November 2010 Archives

Here's Peter Dickson. You've never heard of him, but you'll know his voice

More evidence has emerged that the IT industry is being colonised by the rival showbusiness sector.

Previously, this column reported how Simon Cowell's brother, Whatshisname, has launched aggressively into the storage sector with Livedrive. Next it emerged that legendary showbiz agent Clive Rich has thrown his hat into the ring, entering the software development industry with an iPhone app, Close my Deal.

That's two showbiz types who've infiltrated the IT industry. Coincidence? I thought so too. Until last night, that is. 

Last night a third X Factor associate, Peter Dickson, threw his hat into the ring. Now a pattern seems to be emerging. 

Dickson might not look familiar, but you'd soon recognise his stentorian voice, which booms out to announce every act on The X Factor. In fact, his voice appears in a lot of places. He even won a BAFTA for his voiceover work.
Dickson has announced his intention to disrupt the telecoms industry. 

Details of the product are under embargo, so I can't tell you anything. Except that he's involved, somehow, in a company called Iovox. This telecoms start up has created some sort of software platform that allows anyone to create their own voice applications. Telephony has been static for years, but Iovox apparently, intends to breathe new life into the old dinosaur. They've called it Voice as a Service. (Blimey, whose idea was that?!)

Reporting restrictions mean I'm not allowed to describe how Iovox has created a sort of world wide web for the telephone systems.

So I can't tell you about how anyone can create clever apps for business now. It sounds like the only constraint for using Iovox will be your imagination - and your understanding of business.

News International, for example, used Iovox to create a number they could put in newspaper ads. It enabled them to give away advertising space free to clients, as long as they paid commission on each call generated. Iovox creates a phone number, which somehow generates all kinds of meta data associated with a phone call. Such as who called, when, how long, why etc. This enables any business to audit phone calls and see how successful their phone communications are.

In other words, they're making print advertising as sophisticated and accountable as online marketing.

Iovox could save the printed word. 

But we're not allowed to talk about it yet. In fact, there's loads of other stuff we could talk about. (Work with Gumtree and Zoopla, for example.) This would be a great business for a comms dealer or voice reseller to get into. Instead of just selling minutes or installing PBXs (where the margins are fast disappearing) this platform gives you the chance ot create new business streams for clients. Which makes them happy to get the company cheque book out.

But we can't talk about it until next week.

What we can say, in full confidence, is that the showbiz people are muscling in on the IT industry.

Here's Clive Rich, a legendary showbiz agent who has never lost out in any negotiation. Now he wants to empower IT salesmen  

Clive Rich is probably the first man who could negotiate his way into heaven and get a camel through the eye of a needle.
Now he wants to share the secrets of his success with you. For just £2.99 iPhone users can buy his new killer app Close My Deal, a portable confidence boosting toolkit for anyone involved in deal making and negotiating.
Sales skills are rarely taught and they're not exactly a laugh a minute when they do materialise. Clive Rich can offer a wider perspective on this universal skill. His experience comes from 25 years in one of the most cut throat businesses there is - the entertainment industry. It's not unknown for promoters to dangle rivals out of windows in order to clinch an agreement.
Rich has worked with Simon Cowell, Sony, My Space and The Royal Opera House to develop an App which could help you get more of what you want when making business deals, selling your car or even buying a house.
Close My Deal, he promises, comes with six 'killer' features:
•       a profiler to chart your personal negotiating style
•       a how to win step-by-step guide to developing professional negotiating skills;
•       a tough guy emergency service for combating bully boys and stop them in their tracks; a game plan to help you take control and get a better win;
•       a practical coach/ problem solving tool for showing you why negotiations go wrong;
•       a 'who holds the aces' tool to help you analyse the balance of negotiating power so you can play to win.
 "We all negotiate all the time these days. This app will help you make deals happen and win on your terms," says Rich.
http://www.cliverich.com/about/

Does your vendor like to cheat on you or dress in reseller's clothes? Tell our problem lady, who will deal with all your relationship, commitment and margin problems.

Welcome to the Channel's first problem page. In this we intend to deal with all matters social, sectional and marginal.

Our first letter comes from Sys, who has problems trusting their partner:

"Dear Problem Lady,

I'm a reseller, and I've been at my wits end. The problem is my partner's lack of commitment. I suspect there are others involved.

Recently, I've been living at a client's site.

One day, I came 'home' unexpectedly early, and found my partner swanning about in my clothes, pretending to be a reseller.

My partner is a big strong manufacturer, but confessed to liking get in touch with their customer side. After a while, my partner admitted a taste for going direct.

I'm absolutely gobsmacked. Where does this leave me?

Yours
Systems Integrator

Dear Sys,

This is quite common.

It sounds like your partner is a Transvendor.

It's actually perfectly harmless - one per cent of the time.

In most cases, though, you should be worried. Because your partner will cheat on your again and again. And eventually they'll discard you, like the husk of a sucked orange.

Will do you something for me, luvvie? Don't get involved in another relationship where you do all the work and then you end up getting hurt.

I would find a nice partner, like Vadition, which is honourable and supportive and understands how resellers feel. Vadition is a distributor who will stand by you and encourage you to grow as a reseller. It recently launched a deal registration system to protect resellers.

So even if a transvendor moves in on clients, your interest is already registered and protection is guaranteed. But only if you can qualify your interest. For example, if you've already had your first date (meeting) and a plan is place for engagement (proof of concept or trial).

Some partners swing and claim clients as their own, even though they've not done the business with them for a while.

In addition - Vadition runs 'Drive Velocity' a dating service which allows partners to make dates with prospects and register them directly onto a portal - Partners are rewarded directly with incentives and marketing funds - so they can go out and play the field even more!!

You could also try Astaro, which recently appointed Vinod Chamdal, as sales director for the channel. Vinod is a decent sort and will stand by you and help you grow.

Will you write and tell me how you got on, too?

Are there any decent Vendors and distributors out there?

Email, tweet and respond with your positive stories.

Here's Vito Nicastri, the alleged mob boss who ran a windfarm racket in Sicily. He sold the assets of the Minerva Messina wind farm to Danish developer Greentech Energy System.

Greentech bought 85 per cent of the 48.3 Megawatt Sicily based wind farm, which Nicastri developed, in 2007. In may this year it bought the other 15 per cent, with the deal being personally overseen by Greentech CEO Kaj Larsen.

Did Larsen subsequently become a made man? Sadly no, like Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas, they had a problem.

The problem being Italy's anti-mafia agency, the DIA, which confiscated a 15 per cent stake in the farm as part of an investigation into how the mafia is going green, by laundering money through the alternative energy companies.

And Larsen? He's been replaced. Still, it could be worse. He could have got the bullet.

It's only when you look at an ant under a magnifying glass that you realise how often they spontaneously burst into flames.
This is the case with data centres. These huge computing factories cost the earth to maintain. We burn billions of tons of the world's dwindling supply of fossil fuels, just to feed them the megawatts they need to simultaneously heat up their processors and then cool them down again
How do we stop them consuming the planet?
Chloride has an obvious answer. Pay a lot of money for one of its new super efficient Trinergy UPSs, and get your money back several times over in savings on your electricity bills.

It's not as much fun as watching an ant under a magnifying glass, but it's got a happier ending.

Facebook has this week been granted a 'notice of allowance' to trade mark the word 'face' by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Unbelievable! But true.

We should patent the English language. Although some of it's Latin. And some words are Yiddish. And some are Germanic. Then there's the French.

This could get tricky; some words are Arabic, too.

Still, we should patent it, before the bloody foreigners get their hands on it.

Ever wondered why we make an instinctive migration every now and then? The answer may be in our DNA. Our AppDNA, more precisely..

Here's Penny Gralewski, from AppDNA, who says the fear and uncertainty has been removed from Windows 7 migrations.

The hardest part of the 1000 mile journey is the first step, she says (quoting a famous Chinese proverb). AppDNA claims it has taken the first difficult steps for you.

Are you planning a Windows 7 Migration?

Microsoft funds the Jumpstart programme to help enterprises run pilots and proof of concepts of Windows 7, IE8, and App-V migrations.

Enterprises need help testing these new technologies in their environments. App-DNA is supporting Microsoft by providing free application compatibility software licenses for either the 10 day proof of concept trial or the 10 week pilot.

"This could remove the biggest obstacle to app migration," says Gralewski.

Analysts say that conversions to Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 or App-V all hinge on the existing applications' compatibility with the new technology.

"App-DNA eases the pain of application testing and compatibility - at no extra cost to the customer or partner," says Rich Reynolds, the general manager in Microsoft's Windows group.

Jumpstart version 1.5 is explained here.

They don't make 'em green anymore

Did anyone here have a dot matrix printer? Me too.

Things were better in those days. You could send a document to the printer, and go for a cup of tea, safe in the knowledge that it would still be printing when you came back.

I miss the noise they made. It was as if the machinery was powered by wasps.

Guess what?

Now dot matrix are enjoying something of a renaissance. They're not exactly Britain's fastest growing market. But they're the next best thing, to those in the know.

A steady earner, offering good margins. Better still, they're green!

A dot matrix printer can last twenty years. They're made out of die cast metal, not that rotten grey plastic that inferior printer makers go in for. And the consumables are a lot cheaper. The paper is a fraction of the price and the printer ribbons last several lifetimes longer than a toner.

Dascom (formerly Tally) has invested in R&D and made the Tally range of dot matrix printers 35 per cent quicker.

Customers love them. The National Blood Service swears by them. Logistics outfits and retailers use them too, along with thermal and barcode printing. 

Now one reseller, Printware, has decided that the only way to be the biggest back office printer reseller is to sell dot matrix. 

Top ten lessons on Securely Managing Email go unheeded

Here's Leon Rishniw, senior vice president of engineering at Cloudmark who says it's vital that email is properly managed to protect assets and ensure employees remain productive.

In support of this cause, he has provided a list of ten tips for IT managers.

1. Employees must be educated, says the IT man
2. The marketing department must also be educated, he insists.
3: er, I stopped reading after points one and two, because I felt a little insulted on behalf of this employees and marketing department.

I'm sure Mr Rishniw has the best interests of the company at heart. But surely he can make his point without sounding like he's patronising end users.

There's something really irritating about IT managers who assume people should 'Read the manual' and they they should be 'educated' because they don't spend all their time exploring operating systems.

Or is it just me?

Do I need educating?

Here's some good stuff about Cloudmark DesktopOne software:

Here's a man who knows about voices and passing messages on from the other side.

This is the Brighton Pier HQ of Paul Hughes-Barlow, Tarot reader and communications guru. His publicity (see picture) boasts of a prestigious list of blue chip clients. Among the global corporations seeking his inspriation are Cable and Wireless and Ericsson.

What advice would Ericsson use from this man?

Is Cable and Wireless trying to get in touch with an executive who has passed over to the other side (i.e. BT)?

Can anyone illuminate us?

Trend Micro has announced a special promotion on virtual desktop security

Here's Caroline Hodson, the pugnacious southpaw who fights in the Trend Micro camp, which has announced a special promotion for virtual desktop infrastructure (VD) aware security.

Security in physical environments is well established. Heavyweight data centres are big and static and make themselves easy targets. Virtual environments are far more fluid. But they can float like a cloud they're still likely to get stung like a Bee.

The Trend camp say they have identified weaknesses in the virtual environment's defences. Worse still, their managers tend to regard defence as a drain on cost and resources and lower their guard.

Trend Micro's OfficeScan will make companies VDI aware. It will train virtual systems to automatically detect whether security needs to be virtual or physical. It's faster than security scans on most middleweight virtual machines, too.

Look out you viruses, hackers and crackers. Caroline Hodson, head of UK channel sales and marketing at Trend Micro, has you in her sights. "Many organisations are already using or planning to deploy a VDI solution by Citrix Xen Desktop or VMWare View", said Hodson, "we are now offering resellers an incentive to help customer secure their virtual environments without having to cut their security policies or return on investment."

Bring on the virtual environment and my resellers will whup its assets, Hodson seemed to implying.

The promotion enables Trend Micro's partners to sell VDI-aware security software at a 50 per cent discount. The offer is valid for both new and existing customers of Office-Scan enterprise security suites of up to 1000 seats. The offer ends 31st January 2011.

Corporate communications are getting out of hand and consequently out of control. Mobiles are so damn convenient to use that people are using them at work, even using their personal mobile for work calls, when there's a company mobile available.

So what? Surely companies want their workers to communicate. The problem is that using personal phones for work weakens the control a security manager has over employees. Which can be a good thing, but not when it means that other people have access to that personal handset.

Your mobile's bluetooth connection, for example, could be easily hacked. All you need is a laptop, some software and a small directional antenna and you're all set to steal the entire contacts records from anyone's phone.

"The same can be achieved with an insecure wi-fi connection," says David Ward, senior consultant at Integralis, "but you won't even need an antenna."

Hang on though. Surely that's a lot of trouble to go to in order to sell secrets.
In the real world, how do companies gather information about their rivals?

How does global software vendor A find out what its closest rival, B, is planning in the next 6 months? How do they gather the information about their channel plans, the number of support people, their marketing strategy and the management structure of their rivals?

Do they hack into their rivals data bases? Do they steal smartphone contacts via Bluetooth?

Hell no. I can tell you, from personal experience, what they do. They employ people to talk to people in their rival camps. They set up phoney headhunting companies to conduct bogus job interviews, where they ask their rivals "tell me what you do in your current job". They use subterfuge, bribery and deception.

In short, they use people. People are the biggest cause of leakage in any company. But it's difficult to make products that tackle humans.

It'll be a day to celebrate when Integralis closes that security breach!