server.

The advantages were compelling, and similar to the desktop virtualization pitch of today: easier administration and security, the ability to transfer the workload from the desktop PC to the server, delay or eliminate the need for PC refresh. The dis-advantages, though, were stronger. It was primarily an apps-limited Linux-based environment being served-up, network infrastructure reliability was still a concern, and virtualization hadn’t yet taken flight. While there were some limited deployments – my library at Carleton University installed thin clients – “fat clients” still ruled the day.

Today, though, call it desktop virtualization and,

with some notable service improvements, Citrix is betting the market has caught up and is ready for the “thin device” model.

The biggest difference is that it’s now a full, fam-iliar Windows-based environment being served-up, with all the apps a user is familiar with. Network infrastructure is now reliable enough to consider going virtual, with tools in place to enable offline working. But perhaps the biggest change in favour of this model is the increasing irrelevance of the endpoint. With people wanting to work anywhere, on any device, and IT not wanting to have to man-age every endpoint, virtualizing the desktop makes sense for both users and IT managers.

The thin device model won’t be for everyone. But more than a decade after the first thin devices hit the market, it could finally be an idea that’s time has come. The more things change… |

www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 15

Microsoft and Apple: For VARs, the lines are blurring

m a R g i n a l i a | b y s h a n e s C h i C k

You’re either a Microsoft VAR or an Apple VAR. Aren’t you?

The dividing line between the worlds of Red-mond and Cupertino used to be fairly clear, until Apple made a conscious decision to focus on con-sumer technologies. This happened, unfortunately, at a moment when consumers also realized they wanted to put the technologies they bought to-wards work as well as personal tasks.

Back in November, for example, the Board of Internal Economy – a committee which oversees federal spending – issued a ruling that Members of Parliament are not permitted to expense the pur-chase of Apple’s iPad tablet devices. The Globe and Mail, which recently covered this story, interviewed Liberal MP and board spokesman Marcel Proux for an explanation.

“If I was to call the Hill help desk and say I have a problem with my iPad, they’d say ‘Too bad for you. We don’t know anything about iPads,’” Proux told the Globe. “The House system is totally based on Microsoft.”

Well, so are the systems of at least 80 per cent of other large and mid-size organizations. And of

course, MPs make enough money that they can probably afford their own iPads, much like the average white-collar knowledge worker. But the Board of Internal Economy has also warned that those who do had better also buy an extended war-ranty, and not come crying to the public sector’s IT department. I imagine the same stance has been taken in many private firms as well.

Most of the IT systems that would be affected by the infiltration of Apple products were probably acquired or even set up by partners. These resellers no doubt specialize in Microsoft products as well. But this specialization – both from a partner and a customer perspective – may no longer make sense. As consumers demand more freedom to compute and demonstrate a willingness to increase their pro-ductivity or generate more results based on choice of IT tools, it would make sense for employers to accommodate them. And for VARs to prepare to help them.

This is not to say all those Microsoft VARs will (or should) suddenly change stripes and become Apple dealers. But they should be figuring out some strategies that will provide the compatibility,

the functionality and most importantly the secur-ity between Microsoft back-end infrastructure and front-end Apple hardware. In some cases it might mean forming an alliance of sorts with an Apple VAR who can assist with recommendations and ease the transition.

A big part of this will be education. Customers like the government will need to understand that you can still be a Microsoft shop without closing the door on Apple. Opting for an iPad will not mean changing over their entire server infrastruc-ture – it might be worth mentioning that Apple recently got out of that game, with its Xserve line, completely. There is no question that being able to help employers like the government make their stakeholders happier will make such resellers more appreciated and influential over time. You’ll be who they call the next time Apple launches something big.

Being a “solution provider” doesn’t simply refer to handing a customer the products they ask for but someone who can solve unusual problems. In 2011 and beyond, I can guarantee you this is going to be one of them. |

“It’s unlikely in the extreme that the net neu-trality provision in the continuing resolution will make it through the Senate, and we have heard no indication that it would be used as a bargaining chip. Key Senate appropriators have expressed to us that they strongly oppose the measure. I would suggest that the FCC’s unilat-eral appropriation of jurisdiction over the Inter-net has given many members pause. It is fair to assume that sentiment carries over to the Senate as well.”

Kamilla KovacsCommunications directorMedia Access Project, an advocacy group in favour of strong net neutrality rules

“Terribly misguided! “Everything is on the table.”

Art BrodskyCommunications directorPublic Knowledge, another net neutrality supporter, who wouldn’t predict that the Sen-ate would kill it

“It’s certainly possible that in an effort to find a compromise that avoids a government shutdown, the cut-off of government funds will become a bargaining chip. And it is possible to envision a scenario in which the Senate Democrats ac-cede to the House cut-off, or vice versa. This is

only an early, and relatively minor, skirmish in a longer war.”

Randolph MayPresidentFree State Foundation, an anti-regulation think tank on net neutrality

“It’s useful for the House to make clear that it believes the FCC has overstepped its authority with the net neutrality rules, whether or not this provision makes it through. It very well could end up being used as a bargaining chip but I think it is unlikely to make it into the final budget.”

Tom LenardPresidentTechnology Policy Institute, another anti-regulation think tank and critic of net neu-trality rules

“Data is encrypted in a file system where it’s stored. Though stored encrypted, the data has to be processed by some application and if you’re processing that data it will be processed in that system unencrypted. Although data encryption is widely regarded as good protection for sensi-tive data — and may be required under regula-tions — attackers are probing the chinks in en-cryption’s armor to steal it. That’s done by taking advantage of the fact that to be processed, data

has to be unencrypted, and attackers go into memory and grab the crypto key and start fetch-ing the PII itself from memory. One interesting aspect about this attack is that the bad guys want to maintain the end-to-end encryption, too.”

Ed SkoudisSenior security consultantInGuardians on “pervasive memory scraping” and why is it considered to be among the most dangerous attack techniques likely to be used in coming the coming year

“That’s not bad. You’re going to spend $3 million on an MRI machine. If you look at how expen-sive hospital equipment is, cost is not the issue. So you’re in the $300,000 range. It’s quite pos-sible [to wait two hours] if you run it on your Power 750 at home. I’d bet there are some people who’d say, ‘heck, I can’t even get my doctor to call me back in two hours.’ I think it’s reasonable that larger hospital systems will have the bigger machines and smaller hospitals might settle for waiting a little longer for an answer.”

Tony PearsonMaster inventor and senior consultantIBM, about the Watson computer and who could afford it. The Power 750 server retails for $34,500. Thus; the 90 that make up Wat-son would cost about $3 million, Pearson added.

t h e y s a i D i t |

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com16

f e a t u r e r e p o r t

THE CLOUD JUGGERNAUTthe market opportunity is so cloudy in Canada that 14 service providers are offering channel partners cloud services right now

By lyNN GreINer

You know a technology is hot when even non-IT people are talking about it. And everyone is talking about the cloud.

They may not know quite what it is, or understand what it means for infrastructure or security, said Greg Myers, vice-president of marketing at Tech Data Canada, whose non-tech ski buddies were even talking cloud on the slopes, but they do understand that it’s about accessing applica-tions over the Internet.

“I think the marketplace is just generally more aware,” he said. “Everyone has had the experience of working with a new device that works with a new service. It’s the conver-gence of business standards and consumer taste (the iPad is the best example of that bridge from a communications and technology point of view between consumer and business life). People understand that the cloud likely makes things simpler.”

IDC Canada’s research director, infrastructure solutions, David Senf, agrees. “What in cloud is not hot?” he asked. “In the past year, we’ve seen the attitude towards the cloud move from pure skepticism. Today, it’s strategic. I’m amazed at how fast it has moved from ‘what the hell is that?’!”

It is, in fact, strategic enough that companies such as Ali-ant, Allstream, Amazon, Bell Canada, CGI, HP Canada, IBM Canada, IBM Global Services, MTS, Peer 1 Net-works, Q9 Networks, Rackspace, Savvis, and Telus are all dipping (or have dipped) their toes into the cloud servi-ces marketplace, according to a recent IDC Canada look at infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and the impact it will have on the Canadian outsourcing market, released to co-incide with IBM’s announcement of its cloud strategy and offerings. In fact, IDC thinks that IBM’s move will help make IaaS one of the top stories in Canadian technology for 2011.

Of course, “the cloud” isn’t only IaaS. Like its analogue in nature, it can have several manifestations. The definition is so cloudy that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a document for public comment that, while acknowledging that the understand-

ing of cloud is still evolving, lays out its thoughts on the subject.

NIST suggests this definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”

Besides the IaaS model, NIST names Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to round out its trio of service models, and Private, Community, Pub-lic and Hybrid as possible deployment models.

“There is no such thing as an all-encompassing cloud model,” agreed independent analyst Carmi Levy. “Compan-ies can’t simply jump into the cloud or throw their existing infrastructure into the cloud. There are huge risks associated with pursuing an all-hands strategy without first under-standing the far-reaching technology and business impact it will have, and cloud is about as impactful a technology evolution as we’ve had in recent memory.”

That opens up opportunities for partners who understand the technology, and both its impact and its potential, and who can advise their customers on sensible, cost-effective approaches to take.

And, notes Myers, it’s a major inflection point for the channel. It’s not only a new market; it marks a shift in ac-quisition patterns from capex-heavy purchases to a blended focus with more funding through operating expenses. In-stead of buying massive amounts of infrastructure, custom-ers will be asking for services that preserve the customer’s capital while ending up contributing more to the channel partner’s bottom line.

“I think resellers generally like the idea of recurring rev-enue streams as a result of selling subscription services with monthly billings,” he said. “The cloud is about to change the way companies acquire, leverage and maintain those neces-sary IT services for their employees.”

www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 17

However, he went on, there are challenges for partners who want to take this route. They first have to edu-cate customers on the benefits they can receive from introducing cloud-based delivery of IT services.

And customers may still regard the cloud with a certain amount of well justified suspicion. Senf compares to-day’s cloud to yesterday’s Service Ori-ented Architecture (SOA), which, he notes, “collapsed under the weight of its own standards.”

“That was a hybrid cloud,” he point-ed out. “But this time it’s supposed to work. I think we have enough things in place to make it work.”

Myers agrees, and thinks now that the traditional large vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are providing cloud offerings, both customers and resellers will be more kindly disposed toward the technology.

“I think there will be growth in channel interest when the services they get to resell come from world-class vendors like Microsoft,” he said. “Vendors need to prove to resellers that their intention is to drive more revenue to the channel through the deployment of services.”

WHAT’S HOTThe hottest services, according to cloud vendor Hosting.com, include business continuity and disaster re-covery. In its 2011 survey, The Current State of Cloud Computing, one in five respondents ranked business continu-ity and disaster recovery (BCDR) as their number one reason for moving to the cloud, and more than half rated it as one of their top three drivers. The survey reported that the cloud makes BCDR services accessible to more companies than ever, primarily due to the high availability inherent to the cloud and the ability to extend infra-structure across multiple service pro-vider data centres.

However, the report went on, this puts a burden on the service provid-ers. It said, “The top ranking of BCDR places a significant emphasis on cloud services companies to architect, plan and validate their ability to withstand outages, attacks and performance spikes. They must also develop cloud solutions that stretch across multiple data centres and seamlessly integrate with a client’s own data centre.”

“Shifting an application suite into

the cloud can rock IT’s world on a number of levels,” added Levy. “Aside from the day-to-day changes in ad-ministration and management, mis-sion critical workflow elements such as backups and DRP must be completely restructured.”

This may have an effect on internal staff, who may need to be retrained or rendered redundant.

With this in mind, Levy notes that an especially hot area of cloud com-puting revolves around organizational evolution and design, and what the cloud-enabled IT shop of tomorrow needs to look like to best take advan-tage of the cloud revolution. Partners who can develop this expertise will be in high demand.

Added Senf, “The top thing we hear from CIOs is that they have to ensure they have governance in place so they do the right thing now and in the fu-ture.”

And, he went on, IT needs to take control and have policies in place to help the business decide what should and should not be in the cloud.

Levy added, “Whatever the IT department ultimately looks like, it’s clear that what works in a complete-ly cloudless landscape will need to change radically as resources become more cloud- and virtual-friendly.”

While the channel can potentially fatten its bottom line offering services to assist customers in their cloud jour-ney (and perhaps even providing said clouds), Senf says that it’s not some-thing to just leap blindly into.

“The challenge in the marketplace is that every company wants to talk about cloud, but getting from that conversa-tion to a sale can be a protracted pro-cess if you don’t have a plan,” he said.

The good news, according to Host-ing.com, is that almost 90 per cent of companies that have moved into the cloud were satisfied or very satisfied with the services they’re receiving. The bad news: only just over a quarter were very satisfied, indicating significant room for improvement.

The survey also illustrated the up-and coming models for cloud usage. While, as one would expect, receiving on-demand computing resources was the top reason companies moved to the cloud, access to disaster recovery and backup ranked second.

Hosting.com pointed out that this is reflected both in the speed with

which cloud providers are moving into the BCDR arena, and in the new buzzwords such as recovery-as-a-ser-vice, cloud recovery and cloud-based disaster recovery that are emerging monthly. The report says, “Cloud-based BCDR presents companies with the opportunity to adopt BCDR solutions for their mission-critical ap-plications at a fraction of the cost of traditional BCDR offerings would cost to implement, maintain and test in a traditional model.”

WHAT’S NOTFinally, for smaller companies in par-ticular, cloud adoption was driven by the need to replace existing infrastruc-ture, and for almost half of large com-panies, the need to extend it.

For the time being, says Senf, to maximize revenue, partners who of-fer cloud infrastructure should keep services such as backup separate from the base hosting price. However, this model of acquiring additional recur-ring revenue will likely change with hyper-competition from major Amer-ican players moving into the Can-adian marketplace bundling services and undercutting prices. He also sees new tools that automate management presenting opportunities for partners who want to become hybrid cloud managers.

And, he pointed out, in the security space, SIs and VARs that did well were those with trusted advisor status with their customers. He advised, “Taking on that same mentality in the cloud, especially at this stage in the market-place, it’s important for channel part-ners to have trusted advisor status with their customers to ensure that what-ever way the customer moves, the part-ner will be the broker.”

The cloud may be the darling of the industry today, but it’s destined, like many other technologies, to descend to the mundane before long, accord-ing to IDC Canada. Mark Schrutt, director of services and enterprise ap-plications, said “We anticipate that in four to five years, cloud will no longer be hype or trendy, but a commonly ac-cepted component of an IT delivery strategy.”

Added Myers, “What started the decade a bit hazy, a year later is under-stood in more detail. I think by the end of the decade, the cloud will be per-vasive.” |

‘Shifting an application suite into the cloud can rock IT’s world on a number of levels.’— Independent analyst, Carmi levy

speCial RepoRt

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com18

Evaluating IT’s maturity levelInnovation Value Institute conference calls for global It accreditation

B y V a W N H I M M e l s B a C H

Being green makes for good PR, but businesses need to be commercially successful as well as environmentally responsible. The problem is, most CIOs don’t pay the energy bill in their facilities, and the facilities depart-ment doesn’t speak the same language as IT. And while progress is being made in pockets of organizations, it’s typically not being made across those organizations.

While many organizations have undertaken sustain-ability initiatives such as virtualization or videoconfer-encing, it can be difficult to manage and quantify bene-fits across the organization and provide input toward an overall strategic roadmap. That makes it difficult to measure — or optimize — the business value from their IT investments. CIOs have to take a leap of faith that there will be a payoff down the road.

This is one of the reasons behind the development of a global consortium, called the Innovation Value In-stitute (IVI), co-founded in 2006 by Intel, The Boston Consulting Group and National University of Ireland (NUI) Maynooth. The idea behind IVI is to provide tools and techniques for long-term process improve-ments by assessing where an organization is at, synthe-sizing that data and providing feedback. But it’s not a purely techno-centric approach; it’s also about change management with people and processes.

IVI has created an “open innovation” framework, called the IT-CMF (Capability Maturity Frame-work) to evaluate an organization’s IT maturity level, benchmark with industry peers and best practices, and identify a roadmap for improvement. The consortium is working toward creating a global accreditation stan-dard for IT management, and was recently contracted by the European Commission to develop a European-wide framework for ICT professionalism, with the goal of enhancing ICT practices across Europe, as well as a European Training Programme for ICT managers to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

adOPtION ratesAfter three years of research, IVI is now focused on adoption. To date, some 300 IT professionals from 20 countries have interacted with the IT-CMF; patron members include BP and Chevron. There are currently pilot adoptions in other countries with many financial services and high-tech firms on board.

“It’s great to do research and write some academic papers, but we’re trying to drive structural change,” said Martin Curley, director of Intel Labs Europe and IVI co-director, at IVI’s North American Summit held Compugen headquarters in Richmond Hill, Ont. “IT is going to be hugely important for sustainability, so we hope this will launch broader adoption in Canada and beyond.”

According to IVI, sustainable IT (or SICT) has the potential to realize savings of almost US$950 billion for global business by 2020, but left unchecked the rising

cost of energy could drive a 20 to 30 per cent increase in IT spend, equivalent to US$450 billion, over the next five years. But this isn’t just about saving money — the idea behind the framework is to help organizations

realize opportunities for new product development and new markets that a greener economy can bring.

At the summit, IVI announced the findings of a research study based on IT-CMF, undertaken by six multinational oil and gas companies. The research showed that companies with a higher IT-CMF matur-ity were 33 per cent more efficient than the peer average in overall IT spend and 44 per cent more efficient in IT infrastructure spend per supported user. In other words, higher IT-CMF maturity is correlated with lower on-going IT costs and increased business value. As a result, the CIOs who were involved in the research study have decided to continue their benchmarking work.

The objective of the research was to compare both qualitative and quantitative information so that com-panies could maximize the efficiency of their respective IT services (and was designed in such a way that no legal or competitive issues arose, since anti-trust looms large in the minds of many oil and gas executives).

“Despite initial mutual suspicion, trust was quickly formed and it worked very well,” said Andrew Scott, senior benchmarking project manager for Aupec in Scotland. The CIOs of the six firms developed a list of questions they wanted answered by the framework, such as how much of their investment spend is used for in-novation and what sourcing model works best.

“There are real structural differences in how these companies are choosing to run their IT, and there are choices they can make to differentiate themselves com-

petitively,” said Andrew Agerbak, principal with The Boston Consulting Group. “It’s very actionable. If you’re $40 million from the median spend, what are you doing in 2011 that will get you some of the way there?”

Other insights arose from the research. “We found rigorous control in getting money, but weakness in how that money gets tracked in real life — it’s only tracked for larger projects,” said Agerbak, adding there’s often a disconnect between benefits tracked in the lifecycle of projects, in innovation and sourcing.

NeW fraMeWOrKThe IVI believes this collaborative approach could be used in a variety of other industries. Here in Canada, the CIO Association of Canada is looking at the IVI framework and how it could add value to members, particularly those in smaller organizations, according to Dave Kodak, CIO of TD Bank. It’s early days, but there’s interest in the framework, and the association is looking for relevant examples they can highlight to members and to provide more education about what this means in a Canadian context. “The framework is complex, but in a good way,” he said. While currently the IVI has attracted large multinational firms, such as Microsoft, Intel and SAP, it insists the framework is just as relevant for smaller firms. The idea is that SMBs will also benefit from this approach. One such company is Mainstream Renewable Power, which develops wind and solar plants on land and at sea to help accelerate the transition away from coal, oil and other fossil fuels. The Dublin-based company has a portfolio of 5.5GW across Scotland, England and Germany, and is developing more than 6.5GW of onshore projects across Canada, the U.S., South Africa and Chile — with a staff of about 40 employees. “It’s not a question of if, but when,” said John Shaw, CIO of Mainstream Renewable Power, of the transition toward renewable power. Issues driving this transition include climate change, rising fossil fuel prices and the ever-increasing demand for energy.

The challenge is that there’s a dispersed understand-ing and implementation of sustainability initiatives around the world. “We need measures and metrics,” said Donnellan. “There’s a lack of knowledge and ex-pertise generally in our discipline for this topic,” and that means there are real challenges facing CIOs today.

“Many companies are struggling with this,” he said. “There are challenges around adoption of a common language for change management projects. Many get it in terms of the vision, but they’re having a hard time coming to grips with this. They have the right tech-nologies, but need organization-wide awareness and mindset-shift.”

The hope, according to IVI members, is that the framework will help organizations make that mindset-shift — and CIOs will see that profitability and sustain-ability can go hand-in-hand. |

www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 19

Case stuDy

Nortel users looking for choicesCustomers like Humber river regional Hospital face new challenges with legacy Nortel equipment

B y H O W a r d s O l O M O N

When Nortel Networks Inc.’s enterprise division was sold to Avaya Inc. just over a year ago, Toronto’s Humber River Regional Hospital was one of hundreds of organizations across the country with Nor-tel equipment that was worried: What’s the future of our phone system?

That’s one reason why Lynn Yurchuk, the hospital’s telecom-munications manager attended a panel on options for Nortel system owners at a telephony conference in Toronto.

There she and others in the audience heard an Avaya Can-ada Inc. official try to put their minds at ease, while a competi-tor hinted lots of Nortel cus-tomers were abandoning ship.

“Rest assured your invest-ments in existing [Nortel] plat-forms are still good,” said Amir Hameed, director of national solution specialists.

Avaya will allow Nortel cus-tomers to either upgrade their software to the latest versions or convert to Avaya’s Aura plat-form at their own pace, he said. Since Nortel and Aura products are Session Initiated Protocol (SIP)-based, changing plat-forms will be seamless, he said. There will be a one-year advance notice when production of Nor-tel products are to be ended, and support for them will be con-tinued for another six years.

But panelist David Hobbs, a senior solutions engineer with the Canadian division of ShorTel Inc., which makes uni-fied communications systems, wanted to make sure the audi-ence knew Nortel owners have a choice.

ShorTel’s telephony equip-ment runs on one software platform, he said, and is man-aged from a single Web-based interface. Asked by a moderator why Nortel customers switch to

Shortel, he replied, “simplicity” in operations and installation.

Partly caught in the middle was Andrew Judd, senior solu-tions engineer with Toronto-based Eclipse Technology Solu-tions Inc., a systems integrator which sells equipment from Avaya, Cisco Systems Inc. and Mitel Networks.

He pointed to advantages of all three manufacturers: Avaya has a standards-based architec-ture that integrates well with Nortel’s platforms and has one of the best contact centres; Cisco has a wide product range with unified communications baked into every one; and Mitel has tight integration with Re-search In Motion’s BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (MVS), which links the handset to many telephony systems.

There’s lots of life left in Nor-tel systems, Judd added. But, he said, some companies don’t want to merge into the Avaya system for a variety of reasons: Modern telephony systems are IP-based as are their data networks, so it can make sense to have identical telephony and network vendors; and some are looking for a “kill-er app” Avaya doesn’t have.

One thing panelists did agree on: Microsoft Corp.’s new Lync communications platform, which has replaced Office Com-munications Server, isn’t ready

to take over the entire corporate communications system.

In the end, Judd tried to give independent advice for all users: “Look at your business. What do you need? What’s the growth potential within your organiza-tion? Then pick the solution that best meets your needs.”

Integrated Voice That was the take away for Humber River hospital’s Lynn Yurchuk. She said she didn’t have concerns with Avaya’s purchase of Nortel’s enterprise division. But she admitted that others in the hospital aren’t sure whether they should abandon their Nortel Communications Server (CS) 1000 system for Avaya Aura or something new. A choice has to be made soon because the institution is pre-paring to build a new facility, merging three hospitals across the city into one. The first fully digital hospital will feature 656 patient beds, span 1.7 million square feet, and is capable of handling 130,000 ER visits; 450,000 ambulatory and diag-nostic visits; 40,000 surgeries; 17,000 oncology care treat-ments; 550 patients in dialysis treatment and about 5,000 new births per year. Construction on the new digital hospital is slated for November of this year with

a grand opening in 2014.The conference, which was

aptly named Know Your Al-ternatives, also had panels on how to assess managed and hosted telephony services, the benefits of SIP and competition in the industry.

At an opening panel, execu-tives of Mitel and Shortel also took pains to tell the audience their platforms are options for Nortel customers.

While Avaya has been careful in the past year to ease concerns of Nortel customers, at least one isn’t happy. A network staffer at an Ontario company at the con-ference said his firm isn’t happy that it can’t buy more licences for its Nortel CS 1000 system un-less it upgrades to a newer ver-sion of the operating system. “If we’re going to pay a half a mil-lion dollars we might was well look for alternatives,” he said. This staff member couldn’t be identified because his company hadn’t authorized him to speak to the press.

Told of the comment, Avaya’s Hameed said in an interview the customer is running a version of software that was unsupported when Avaya bought Nortel, so it can’t sell more licences. Av-aya has made it clear that it will support CS 1000 Release 5.0 and above, he said. “That being said, we’re committed to making our customers happy,” Hameed added, and welcomed an oppor-tunity to talk to the customer.

Luc Babineau, a telecom-munications consultant with Integrated Voice Services Inc. of Aurora, Ont., who was at the conference, said there was a lot of uncertainty among Nortel customers after Avaya’s Nortel deal. However, he added, Avaya has done a good job of reassur-ing them. One the other hand, he added, it has opened some customers to thinking about changing suppliers. |

Humber River regional hospital will open in 2014 as the first all-digital facility in Canada

| t R e n D s

PC shipments risetOrONtO – The Canadian Cli-ent PC market continued to ex-perience positive growth, with unit shipments up 5.6 per cent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2010. According to the IdC, total shipments for 4Q10 reached 1,807,034 units. Canada fared slightly better in the fourth quarter than the overall worldwide growth of 3.4 per cent year over year.

While 2010 was a year marked by rapidly changing dy-namics, new product offerings, and a still cautious economic climate, the overall Canadian market grew by 12.7 per cent over 2009.

Portable PC market per-formance was slightly better than forecasted, growing 2.9 per cent year over year on 1,196,342 units in the fourth quarter. desktop PC shipments came in lower than expected, with 610,692 units in total for the quarter and up 11.4 per cent over the same period last year.

HP built on its lead position with a 28.2 per cent unit share Acer maintained second place overall with 19.1 per cent, and dell rounded out the top three.

BI growing againBOstON – The worldwide market for business intelligence (bI) software is forecast to grow 9.7 per cent to reach uS$10.8 billion in 2011, ac-cording to Gartner. Growth is expected to slow slightly over the forecast period to 2014.

Gartner’s view is that the market for bI platforms will remain one of the fastest grow-ing software markets despite sluggish economic growth in most regions. organizations continue to turn to bI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile and efficient business.

bI ranked number five on the list of the top 10 technology priorities for chief information officers (CIos) in 2011, accord-ing to Gartner’s annual global CIo survey. |

B y P a O l O d e l N I B l e t t O

Computer cables can generate more than triple the acquisition costs for solution providers.

Dave Walsh, the former In-gram Micro and Blue Range Technology senior executive, said resellers average more than 25 per cent margins from cables and that some others make more than 50 points. Walsh, who was just appointed country manager for Dayton, Ohio-based Cables To Go, a computer, data-communi-cations and AV connectivity manufacturer, said the chal-lenge he has is to educate the VAR community that cables shouldn’t be an afterthought

when putting together a IT solution for customers.

Cables To Go is a division of Lastar Inc., established in 1984. The company has been push-ing the development of cables into key growth markets such as healthcare and education. Walsh’s mandate is to create new markets for Cables To Go in the healthcare and education space, along with digital sign-age.

“There are markets we haven’t touched like digital home, pro AV and system integrators,” he said.

Another area Walsh wants to build is Cables To Go’s inven-tory is in Canada, and he said

he’ll be working with the top distributors in Canada on this. He’ll also set targets for resellers and drive demand generation through new marketing efforts.

Walsh added he intends to streamline claim forms for the channel.

He plans to work on the company’s channel network to grow it and to push it towards the healthcare and education verticals.

“Healthcare is a $3.3 billion dollar opportunity with 18 per cent of it in just hardware. One to two per cent of that 18 per cent is in cabling. That’s a six to 12 million (dollar) opportunity,” Walsh said.

Cables To Go has developed RapidRun, a branded cabling system specific for healthcare. RapidRun is also ideal for the connected classroom, confer-ence rooms, home theatres, video displays and other in-wall applications. The cabling system dramatically reduces the likelihood of return to ser-vice calls due to faulty field ter-minations.

RapidRun has signal types that support runner cables, VGA, composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI and DVI.

But that’s just one solution from Cables To Go, which sports more than 6,000 differ-ent products.

What also differentiates Cables To Go is that they will build custom configured cables for special installations, Walsh said. |

maRkets

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com20

| v a R b i t s

Dell puts its eggs in the workforce/lifestyle basketNew desktops, laptops, a tablet and workstations coming soon

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

During a Webinar hosted by Dell Computer, executives un-veiled new desktops, laptops, a tablet and workstation PCs to suit the changing needs of to-day’s evolving workforce and lifestyles.

Kirk Schell, executive dir-ector for Dell’s commercial client product group, said the new form factors and design improvements were made to the company’s Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision lines to better meet the needs of an evolving workforce.

“The workplace is changing,” Schell said. “Gartner says con-sumerization of IT will make

the biggest impact on enterprise IT in the next decade. IDC says one-third of the world’s work-force will be mobile by 2013.”

Dell’s Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision solutions now provide users with a more “powerful, se-cure and manageable” offering, Schell said.

The entire Latitude E-Family of products have been refreshed to include more than 100 de-sign improvements that were designed from the ground up, Schell said.

The Latitude E5420 and E5520 laptops target profes-sional-user customers who are looking for a budget-friendly solution that addresses mobility and desk computing needs.

The Latitude E6220, E6320, E6420 and E6520 ATG rugged laptops are designed to work in the most demanding of condi-tions thanks to a magnesium box frame chassis design and highly

durable displays, David Lord, the director of Dell’s commer-cial client product group said.

“The Latitude ATG systems work under any circumstances and come with an integrated removable port cover for dust control, a detachable handle for on-the-go dependability and ruggedized bedliner paint,” Lord said.

In an effort to make these laptops easier to manage within organizations, Lord said the Latitude’s 26 product models all share the same one dock, battery and keyboard footprint, in addition to having a backlit keyboard option.

Dell’s OptiPlex products include the 990, 790 and 390 desktop models and are avail-able in more chassis options and also feature new Intel vPro pro-cessor technology, in addition to new graphics and memory.

The Dell Precision work-

stations are designed for high performance use and are high-ly scalable. The Dell Preci-sion T1600 is a single-socket, entry-level workstation that’s designed for both 2D and 3D applications.

To help meet security needs, the Dell business computing solutions also comes with Dell’s Data Protection Encryption software, which executives say is a flexible, manageable and auditable endpoint encryption solution that simplifies data protection.

The Dell Latitude E5000 ser-ies starts at US$859, the Opti-Plex 390 at US$650 and the Precision T1600 workstation at US$840.

Lord also said the company will introduce a 10-inch Win-dows 7-compatible tablet later this year that targets business users. The Windows tablet will be called the XT3. |

There’s big money in cablesCables to Go appoints It channel veteran to build its business in Canada

HP pushes tablet releasePalO altO, CalIf. – Hewlett-Packard is reportedly trying to disrupt the upcoming wave of Android 3.0 tablets by plan-ning to launch its WeboS 3.0 TouchPad earlier than expect-ed. HP’s Web site still says the 9.7-inch tablet should arrive this summer, but a DigiTimes report says the TouchPad could arrive as early as late March.

HP is gunning for the iPad directly,but Apple’s tablet won’t be the only competi-tor by the time HP comes to market. Motorola is planning to launch the Xoom, while Sam-sung and Toshiba have similar plans.

lenovo tablet out in JunetOrONtO – lenovo plans to release its tablet the lePad this June.

lenovo also announced the first ThinkPad laptops running Intel’s latest Sandy bridge chips, which help make the PCs faster and more power-efficient than older models.

The company’s new Think-Pad T, l and W laptops run on Intel’s latest Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, which were of-ficially announced earlier this year. The power-efficiency fea-tures on Intel’s Sandy bridge chips, combined with lenovo’s new power-saving features, have helped prolong battery life on the new laptops.

facebook phones are comingBarCelONa, sPaIN – Mark Zuckerberg’s been saying it all along: There is no Facebook phone.

but this year, there will be dozens of phones like HTC’s ChaCha and Salsa, which focus on Facebook with dedicated buttons for the social network.

Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, clarified the Facebook phone strategy in a recorded video statement, presented during HTC’s press conference at the Mobile World Congress in barcelona. |

New network security vendor tries old selling modelPalo alto Networks enters Canadian market with a new/old channel approachB y P a O l O d e l N I B l e t t O

The first thing that executives from Palo Alto Networks want Canadian resellers to know is that they’re not a knock-off product vendor.

While the company says it competes with networking powers such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, it isn’t quite sure where given Palo Alto’s product line. It isn’t sure if it competes with CheckPoint, even though they come across each other during competitive bids.

But it doesn’t seem to matter for the newbie to the Canadian market because they believe the company, founded just a few short years ago by executives from the three above mentioned companies, that Palo Alto Net-works can play in the $6 billion-plus network security space.

As a new company all of its business is done through the channel. The opportunity for Canadian solution providers,

according to Mike Haro of Palo Alto, is in solution providers who have strong expertise in storage and in applications areas such as CRM.

“All those players have a dir-ect influence on network secur-ity and would want to partner with a very channel friendly supplier,” he said.

Palo Alto’s products are next generation which integrate firewall and IPS as opposed to using additional component such as blades to consolidate functionality, Haro said.

Haro said these next genera-tion firewall tasks go beyond just blocking, but keeping massive amounts of applications safe and protecting them from mal-ware. It also prevents data from leaking out via applications.

The product also is driven by policy of apps and users and not on ports or protocols.

“We look at all traffic and identify it and shape it in a cer-tain way. For example, if two people work for TD Canada Trust and one is an analyst, while the other is a sales guy I can permit one to do certain things on Facebook and not the other because of compliance

risks,” he said. Even the company’s go-to

-market strategy is different as it doesn’t charge by the number of seats or users, but instead, opts for the age-old method of sell-ing the product itself.

Palo Alto structures its pricing by the box, typically between $70,000 and $80,000, depending on the amount of gigabytes. In that box Palo Alto integrates several solutions such as threat management, IPS and anti-virus that are usually sold separately.

“This consolidates lots of technology and there is no seat-based pricing,” he said.

About 60 per cent of that price is for the hardware, while the rest is a subscription.

Channel compensation is as follows: in year one chan-nel partners can expect to earn between 35 to 40 per cent mar-gin off the subscriptions. This means channel partners will get paid each year of a three to four year deal, he said.

The price for the product has been set to be lower than a collection of solutions from multiple competitors would be. This approach has yielded book-ings of more than $100 million in just under three years, mak-ing Palo Alto cash flow positive. They’ve also received interest from venture capital powers Greylock and Sequoia, which backed Facebook.

With its 100 per cent indirect selling model the company has

forged two-tier distribution partnerships with Westcon and upstart German-based VAD ComputerLink.

Through distribution, Palo Alto is looking for Canadian partners who are security spe-cialists. They currently have 170 resellers in North America.

“We don’t push boxes and we don’t want resellers to do that either. They should run the business and services and sup-port for customers.

Palo Alto will not do any professional services and want the channel to eventually do first and second line support,” he added.

GlobalProtectThe company also announced the general availability of Glob-alProtect, a new PA-5000 series priced at $40,000.

This software and hardware combination addresses current security demands in three ways.

GlobalProtect secures users and data regardless of location.

It can sustain 20Gbps of next generation firewall perform-ance in the data centre and can eliminate network traffic blind spots. |

Symantec promises to speed up securityUpcoming endpoint Protection 12 product is available for small businesses and the enterprise

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

Symantec announced the up-coming release of its Endpoint Protection 12 product as the company works to bring faster protection, more effectiveness and simplicity to the security market.

Blake McConnell, senior manager of product manage-ment, SMB security solutions at Symantec, said the Endpoint Protection Small Business Edi-tion 12.1 solution meets three key needs of small businesses: speed, simplicity and effective-ness.

“Endpoint Protection of-fers fastest performance around things like boot time, mem-ory utilization and application

launch time,” McConnell said.Since the solution is pow-

ered by Symantec’s Insight and Sonar technologies, Endpoint Protection 12 has the ability to “stop malware that hasn’t been seen before” in addition to being able to look at different process-es for abnormalities, McConnell explained.

“Insight is an enabling tech-nology that provides proactive protection against mutat-ing threats or malware that’s changing,” McConnell said. “Insight puts files into context using their age, frequency, loca-tion, etc. to expose threats that are otherwise missed. Sonar technology monitors 400 dif-ferent application behaviours to

enable faster scans.”Randy Cochran, senior vice-

president, channel sales for the Americas at Symantec, said that while Insight technology is new to Symantec’s Endpoint Protec-tion product family, it’s not new to its Norton family of products, which target consumers.

“We’ve had this technology out for four years and we’re now putting it in a commercial vehicle to push it out to our small, medium and large cus-tomers,” Cochran said.

Symantec Endpoint Protec-tion Small Business Edition is compatible with both Windows and Mac environments and the enterprise version of the prod-uct is available for Windows,

Mac and Linux environments.One of the main differences

between the Small Business Edition and the enterprise edi-tion is around custom configur-ability and the availability of ad-vanced features like application control, McConnell said.

Symantec Endpoint Protec-tion Small Business Edition also features pre-configured policy settings and automated notifications and reports.

“We know that especially with our small business cus-tomers, they want a solution that works,” Cochran said. “They also want a solution that’s simple to use and this offering meets these criteria. The product is easy to deploy in as little as 20

minutes.”Symantec Endpoint Protec-

tion 12 Small Business Edi-tion is designed for companies between five and 99 employees and the enterprise offering is designed for organizations of 100 or more employees.

A private beta is taking place now for Endpoint Protection 12 and a public beta is scheduled for April, with general availabil-ity set for summer 2011. |

A view of Palo Alto’s Policy Editor for next generation firewall tasks.

www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 21

pRofile

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com22

| p e o p l e

Electronic signature service solution wins Beacon recognition from IBMMontreal’s silanis technology was the only Canadian winner of a Beacon award at IBM’s PartnerWorld leadership conference

B y J e f f J e d r a s

A solution to help the insurance industry manage electronic sig-natures and documents won Montreal’s Silanis Technologies a Beacon Award at IBM Corp.’s recent partner conference in Orlando, the only Canadian company to be so honoured.

While the company is based in Montreal, it actually does the bulk of it business outside of Canada, according to president and co-founder Tommy Petro-giannis. About 90 per cent of their revenue comes from the U.S., and Petrogiannis said they do more business in Australia, the UK and South Africa than they do in Canada.

It was in Canada that the company got its start though, thanks to a contract with the Government of Ontario. In 1992 it was thought that pen-based computing was going to change the world, said Petro-giannis, and that first contract revolved around electronic signatures and a custom-built solution to get e-signatures for engineering project changes to speed up the approvals process.

That solution was built into a business, and through the 1990s Petrogiannis said most Silanis customers were focused on internal e-paper processing. Silanis was viewed as comple-mentary to form solution pro-viders such as JetForm.

“We could automate their forms instead of returning to paper for the signing aspect,” said Petrogiannis. “We’re the

last mile to enable end-to-end transactions to take place.”

The big break for Silanis came in 1996 when the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff standardized on the Silanis of-fering worldwide. That opened the Department of Defence floodgates, said Petrogiannis.

Also key a short while later was the adoption of e-signing laws that gave e-sig-natures legal equiva-lence to written paper signatures.

“We started at-tacking the insurance and banking industries for outward-facing processes like loans,” said Petrogiannis.

Most of their revenue comes from the insurance and banking verticals, focusing on the large Fortune 500 players in each space. These companies are do-ing massive enterprise overhauls and, while you can’t get rid of paper entirely, Petrogiannis said that “last mile of true e-process-ing” is happening now.

“There’s tremendous ROI,” said Petrogiannis. “If a consum-er can go online, get a quote, get a credit score, and get approved for a loan, they don’t want to wait for a package to come in the mail. We’ve seen close times cut from seven to 14 days down to the same day, and that’s mas-sive. You don’t have that churn at the front-end.”

An electronic process also re-duces errors, noted Petrogiannis, as the system won’t let you miss a signature, sign in the wrong place or forget to fill in data.

The Beacon Award win for Silanis, in the category of best insurance industry solution, was for a solution that addresses the evolving multi-platform nature of business today. Customers want to have the same experi-

ence whether they work with an agent, on the phone or online, and backend processes need to be integrated to make that hap-pen.

“It’s not just signing. Our engine executes the whole pro-

cess, controlling who sees what when, and making sure the steps are done,” said Petro-giannis.

Another big trend is mobility, said Petr-ogiannis. BMW has gone from laptops with signature cap-ture tablets to iPads

for lease buybacks, allowing cus-tomer sign-off on the spot.

“That whole mobility wave us starting to happen now across the boards, and we’re seeing that wave ripple across all banks,” said Petrogiannis.

In addition to mobility, ana-lytics is also a major focus area for Silanis. Petrogiannis calls analytics a “treasure trove” for a legal and compliance perspective.

Send out paper and it goes into a black hold, but with elec-tronic processes you can see trends, regional data, seasonal patterns and other aggregate in-formation.

“We’ll be able to leverage on-premise and cloud offerings to deliver analytics solutions, which I think will be the next big wave,” said Petrogiannis. “It will be the way to do business to be successful, and we’re in-vesting heavily.”

Their relationship as an IBM partner goes back to 2005, when they teamed-up for a U.S. Army implementation that took Lotus Forms (then PureEdge) and IBM Enterprise Content Man-agement and integrated it with the Silanis e-signature solution to design an army-wide travel requisition system.

Today, Silanis is an IBM

Value Net Partner supporting Websphere, Forms and ECM. Becoming an IBM partner makes sense, said Petrogiannis, because most of their customers are also IBM customers. Most banks, for example, are using Websphere and Lotus Forms. Silanis is also keen to jump on the “Lotus Live” bandwagon, said Petrogiannis.

“Lotus Live was the first true collaboration vision I saw that made sense to me from a busi-ness point of view; it’s social networking with business con-trols” said Petrogiannis. “So we took our core technology, put it up on the cloud, and coupled it tightly with Lotus Live for e-SignLive.”

Silanis uses the offering itself internally to do revisions and collaborate online, and Petro-giannis said it may be the solu-tion that will allow Silanis to scale down more into the mid-market.

“The SMB market is trying to be competitive with the big guys, and this lets us attack the mid-market in a much more cost-effective way,” said Petro-giannis. “It’s opening up new ground.” |

a change at the top of avnetPHOeNIX, arIz. – roy Vallee, the long time CEo of Avnet, will be stepping down from his post for rick Hamada this summer. Vallee will continue with the company as executive chairman.

Hamada, 53, will take over from Vallee on American Inde-pendence day (July 4, 2011), concurrent with the beginning of Avnet’s new fiscal year. Hamada currently serves as president and Coo.

These moves are a culmi-nation of a multi-year CEo succession planning process, according to the company based in Phoenix, Ariz.

Hamada has been with Avnet since 1983. He started his career with Avnet as a technical support specialist and rose through the ranks to take on key leadership responsi-bilities in sales, marketing, and business development.

More changes at avnetPHOeNIX, arIz. – In an effort to drive long-term strategies and support succession plan-ning, Avnet Technology Solu-tions, recently made a number of executive changes. The distributor promoted Cheryl neal to vice-president of marketing for the u.S. and Canada. rick Alvarez now leads a newly created team to be known as sales acceleration.

Fred Cuen has had his responsibilities expanded to include the Canadian team. This was a role previously held by Alvarez.

Scott look has been pro-moted to vice-president and general manager of ATS’ Tech-nology Infrastructure Solutions business.

Gavin Miller is in charge of the Solutions Marketing and development team.

Tony Vottima now leads the HP Solutions team, while ni-cole Enright leads the Strategy development and Execution team.

s I l a N I s t e C H N O l O G y I N C .

ESTAblISHEd: 1992

HEAdQuArTErEd: Montreal, Quebec

MArKET: E-signature solutions to insurance, financial services, government agencies, and service providers

PArTnErSHIPS: IbM Advanced business Partner since 2005

noTEAblE CuSToMErS: u.S Army, 21st Century, liberty Mutual, national Indemnity, blueFrog

Tommy Petrogiannis

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Symantec updates Norton 360 security suiteNorton 360 version 5 offers users faster performance and more powerful protection

B y M a X I N e C H e U N G

Symantec Corp. has released the latest version of its norton 360 all-in-one security suite, promising consumers improved backup and faster restore performance.

Jordan blake, product manager for norton 360 at Symantec, said norton 360 version 5.0 features Insight, which is a reputation-based security technology and can also be found in Symantec’s Endpoint Protection 12 secu-rity solution offering.

In version 5, Symantec has added the norton Secured security badge, which is an image that shows up in search results to notify users on whether or not a specific Web site has been tested and authenticated by Symantec and deemed to be safe, even before they click on the link.

“The norton Secured security badge is the first level of integration (as a result of the) VeriSign (acquisition) into Symantec Safe Web,” blake said.

other enhancements in version 5 include improved backup performance, restore performance and reduced system impact, blake said.

The suite also has performance alerts and proactive messaging which can profile all of the applications on a user’s computer so they can see if a program is slowing them down. The alerts can also notify users when a pro-gram is “hogging” system resources.

The user interface also provides users with quick access to online services such as norton Safe Web, norton online Family and norton Cybercrime index.

“Version 5 also has double-digit improvements in speed of backup and restore features,” blake said. “In version 4, backup time in seconds was 204. In version 5, it’s 166 seconds, a 18.63 per cent improvement increase. restore time in version 4 was 197 seconds and version 5 is 177 seconds, so that’s a 10.15 per cent improvement increase.”

norton 360 version 5 is now available and can be installed on up to three PCs.

The suggested Canadian retail pricing for the product is $89.99 for the standard edition, which comes with 2Gb of online storage space.

A premium edition of the suite is also available and comes with 25Gb of online storage space. |

Hands on with the HP TouchPadWe get our hands (briefly) on the HP touchPad

B y M a r K H a t t e r s l e y

HP is rightly proud of its TouchPad, the large screen offer-ing based upon Palm’s critically acclaimed, but commer-cially underwhelming, WeboS operating system first seen in the Palm Pre.

Getting a hands-on test with the HP TouchPad is some-thing of an achievement in itself. on the show floor at CES HP was adamant that nobody is allowed to touch the TouchPad, instead they can only watch demonstrations performed by experts.

While this doesn’t bode particularly well for the devel-opment status (hands-off is a sure sign that things aren’t finished), behind closed doors we managed to get a brief amount of hands-on time along with a good discussion with HP’s Sachin Kansal, director of software manage-ment. Kansal worked on the original Palm Pre project and is now working with HP, to talk about the TouchPad and its place in the market.

First, the good news. It’s obvious that this is by far the most interesting of all the tablets on display, at least judg-ing by the crowds of people gathered round taking photos and video from all angles.

unlike the blackberry Playbook and Samsung Galaxy Tab, the HP TouchPad has a 9.7in display (although it’s somewhat smaller than the 10in Motorola Xoom). It is, however, in the same aspect ratio as the iPad, which we prefer on a tablet device to the widescreen format being used by Android tablets.

Inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2GHz CPu versus

the iPads 1GHz A4, although how this will compare to the Motorola Xoom with its GHz Tegra 2 dual-core processor remains to be seen. Performance - insofar as we could tell - was fine.

The case is stylish, and it has a slightly curved exterior that means it faces slightly towards you when placed on a flat surface.

The interface is suitably snazzy and responded quickly to all touches. Instead of displaying a home screen with icons it has a coverflow-style area displaying open docu-ments. HP seem particularly proud of the device’s ability to multi-task more effectively than the iPad. In e-mail, in particular, you can write multiple messages at the same time, switching between different drafts; each appears in a stack on the display when you press the home button.

As with the Palm Pre, the display is somewhat different than the iPad, displaying a preview of application windows and documents that you swipe left and right between.

like WeboS on the Palm Pre it still has a weird (to our minds) interface element where a circle flashes on the screen to let you know where your finger has just pressed. We’re not quite sure why this is necessary - certainly none of the other pads seem to feature it.

one key advantage to WeboS is the way it enables you to tap directly into your online services (hence the name). Photos, for example, aren’t just the ones on the device but also ones on your Flickr account, and other cloud services; the same goes for contacts and Facebook and Twitter. Ev-erything is integrated seamlessly into the operating system

so it all works from the same place. Again, how well this works is something that will need to be tested thoroughly on launch.

WeboS was certainly a big “wow” factor in the original Palm Pre though, and the big question is whether it’ll work commer-cially this time around.

like the iPad there is a fixed-in battery, although there is no information yet regarding battery life.

“I think it’s fair to say that the original Pre met with considerable critical acclaim” said Kansal, “but what’s dif-ferent this time around is HP’s scale and resources.”

HP has a lot of clout in the market, from supply to dis-tribution, and is especially large on a global market. Palm was integrated into HPs mobile division and now Palm, or rather HP, hopes that this increased muscle will help it drive the TouchPad into getting wider market share.

on the whole the HP TouchPad is probably the most interesting of all the tablet devices being demonstrated at MWC, whether that will translate into the most sales later in the year is debatable (we remember the massive interest from journalists and analysts in the Palm Pre - this turned into very few sales to the general public as the iPhone and Android cleaned). |

www.computerdealernews.com | CDn | March 2011 25

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April 27, 2011CDN TOP 100Woodbridge, Ont.Paramount Conference & Event venuewww.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/CDN/top100/GalaDetails.asp

May 3 - 6, 2011RED HAT SUMMIT AND JBOSS WORLDBostonSeaport Hotel & World Trade Centerwww.redhat.com/summit

May 8 - 12, 2011NETSUITE SUITEWORLD 2011San franciscoMarriott Marquis Hotelwww.netsuite.com/portal/press/events/suiteworld/main.shtml

July 10 - 14, 2011MICROSOfT PARTNER CONfERENCELos Angelespartner.microsoft.com

B y P a O l O d e l N I B l e t t O

According to NPD Group, Kaspersky Lab grew 165 per cent in retail in North America in 2010, better than any other security vendor in the market place.

Kaspersky has rode the wave of Internet Secur-ity popularity among consumers and home-based business users. That wasn’t exactly the way Oren-berg drew it up on the ole drawing board when he started at the company. But for a company that’s battling the 800-pound gorillas known as Symantec and McAfee; Orenberg will take it.

The next step in Kaspersky’s growth plan is to establish itself in the enterprise and SMB markets. That, Orenberg told CDN, was the original plan of attack. Retail was just to build brand awareness, he said. Orenberg sat down with CDN at its Americas Partners Conference in Cancun, Mexico to discuss Kaspersky’s enterprise action plan and how it fits into the Canadian market.

The following is an edited transcript.

CdN: last time we spoke you talked about a direction for the company that was corporate and enterprise heavy. You were looking for a more longer-lasting customer than those at retail, where you could fall at the whim to the ever-changing minds of the north American consumer. Where are you with that plan?

steve Orenberg: We are happy with our first suc-cess and we’ve been around for a few years (since 2005). We’re now able to track the customers whose licenses are up for renewal and we have great re-newal rates. Not all of our customers will be with us, but we expect a very high rate of return. Those not continuing with the product have either gone out of business or have been acquired. So we’ll have a great retention rate. Year-in and year-out new business will be in the mid-double digits in growth, which is really good considering the poor economy. We’re also going after the corporate market. On the SMB side of things there are a lot of companies that we found are in the five-person office that really don’t have an IT staff. Offices in insurance, legal, a doc-tor’s office would often buy 10 single versions at re-tail and install it themselves and just run with the issues. We’re launching KSOS and that will be sold exclusively through the channel. The demand we have now because of retail in SMB and enterprise is not insignificant. KSOS is a B2B product and it will address this niche and it also opens up more opportunity for us in the enterprise.

CdN: What will be your approach to managed services with channel partners who have already established a practice and those who are putting the finishing touches on their managed services offerings?

s.O.: We’re trying to listen and see what they want from us. The initiative we announced here is new for us and these partners who already selling it understand the space and have customers. We need to listen to the partner and that’s something Kaspersky should be doing. Our managed services offering is very new and a small number of partners are piloting it. This is going to be part of what we do with managed services. It will be offered to our Gold, Silver and Platinum partners and we hope to get them trained and enrolled. There will be edu-cation sessions for the partners so they can better understand what we’re offering. I hope to see some traction in the next few quarters.

CdN: When you look at the market in north America, is SMb the real opportunity for growth in Canada? We always talk in Canada about the million plus businesses that have more than 10 employees and are under 100 employees in this market.

s.O.: The reality of the situation is to take the avail-able market that’s out there. If you consider 500 em-ployee or less to be SMB, then they have different issues and as a vendor you have to look at the total market. A company with 10 employees is going to have different issues than one with 500 employees or a large enterprise. You have to address both and we’ve won a few deals this way. You might not have the bandwidth to get all those deals as opposed to the SMB so we rely heavily on the channel. We have a dedicated staff and their whole focus is SMB. We’re qualifying more leads than ever before in the SMB.

CdN: Your distribution strategy of basically not being over distributed is working well with local channel partners, but how will you have obtain the growth numbers you want in a limited partnership strategy?

s.O.: Not quite the same when you talk about a limited partnership and not being over distributed. There’s a difference. I sometimes scratch my head when a company in our space puts out a press re-

lease and talks about how committed they are to the channel and that part of their strategy of devotion is to sign up 5,000 new partners. To me that’s counter intuitive. Do we have enough partners? No, we don’t and we’re going to get some new partners in verti-cals and those who specialize in virtualization, for example. Certainly we want to increase our partner network in geographic areas, verticals and the pri-vate and public sector. We have a ways to go, but the idea is not to look at a Google map in, lets say, Chi-cago, or any other city, and try to find the Kaspersky private sector reseller in a two block area. You’re not going to see 17 push pins on our map. We do have some goals for this year and our Platinum partners, our top partners we’d like to bring in 40 to 50 more partners over the course of the year. Clearly we won’t do this all at once; maybe four to five a month. Quite frankly, it’s a situation of over recruiting and you can’t support all partners in that model. You can’t train them well and it’s hard to engage with them. I believe in enabling one partner, make him or her strong with tools, training and support. Then collab-orate with them. You get more results that way than putting four new partners with no proper training against that one in a local market. |

Close-up

The Enterprise Mansteve Orenberg was Kaspersky lab’s first employee in the americas and in his six years at the helm has made the russian-based security vendor a recognized brand

s t e V e O r e N B e r G P r e s I d e N t K a s P e r s K y l a B a M e r I C a s

FAVourITE booK: Catch-22

FAVourITE lEISurE-TIME ACTIVITY: Trying to play golf

FAVourITE TrAVEl dESTInATIon: Maui

FAVourITE ATHlETE: bobby orr

AlMA MATEr:Emerson College

PErSon MoST AdMIrEd:Jacob, my maternal grandfather

March 2011 | CDn | www.computerdealernews.com26

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