Quicke Off the Mark

When I were a lad it was a question of using the old "dog ate my homework" line, or in the case of one classmate to try and explain why he had chucked his bag into the river.

His "I felt I was being threatened" line didn't work then and probably wouldn't work now but would he have fared better if he used a high-tech excuse?

According to research from storage backup specialists Mozy the excuses being used in school rooms now are of a much more modern variety. These are just some that you might hear, or dare I suggest prompt your children with, as your little ones head off having forgotten to do their homework:

"I finished my homework but deleted it by accident."

"The Internet was down."

"My printer broke."

"The computer crashed."

But the one that stands out for inventiveness is "the letters wore out on my keyboard so I couldn't type".

Sometimes the computer does crash and the Internet can go down but that keyboard excuse is pushing it perhaps too far.

But in terms of bringing excuses into the 21st Century, then full marks to those that have moved with the times. But if I could offer some advice; when all else fails the dog ate my homework story accompanied with graphic hand movements to illustrate and a pained expression on the face still stands as good a chance as any of working.

The decision by NetApp and Oracle to can a legal dispute that has been rumbling on for a decade comes just hot on the heels of the move by HP to sue over the appointment of its former CEO Mark Hurd.

The reason these things are mentioned is that over the years I have been covering the channel there has been one consistent winner. It should have been the reseller or even the customer but in many cases it was the legal profession.

Some of the biggest cases with Microsoft fighting the Department of Justice and some of the long rambling legal battles involving Apple must have kept certain legal practices in clover year after year.

You can imagine those that were advising NetApp and Oracle in the patent battle are now having to look for divorce cases and parking fine raps to plug a gap that's not existed for a decade in their daily lives.

But as the decision by HP to go legal after Oracle poached Hurd shows, the temptation to call the lawyers is still there in the IT world. Those legal folk that had served NetApp might be worried today but there will be something round the corner. Sadly if history has proved anything it is that the words 'see you in court' are four of the most popular in vendor boardrooms.

A few years ago those selling mobility solutions could be found clinging on to events like the Buncefield gas explosion and the Cockermouth floods as evidence for the need to have a friendly remote working policy.

But with ash clouds, tube strikes and freak weather all featuring already this year the case for mobile working is a much easier one to make.

Add to the reality that there are times people just can't get into the office the fact that the security worries that remote access sparked have largely been conquered then the reasons for making staff go through the commute are getting harder to justify.

So it came as little surprise to see research from GrIDsure that indicated that just shy of half of employees had planned to work from home at some point over this summer.

What was also of interest was the high number, 68% of business professionals who considered the ability to work remotely as a strong factor for enjoying or choosing their job.

One of the biggest opportunities in the channel is to catch the wave of mobility as it starts to spread through more firms. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep people coming in to work in a Victorian style clocking in and then clocking out.

It is not just employees who are clearly looking to enjoy more home working but for companies themselves there are advantages to be had by encouraging remote access.

One is clearly the chance to reduce office space and encourage hot desking which should enable space to be cut and the cost of building rent to be reduced.

But there is also evidence mounting up that those that do work from home tend to work longer and therefore produce more for their employer.

With resources in most offices stretched the idea of getting that little bit extra out of people, who perhaps log on an hour earlier and log off later because they are not commuting, starts to become something fairly compelling.

There used to be an much quoted saying in the security world about no single company being able to provide complete protection.

Talk of 'no silver bullets' and the lack of a 'one stop shop' encourage a fragmented market to develop that proved to be fertile ground for start-ups coming from every direction. Things were also helped by the continuing number of threats that meant the market never stood still and so those quick on their feet could take advantage.

But the tide seems to be turning slightly. As costs are examined by firms and the time and effort it takes to manage systems comes under the spotlight users want consolidation in their security products.

Users want to be able to control, manage and operate a security system that can react to numerous threats but come with just a few names on the front. Check Point and its resellers are starting to hear this demand loud and clear and it could have ramifications for the channel.

The consequences can be split into a couple of areas. Firstly, it means that resellers will be attracted to larger vendors that sell a suite of products. Secondly, those partners will have to sell wider and deeper with its chosen suppliers.

There are already signs that some vendors are doing what they can to get the message across about selling deep
and wide across a portfolio, and one of those is Check Point, and that is likely to continue.

But of course a vendor telling a reseller something is one thing a customer doing it is slightly different. Now that users are apparently saying the same there is a choice for dealers to make.

Either they consider their portfolio and provide the same functionality but from less vendors or they hold out against the tide making the best case for a range of best-of-breed point products. It's going to be the customer that ultimately decides what they want to do.

If I was to leave an employer under a cloud I wonder if a quick chat with the person responsible for software management could be a wise investment.

Imagine if, and this is strictly hypothetical, they said over a couple of beers that they thought that the software the company used was not all being paid for. Well if that's the case I could be in for a killing.

The experience of the whistle blower who informed on non-payment by his former firm for use of Microsoft and Adobe software was to be rewarded to the tune of £10,000 because the settlement reached £100,000.

Good work if you can get it and an attractive supplementary income in these cash strapped times.

But before you start to construct a sentence which includes the phrases "callous, money sucking swine" remember my actions would be for the good of the channel.

Oh yes the reward is nothing compared to the knowledge that a reseller will benefit from another legitimate sale.

Now remind me, what was that whistleblower hotline again....

Catching up with the Apple announcements last night was a little bit like stepping back in time and taking a trip down memory lane to the turn of the century.

Back then the world was divided into the lounge and the study, with the TV living in one and the computer in the other. Bill Gates used to turn up at conferences and talk about how the two were merging but most people just shrugged their shoulders and left him to his predictions.

But with broadband taking off and TV being given a shot in the arm with developments like HD and things like 3D the digital lounge still remains a goal for some hardware vendors.

Some of them might have thought that TV would die as a physical format and research published in the latest issue of the Radio Times does seem to back that up slightly with a significant proportion of young people watching TV via the web.

But in terms of the traditional world collapsing that hasn't happened and so the smart approach is to take the TV and add something to it. Sky of course have done that for the last few years and now the computer vendors are about to have a go.

Apple TV could have an interesting impact when it arrives in time for Christmas next month. At £99 it hits that sweet spot in terms of pricing, not something Apple always manages to do, and it will put the vendor's brand potentially in even more homes.

Wait for other rivals to respond, the analysts have already identified Google and Microsoft as the main two targeted by this move, but from a consumer point of view the choices are multiplying.

With September almost here it's time to put the trunks away in a drawer, deflate the lilo and put the sunglasses back in the case. If the British weather isn't enough of a reminder summer is over and there's some serious work to be done.

The next few months are going to be crucial for the channel and will be tough. October will be all about cuts as the details of the spending review become clear and that is likely to have an impact on November. Come December and some of us will be talking of Santa while others moan about the looming VAT rate rise.

For those in the public sector things are already difficult but the government is not full of idiots (Eton and Oxford would have a thing or two to say about it if that claim was made) and so there has to be some recognition that too much bad news might be damaging.

The hard medicine that we have all had to swallow was delivered in the emergency budget but it has continued to drag as the details are waited for. There has been little to distract from the gloom with even England's success on the cricket field being overshadowed by a betting scandal.

But as the views of a selection of industry players on page 10 shows there is still a huge amount of optimism and if any sector knows how to navigate through choppy waters it is the channel.

The channel has seen the green shoots and refused to be thrown off its course by the gloom and doom and as the industry gears up for the most important quarter things are looking fairly stable. The number of insolvencies are down, credit insurance is apparently coming back on track and the technological arguments for an upgrade are being led by a strong-selling Windows 7.

As the heads go down and the hard work begins the hope is that the next few months will be a return to seasonal spending that it strong for the channel. Cameron and company need to talk things up but they can leave the hard work of driving the recovery to the channel.

At the end of a phone call about some embargoed news that comes out on Monday I had to mention that its a Bank Holiday.

There was a pause as those on the line, both calling in from different exotic places overseas, struggled to understand just why the Brits wouldn't be working on Monday.

For one terrible moment I felt very lazy and found myself apologising for not being straight into work. But then I thought; hold on a minute, chum - I'm allowed a day off now and again and if the banks can't give us our money back or help resellers get loans the least they can do is provide an excuse for a day off.

Over a lunch the other day the subject of Twitter came up along with the usual debate about its value as a form of communication.

But there was another spin to the debate with this contact arguing in the last calander year providing content and engaging with social media had cost the company in excess of £60,000 in man hours.

This instantly challenges the notion that social media is 'free' because clearly there are costs to those that want to engage with it seriously.

it also makes you wonder if those vendors that are encouraging mass participation by resellers appreciate the costs involved might not be monetary but do translate to serious ones in terms of time and effort. Just giving it to a junior member of the marketing team to look after is not perhaps the wisest idea.

As the National Theatre found out last night after its tweet stream included a post calling a journalist an unmentionable name there are implications on branding and reputation that need to be considered with Twitter.

So it was refreshing to see that someone has gone to the effort of pricing up the time spent on social media networks. Resellers might well need to be conscious of a costing argument as they face discussions with vendors where the pressure to get involved online is significant.

It is easy to lose things, we have all gone mad looking for that missing sock or our mobile phones and car keys, but when it comes to a retailer losing your personal financial information it's harder to be forgiving.

After all when you walk into a store along with expecting the retailer to have a decent product range and a number of different price points you also expect that the credit card slips and other details will not end up going AWOL.

You expect this even more because outfits including Visa have talked of the efforts they are making to get retailers to look after that information and that has given rise to things like PCI, which comes into effect for major retailers at the end of next month.

But what the last couple of days have shown is that data continues to get lost and treated in a fairly sloppy manner. Credit agreements left in skips by Dixons and backup tapes simply vanishing over at Zurich Insurance are things that should cause some alarm.

On the positive side the fact that we all know about them shows that data loss is becoming more of a public issue and organisations like the Information Commissioner's Office will name and shame those that lose data.

But on the negative side it shows that it continues to happen and that there is still a very carefree attitude being shown towards sensitive data. Perhaps the threats of what can happen when security is compromised hasn't got through to retailers but it needs to and it needs to quickly.

You sense the naming and shaming and fines are only going to get more stern and steeper as time goes on. 

If you have ever come back to your car and found a fine attached to the windscreen or got a letter and a demand through the post for driving in a bus lane you will be familar with the pay in 14 days and get a 50% discount idea.

What is interesting to note is that this discount policy appears to be applicable to even the largest fines. At the bottom of the statement the Financial Services Authority made about its decision to fine Zurich Insurance £2.3m for losing customer data it had a little nugget about the discount procedure.

"As Zurich UK agreed to settle at an early stage of the investigation the firm qualified for a 30 per cent discount. Without this discount the firm would have been fined £3.25 million."

So next time you find that fine waiting and bemoan the games they play with the fortnight to pay or the threat of baliffs just remember the same technique is used whether its £50 or £2m.

There is something rather sick in the way that spammers use events, including natural disasters, to dump rubbish in user's inboxes.

When most people in Russia might have been worried about fires and heat waves spammers decided to use that opportunity to promote air conditioners.

The craze for Paul the World Cup result predicting Octopus is still being taken advantage of according to the latest Symantec State of Spam and Phishing report.

But if you thought you could see those spam messages coming the blank subject line technique is proving to be the most popular technique currently being used to lure users into opening emails they might try to avoid.

Taking the tongue out of the cheek for a while, the point here is that while most of us are heads down trying to get through the current recession and talk of double dip, there are some trying to add to the misery and load the inbox with spamming nonsense.

Symantec is already warning that next year's cricket world cup is being exploited and presumably the phrase 'double dip' will be one used by phishing folk over the next few months.

If spam didn't have security concerns and impact bandwidth the temptation would be to skim through an analysis of that market but what the Symantec findings show is that it is a widespread and serious problem where the unscrupulous target the innocent and that is no laughing matter.

I'm busy collecting the deed poll details just in case any of my social networking activity embarrasses me so much I have to resort to changing my identity.

This might sound extreme but according to Google boss Eric Schmidt he thinks children will have to change their names later on to distance themselves from earlier tom foolery online. Bearing in mind many employers use social networking as one of their checks before offering a job it could be something that starts to happen.

He talked about being more forgiving of youth but to be honest there might have to be a bit more forgiveness of those slightly longer in the tooth.

A couple of weeks ago a tech PR from the other side of the pond decided to moan about a shop online abusing the owner only for the rest of us to watch as many of her followers hit the unfollow button.

She might well be thinking of distancing herself from that episode but a name change seems a little extreme.

From MicroScope's newest correspondent Sherlock Hubbucket.

One of the main features of social networking is that you share almost everything. You know when someone is having a coffee, catching a flight or their feelings on the football.

But imagine for a second you are sitting in an office running the channel side of things for a major vendor. You want a change in job but you know that the minute you brush up your LinkedIn entry people will talk and you can hardly pop up on Facebook or Twitter chatting away about what potential opportunities are out there.

So for those people perhaps the idea of anonymity is relevant even if it does sound a little bit against the spirit of social networking.

In a recent chat with one of the founders of Executives Place, Joseph Blass, a recruitment site that is launching with well paid channel players in mind, the anonymous approach was explained in a way that made it seem obvious that those looking for a senior move would not want anyone able to directly identify them.

Of course they want people to be able to identify their skills and experience and those things are listed but the name and current employer remain shrouded in mystery until things get to the point where it is a lot more serious and a job interview or offer is on the cards.

It provoked a train of thought about just how much we are prepared to give away online and how some of the social networking tools might actually work against someone wanting to make a job move.

Sometimes there can be good reasons to keep your identity hidden and perhaps a bit more balance is required for all of us. You might be interested to hear I'm enjoying a coffee but my boss might not be too keen to hear I'm gathering references on LinkedIn and brushing up my CV letting it be known I want a move.

This isn't a blog written with a political agenda just one driven by frustration because surely the time for the negative messages has come and gone and now the government should be talking things up?

When you see the Chancellor saying that it is going to be a choppy recovery your head dips that little bit because you know that in October the spending cuts will be detailed, January VAT will rise and the bad news potentially will keep coming in dribs and dabs.

Okay so we all need to be realistic and hear these things but there was so much hard medicine for us all to swallow in the emergency Budget that what we all need now are more positive messages.

Confidence is a strange commodity and if George Osborne and his friends are not careful they will give it one dent too many and the feared double dip that many people are almost obsessed about will come into being.

Come on George and co talk things up a bit.

It might have taken seven months but there has been an openness during the McAfee distribution review that has been refreshing.

In several briefings the UK and Ireland channel director Jill Henry talked about the aims of the review and then explained why it was taking the time it did.

These days a vendor cannot simply put out a call for tender for a contract and expect the world to stay still while that process goes through the necessary stages. There is consolidation, which can take the field of bidders down, in this case from nine to seven, and there are the global aims of a distribution head to take into consideration.

With most security vendors looking to maximize value from resellers and to get them to sell across a wide portfolio it is not a surprise that the same criteria has now been applied to distribution.

In a conversation with Henry she said that the vendor wanted to get more out of distribution and understood that it had a value to add that was part of its ambitions to grow market share. Plenty of other vendor's have similar ambitions and it's good to hear distribution being talked of as more than just a logistics and credit engine.

So at the end of the process the number of distributors have dropped from four to three and the review can be put to one side and normal business can resume. But for other vendors thinking of doing the same there are some real lessons to be learnt here not just about taking the time to get it right but how talking about it while the process is on-going can be useful.

Last night my mother in law went missing. She is 71, suffers from memory problems and had gone to visit family in Exeter, a long way away from her home in North London.

A coach delay and the driver's decision to miss a stop triggered a six hour absence that involved several police forces and put the family through an evening of torment.

In that situation what you want to do more than anything is feel that you are doing something. The urge to jump into a car and drive to Exeter and go around looking for her is a difficult one to resist because it meets the overpowering need to be active.

But when that isn't practical there turned out to be another answer and one that might just surprise those people that believe social networking is a pointless vanity exercise.

After being given the green light by the police I called for help in the search for my mother-in-law on Twitter.

I watched as my call for help in locating her went ever wider and it wasn't long before someone contacted me prepared to go to the coach station and look for her. That was the very thing I wanted to do myself but in the absence of getting there a Twitter contact was going to go and do it for me.

Just put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Here is someone busy minding their own business who sees the call for help and responds. She puts to one side her plans for the evening and goes to the coach station, alerts security there and then goes on a hunt round the pedestrianised shopping area to see if there are any signs of my aged relative there.

I didn't offer a reward, it was a simple call for help and it was answered. The support and the goodwill, with people offering ideas and assistance, was staggering. It even surprised the police when I mentioned it to them when they came to get further details of my missing mother-in-law.

In the end she was found and the saga had a happy ending but of course there are going to be plenty of lessons that this experience has taught her family.

But there is another lesson here about the power of social networking. Twitter proved that it is a way to reach out to people who care, are prepared to give up their time and energy and it showed that when you need help there are new ways of getting support that deserve to be taken seriously.

Twitter might not have actually found her but it provided eyes that I couldn't have in the right places and it provided support in a time of trouble that you just wouldn't believe. Thank you to all those who tried to help.

So the Royal Family opens a Flickr account and as a result those who live and breathe the web start talking about it being a great sign and time to start talking again about building a digital Britain.

Forgive me for perhaps being a bit of a party pooper but it is hardly likely to be the Queen herself uploading pics of the Polo matches and grouse shoots. It will be some minion in the press office.

Of course that minion will be basking in the glow of the coverage that move will have gained and rightly so but let's not get carried away here.

What would be really great is if I could send a tweet or comment on a picture and have The Queen reply. Of course she won't because she doesn't have the time and she probably doesn't understand the first thing about it.

So is this a sign that the age of digital Britain is dawning? It helps but let's be honest it's not going to change things radically. 

In a conversation earlier this week with an industry source the conversation turned to using technology for call conferencing and the passion in the room went up a notch.

"Why aren't more resellers talking about video and audio conferencing? This is a technology that's time has come. Now is the time to be talking about it," he said with feeling.

Well if resellers take a look at recent research from Plantronics then the case for talking about conferencing calls is more relevant than ever.

Plantronics found that 84% of UK office workers quizzed revealed they are more reliant on conference calls than ever before but, and here's the reseller opportunity, 85% did not have supporting technology to help carry those calls out.

Paul Clark, general manager at Plantronics, said that calls had to be useful and engaging but technology also played a crucial role.

"A staggering number of people are wasting their time, and that of others, by holding ineffective calls. As well as providing the correct supporting technology, businesses should try to teach staff the fundamental rules of conference calls to get the most out of what can be a cost effective and productive way to do business," he said.

So if you are looking for a topical sales pitch, want to sound authorative with some research at ytour finger tips then you could do a lot worse than talk conferencing.

There is an expression 'if you build it they will come' but what happens when they don't? This is a question that is asked with more and more regularity as channel players look to launch new initiatives and engage with social media platforms worried that having spent some time and effort doing so the pay back will not be immediate or good enough to convince those that signed off the investment it was worth making.

If the problem is bad now then it will only get worse in the future as we all become bombarded by more sites and places to find information.

The conclusions that I can draw based on the experience of this blog is that it is all well and good bashing out and sharing some thoughts but what you really need to do is tell people about it.

The same is true for any channel activities. Blowing the trumpet is going to be an essential part of grabbing attention. Even if you think that everyone is blowing theirs and making a lot of noise you still have to do it. Fail to do any promotion and you will end up wondering why no one came.