May 2010 Archives

The Prime Minister David Cameron has proved he doesn't know how to pick a winner when it comes to the horses but you hope it might do a bit better when it comes to helping British business.

Cameron is making one of his first speeches about business today arguing that the last government led everyone in the wrong direction and leant to much on the public sector leaving industries like manufacturing behind.

Now I don't want to get political because there is an immediate point that can be made about a certain Mrs Thatcher and her attitude towards manufacturing. But to focus on the general theme there is something of interest here for the channel.

If you think about it perhaps the balance between public and private sector does need addressing. There is an argument about how you do that by building one up or cutting down the other but anyway that is one general theme.

But the other, which has been one waiting to be discussed more widely, is what sort of mixture of businesses do we need in UK Plc?

The throwaway cliche about us not making anything in this country anymore is one that does need to be examined and some sort of policy formulated. If, as we all would want, the current coalition sets its sights on developing and supporting a mix of businesses it would be a positive step.

But the crucial word there is 'support' and what we will wait to see after the coverage of this speech has calmed down is just how the creative IT industries will get the help they need to grow and expand.

You can't create a growing economy by just cutting spending.

Well what a night that was. The MicroScope Awards for Channel Excellence were a real success in every possible way.

The venue sparkled and the move to the Lancaster Hotel got the thumbs up, the comedian and host Sean Lock got them laughing throughout the evening and did an excellent job and the scenes at the disco provided memories (and blackmail material) that sadly might never be erased.

But as was intended the evening put resellers, distributors and those vendors that care about the channel under the spotlight and gave those that have worked so hard in the last year the chance to get the recognition they deserve.

It is always difficult to convince those that miss out on awards that they have done incredibly well getting to the shortlist but that is more true than ever. This year the competition was stronger than the previous years with more entries and more votes were cast.

Everyone who went last night should be proud of not just what they and their companies did but of what the channel as a whole has achieved in the last 12 months.

Those who dared doubt that the channel still had relevance only had to look at the packed room full of people who prove it day in day out to realise that in an industry that is a person-to-person experience we are lucky to have some of the best in the business working in our sector.

Well done to all the winners and to everyone who attended thanks for making it a great night.

The butterflies are starting to swirl round the stomach and the palms are getting sweaty as the countdown to tonight's MicroScope Awards for Channel Excellence begins.

Standing up and doing a speech is an honour, providing me with the chance to speak to the industry I cover day-to-day, but it is also a brief opportunity to sum up a year's activity.

The word that you will hear hopefully from more than just my lips tonight will be the R word - recovery. Last year was tough but it was not as apocalyptic as some had feared and now the desire is to concentrate on looking forwards and upwards.

To lift a theme from my speech tonight there are various reasons why the channel came out of the other side of the worst recession for 60 years largely intact but primarily among them is that businesses in the IT sector are well run and practice what they preach using technology to save costs and drive efficiency.

The rest of the world has also grasped that idea and unlike the fallow years that followed the dot.com boom it is to technology that most people have turned for answers and it is to technology the answers lie and will continue to be found.

Tonight is very special for many many reasons but chief among them for me is to be able to praise the channel for its hard work and thank each and every one of you for making this such a vibrant and dynamic industry to write about and participate in. 

If there is one thing that always goes hand in hand with the World Cup it is some research about the likely impact the tournament will have on British business.

There are figures that predict how many people will throw sickies to stay at home to enjoy the competition and the amount of time wasted by those watching games while they should be working on other things.

With the tournament just a matter of weeks away, although if you watched the Mexico game last night then perhaps more time to prepare would be welcome, the warnings are starting to emerge.

One of the more practical comes from Ipswitch which warns that there can be a great strain placed on networking infrastructure with staff viewing video streams and the like. So the vendor has launched a World Cup Network Traffic Calculator for IT managers that is designed to help predict and plan football related surges.

With this being the first World Cup to be streamed live online the prospect for some serious slowness to networks is quite considerable. The calculator should help those that are grown up enough to accept that streaming will happen. The other option is of course to try6 and block it but it's those things that can poison company morale.

So with the World Cup just weeks away the options are clear for IT managers, get prepared, use tools like the ones from Ipswitch. The alternative might involve keeping fingers crossed and hoping for an early England exit and a fair amount of staff sickness.

Those who remember the moment when the announcement was made that the Home Computing Initiative (HCI) was going to be canned will also be acutely familiar with the chaos that followed it.

You fear the same might happen with the announcement that BECTA, the education IT buying advisory group, is being canned as the current government looks to claw back the public deficit.

Tender processes were ongoing and the education market was concentrating on delivering products and services through an established tender and approval process. Now suddenly that is in the air and the prospect for the channel is a divided one.

As one contact, who had found negotiations with BECTA over the last six months going nowhere, this now could potentially be an opportunity. But of course for others, including the likes of RM, years of investment and established corporate practice are now under threat. There will be winners and losers as a result of the BECTA decision and although it might take months to settle you can already see the glint in the eyes of those keen to take a slice of the education market.

But the real fear here is that schools will lose their way in technology terms. Most teachers are not IT literate and concentrate on delivering what is a demanding curriculum and look to organisations including BECTA to provide guidance and advice on where they should be spending and what tools need to be deployed in classrooms.

There has been the usual talk about schools, along with everyone else, tightening their belts and having to make do. But try to square that with the ongoing demand for the next generation to be world beaters. No one doubts that cuts have to be made but unless they are done in a way that protects the investment in developing skills we face reaching a situation where we cannot produce the skills required to keep and develop our IT and creative industries.

What a fair few people who went through the HCI debacle will fear is that in the hunt for cost savings not enough thought will have been given to any of this and it will be a mess with schools and resellers picking up the pieces in an atmosphere of agressive competition and pressure on very limited budgets.

Sometimes you wonder whether a sponsorship deal has been struck to fulfill a childhood dream of a CEO or marketing director or simply to widen the public awareness of a brand.

You can often see the eyes of those responsible for the numerous deals between tech companies and sporting outfits glaze over as the enter the stadium or take a ringside seat.

Years ago talking to executives from TDK who were sponsoring Crystal Palace Football Club at the time the question of why they had opted to back the club came up in conversation.

No one it seemed knew why with the then UK managing director, if memory serves me well, revealing he was a Reading fan. The brand might have got seen emblazoned on the team shirts but the corporate box was devoid of a passionate executive who was cheering on the team.

But in some cases the love of the club or sport goes deep. Those who went to see Portsmouth in the days when financial troubles were not on the agenda as a guest of Oki will have understood the passion the then managing director Chris Gill had for the team.

So it was with a wry smile we studied the photograph that came into accompany the announcement that Kaspersky Labs has formed a technical partnership with Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro. Was this a branding exercise or could it be that perhaps it was the moment when a childhood dream was realised?

When you look at the picture it's hard to tell at first who is the petrol head racing nut and who is the security software specialist. CEO and Founder Eugene Kaspersky looks ready to get behind a wheel of anything Ferrari can offer him.

Having only met Eugene once and mainly talked about his business it's hard to say for sure if there lurks beneath childhood memories of pushing red cars across floors making noises and pretending he was at the wheel of the dinky Ferraris. But next time we meet I will ask him, half suspecting what the answer will be.

The pledge by the Conservative and Liberal coalition to offer all workers flexible working should be the push the employers need to embrace the future.

The days when bums were kept on seats in stuffy offices are running out of relevance as the web takes over with the cloud the option to support most ways of working remotely. What is more the next generation of people coming into the workplace will demand change.

So from a reseller perspective this spells opportunity. Not just to sell hardware like laptops, smart phones and netbooks but also to provide the infrastructure at the back end. On a security front it all needs to work securely so there will be plenty of business there and for those selling software this is the moment to deliver the cloud vision.

Remote working has to take off more widely because without it the country cannot function as smartly as it will need to in the years ahead. It takes traffic off the roads but it also allows a degree of flexibility that UK Plc will need to deliver if it wants to remain competitive in a 24/7 world.

One colleague earlier described my ability to work from home as a bonus that was akin to a pat on the back for good behaviour. My reply was that it wasn't a bonus it should be a right. "Why?" was his reply. But as our eyes scanned a floor full of crouched heads slumped over keyboards it became obvious he should have been asking "why not?".

So the co-CEOs of SAP Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe have notched up 100 days in the hot seats running the software vendor.

There is something almost ritualistic about this 100 days thing with politicans often analysised on what they have done in their first century of days in office.

If you were putting a score card together for the SAP duo you would have to note that things do seem to be going in the right direction with the financial results turning round and the prospects for the vendor widening with the summer arrival of its BusinessByDesign service.

But how much of that is down to the pair with CEO in their job titles is debatable. The economy has recovered which would benefit SAP and a great deal of the hand wringing and moaning internally was encouraged and faced up to by the supverisory board before the 100 days of Mcdermott and Hagermann Snabe kicked off.

But let's not be too petty. So far so good for the men running SAP but their greatest challenge lies ahead. Having identified the need to grasp the convergence - data and flexibility and remote working - nettle it will be interesting to see how they get on the the next couple of 100 days go.

One of the areas of channel coverage that we rarely covered in the past was the technology relationships between suppliers.

The market for technology for the channel has grown in the last few years and the links between different parts of the reseller eco system are often vital but not looked into quite as much as they should be.

A good example of what this looks like in practice is the relationship between Compuware and Atos Origin.

Compuware specialises in application performance and has been building a partner network with a selection of resellers that not only take its product and use it to deliver services but also act as a reference point providing some market knowledge and feedback.

There are other tools out there providing tools for those resellers that are providing managed services, MicroScope is doing a seminar series with one of them Kasyea.

But for some reason most of the time the important pieces of the jigsaw that make things work so well for the customer get overlooked. As one reseller put it to me earlier this year "these are the tools that can really add value and perhaps we are not that keen on telling the world and his wife how they operate".

Perhaps that is right but certainly in an era when good service is something not just demanded by SLAs but something that can offer business advantage expect to see more names being added to the Compuware partner network.

One of the dangers that George Osborne must face as he sits there doodling numbers in the margins of the reports that he is getting given as Chancellor is that he cuts expertise as he trims costs.

What is becoming quite clear is that although a significant proportion of the IT budget is spent keeping the lights on you do need people who know what they are doing to keep those lights on properly.

Take the case of security compliance as an example. The amount of bits and pieces that the average IT director in the public sector has to know is increasing all the time. Not only is the weight of compliance regulations going up but the threats of fines is also something very real.

So when the axe swings and the cuts are made the real fear from some of those at the coalface of security is that good people with important knowledge will be put out onto the streets.

In one sense that could be an opportunity for resellers to fill the gap but of course it relies on having someone in-house who recognises that need to plug those holes and someone determined enough to fight for budget.

As things stand it is a wait and see cliche that fits best but as things move forward and the cuts come in the next few weeks those operating in the security channel will need to keep an eye on what happens with their contacts and customers in the public sector.

Increasingly it is not possible to talk about recovery without adding somewhere in close proximity the word 'fragile'. Things might be getting better but that comes with a fair amount of small print.

The small print of course includes caveats like the public sector cuts being made sensibly using technology to save money rather than just cutting the IT allowance. It also comes with some warnings about the X factor which is when the great unknown blows things off course. That is yet to happen but with a coalition that is yet to be tested it could well run into unforeseen problems.

The Intellect state of the tech nation report has come out with the warnings about taking things steady as they go but has some good news for those selling software and those increasing their cloud skills.

If I was asked to produce a report about the future then after trying to fill up as m any pages with intelligent sounding summaries of different sides of the market I would conclude with the following sentence:

"The market remains optimistic but is all too aware of how the state of the economy remains on a knife edge. We all want it to work and this report is designed to add to general feelings of confidence."

Of course no one would spend time and money on it but it's not too far off what Intellect have said but of course they said it with a great deal more intelligence.

If you want to know what is happening in the security channel right now you only have to look at the decisions being taken by the two top players over their channel direction to get the answer: solutions.

Both Symantec and McAfee are redrawing how they want the channel to function and they are both moving to a position where resellers will be expected to fall into line behind certain solution offerings which are based on technology.

The idea is that no longer will the emphasis be on trying to sell kit in an ad hoc way but instead to put a suite of things together and then sell it as a data loss prevention solution for instance. The solution bundles depend on the breath of the vendor portfolios and the language they would use to describe threats but the most obvious are around network and end point security.

As the channel continues to converge this solutions selling approach might well be replicated in other markets. From a reseller perspective you sense the challenge won't just be getting all the necessary accreditational boxes ticked to sell the solution but also a possible problem with customer awareness.

In the past one of the biggest complaints about accreditation schemes has been the lack of promotion to users so a reseller having made a great deal of investment finds that actually not that many people understand or recognise it.

Making the channel sell solution bundles might well suit the agenda of the vendors but unless they make sure it has some resonance with customers it will fail to be the advance for the channel that it at first appears to be.

There are times when things of such importance happen that even Eastenders is taken off the air.

Such a time was last night with Gordon Brown resigning as Prime Minister and David Cameron going in the opposite direction to see the Queen and become his replacement. After days of deals it appeared that a new government was finally ready to emerge from the election of last week.

The channel will now wait to watch and see what sort of government the Conservative and Liberal coalition produces. In many respects they share the same attitude towards technology and the compromises they have made might tone down some of the more extreme measures that were in the manifestos.

Small business groups came out almost instantly and welcomed the new government but the markets have been far from overwhelmed with the key metrics in both currency and gilts remaining not too different this morning.

That indicates that those who make their money guessing which way the wind blows are still keeping a very open mind about what could happen as the first coalition government for donkey's years gets going.

The main difference of course since the last time Liberals sat round a table with the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a war cabinet is the way that the broadcasting industry has changed.

In a 24 hour rolling news environment the cameras will be constantly pointed at signs of possible conflict in the coalition and the prospect for things to go wrong will no doubt become an obsession in some parts of the media.

Add to that of course the social networking with the ability of services like Twitter to spread opinion and in some cases facts around the world in seconds and any breakdown between the parties will end up being shared with us all.

The political landscape might have changed in a way most commentators are suggesting might be permanent but the way news is shared is already going through that transformation and as the two collide it will be fascinating to see the impact on those currently shaking hands on the steps of Downing Street.

If things weren't bad enough for Liverpool FC manager Rafa Benitez then imagine the moment when he was mistaken for a reseller.

As his season drifted into a disappointing end he was spotted at Watford Gap services by a couple of Niman's staffers who knew the face but couldn't place the name of the Spanish manager.

Aastra business manager Allan Merten and his colleague Tony Cowen saw Rafa and managed to get a photo out of him after establishing who he actually was.

In the pic, taken by Tony, Rafa is on the left (for those who also don't know who he is) and Allan is on the right.

"We were on our way to Luton to see a customer and had stopped at the services to pick up a Wi-Fi signal to check our e-mails. Tony doesn't know that much about football and when I spotted Rafa and pointed him out to Tony, he responded: Who is he, is he a reseller?" said Merten.

Should Rafa leave Liverpool as is widely expected he might well take some comfort from knowing a career in the channel is an option as he clearly has the look of a reseller nailed already.

A few years ago in a conversation with a Seagate executive set out a vision of the world that was full of hard drives. Your PC, TV, car and even fridge would all have drives and even more opportunities would emerge.

That conversation pre-dated the cloud and the social networking revolution. So it was with an eye to finding out what could be seen in the crystal ball now that I head to Barcelona to sit down with Western Digital's CEO John Coyne.

If anyone should have a view of the future it is someone like Coyne who has been in the industry for decades, 27 years spent at WD, and has seen it go through many transitions already.

He had a smile on his face throughout our meeting and although admitted the industry didn't see the explosion of sites like Facebook and YouTube coming it had been a very pleasant development increasing the demand for drives from the likes of Google down to people wanting more storage at home.

Coyne spoke of the development of private clouds, not just the ones based around companies but also individuals, as one of the areas it expected a large amount of growth to come from.

People have a natural desire to want to hold onto their information on a device they can see and as wireless spreads through homes and the devices start talking to each other there will be a need for not just back-up but improved segmentation of data.

These are interesting times for the storage industry and over the next few years the growth in data is not being debated and now it seems neither is the demand for hard drives. Those who saw the cloud as a threat will need to think again.

So what the commentators and political pundits thought might happen has and we are now enjoying the first hours of a hung parliament for the first time since 1974.

Through the mists of confusion a couple of things are already clear:

* This means more uncertainty

* This means more politics

The first is not good for small businesses, in fact not for any size of operation, as the public sector and customers wait to make their spending decisions. The delays caused to decision making as a result of the last month's campaigning now have the excuse to continue.

Already SME lobby groups like the Forum of Private Business have been out this morning talking about the damage that a hung parliament will cause for those firms it represents. They were already worried about the lack of clarity around taxes and red tape and that is set to remain an issue.

Those at the coalface have also been quick to comment this morning about how it will cripple those selling into the public sector because they will be waiting to see if its a case of cuts now or later.

But for the majority of us the hung parliament spells one thing: more debate, more hot air and more politicians talking at us via the television and internet. The last four weeks have been an endurance test in terms of staying with the campaign and you suspect had it not been for the televised debates interest would have flagged after the first few days.

Now we can all look forward to today and potentially the entire weekend taken up with talking heads discussing what might happen. What will happen is that today most people will get back to work and get on with it. The sooner the politicians do the same the better.

If there is one sector of the channel that gets more excited about the world cup than perhaps any other it has to be distribution.

As the sales floors start getting football related promotions and sales days it's a dead certainty, slightly more than England's progress through the finals, that there will be some fun and dressing up in distribution land.

Looking for an example of what it could look like then take a closer look at the Panasonic promotions running with Nimans where resellers hitting certain sales targets can qualify for three offers and get camcorders and plasma TVs.

You might well be wondering why a promotion, and there are plenty of them in the channel, should merit a blog post.

The reason is for the way that Julie Greaves, Panasonic business manager at Nimans and Rocom, has got into the World Cup spirit (see picture).

The channel is full of enthusiastic people and in a market that often boasts deals are done people to people it's good to see someone putting their personality out there.

For more details of the promotion, which runs until 30 June, resellers can contact Nimans.

Roll on the world cup and roll on more tom foolery in distribution.

The polling stations have opened and the chance to make your vote count is underway and by the time the swingometer stops swinging some time in the early hours the result should be done and dusted.

The last few weeks have been exciting with the first ever televised debates and the closest contest for generations. It has however in some respects been the same as most elections for the channel.

As usual the subject of technology was kept to the fringes and only occasionally came onto centre stage and when it did it was the question of faster broadband and access to rural areas that was held up as the topic to debate. For the last couple  of decades the politicians have done their best to portray almost complete ignorance of technology matters and that continued again.

There was also little talk of how important the IT sector is to the British economy other than to make vague references to emerging and creative industries but most of that talk seemed to be about green and biotechnologies. Wind farms and carbon reduction tools are important but so are ways of helping us all work better, share information. Get the cloud right and potentially there could be an impact on road traffic as less people commute.

But more importantly for the large majority of the channel that describes itself as an SME there was little clarity from any of the main parties about their tax policies and the potential impact on smaller firms.

There was also a noticeable absence of talk about reducing red tape and making life easier for SMEs on the bureaucracy front.

Hopefully now with the shouting over what will emerge is some sort of certainty because this election has been used by many customers in the last few months to delay spending. Now that excuse has gone the hope is that things improve.

The politicians have done their bit but now its time for the real work to be done and as usual the channel will be rolling up its sleeves providing technology leadership across the UK.

So the iPad has already hit the 1 million sales mark making it a more successful launch than the iPhone. Steve Jobs, head honcho at Apple, must be very pleased and perhaps a little relieved.

Speaking to a transatlantic contact over the lunch table last week he was keen to flip out his Kindle and start telling me how great it was but his face changed when the iPad was mentioned.

"I wish it had some sort of bluetooth phone functionality, it's too big and it doesn't have good wi-fi connection," were the three criticisms he reeled straight off.

In some ways the reaction to the iPad reminds you of the current state of the floating voter. There are the hard core, those who know which way they are going to vote come what may, who rush out and buy the product because they love Apple kit and want to be in that first wave of adopters.

Then there are those that are yet to be convinced, like a quarter of the UK voting population apparently, who will tell you that fundamentally they like the idea of it but are yet to be convinced on the grounds of functionality and price.

Then of course finally there are those that will not know what you are talking about, the people who don't vote or think it's amusing for some reason to spoil their ballot papers, who will carry on leading their lives regardless of if the iPad is a success or not.

The challenge for Apple is that the experience of the US launch is likely to be repeated here, albeit on a smaller scale, but that majority of floating voters needs to be won over.

Nifty advertising will help as will the front line sales pitch in the Apple stores but as the politicians have shown over the last four weeks there will always be a significant number of undecided people and you have to work to win those over.

If Steve Jobs and friends want to make the iPad the sort of success the iPhone has been then he needs to roll up his sleeves and have a campaign to sway the neutral.

You know that we must be coming out of recession when big vendors stump up the money ro pay for research into working practices of the future.

One of the things that has been missing is the large crystal ball-gazing reports that are designed to provoke thoughts in both the channel and the customer base around just how the future might look.

That future might now work out quite how the researchers expect but usually things go in a general direction and those resellers wise enough to read between the lines can find out a few hints.

So it was with some interest that I flicked through Microsoft's Hybrid Organisation report looking for signs of how we will all work in the next decade or so. The phrase hybrid refers to an organisation that is flexible, understands that the lines of work and home are blurred and that technology needs to underpin these changes rather than hinder them.

Hybrid is described as people+technology+workplace and resellers that know how to help firms provide flexibility between those elements are going to be in a strong position.

The future might not work out quite like that but already remote working is on the increase and people expect to be switched on all the time. Those who think that the move towards remote working, cloud computing and smaller offices using hot desking are all symptoms of the recession will need to think again.

A bank holiday is the only day of the year when you start to think of Tomorrow's World and all the promises that show seemed to make about how technology would improve lives. We were all promised more leisure time, more opportunities for flexible working and dare I suggest it more happiness.

Only on those brief days when you know that normally you would be a at work, sticking with routines set down by Victorians, that your mind wanders to what might have been. Technology needs to play it's part in making that better life arrive.