MicroScope articles from January 2008

MicroScope archives from January 2008

05 Editorial.(information technology)(Editorial)(Brief article)
January 14, 2008... Even before the year officially started there were signs of choppy waters ahead with the woes in the housing market causing everyone headaches. The media jumped on the bandwagon and decided, along with a few economic pundits, that it might...

04 Hardware.
January 14, 2008... Ingram Micro acquires Paradigm assets As predicted last year (MicroScope, 8 October) Ingram Micro has signed an agreement with Paradigm Distribution to acquire the assets of the auto ID specialist, taking it into a market that is tipped for...

18 Interview.
January 14, 2008... The latest research from e-consultancy shows the UK market for email marketing platforms and services grew by 24 per cent to an estimated value of [pounds sterling]221m by the end of 2007. Such growth shows that marketers are embracing email as...

15 Columns.(Computer crimes)(Column)
January 14, 2008... eSoft by-lined article for MicroScope Nov 07 Patrick Walsh, Director of Product Management and Marketing, eSoft Protect the SME from Bot Army Exploitation One of the greatest challenges for vendors and resellers alike is keeping...

15 Columns.(computer industry)
January 14, 2008... It has been the season for utterly pointless consumerism and all the gadget mags were awash with gizmos and tinsel. Oh and barely dressed hotties, naturally. But not 'Scope. Oh no. This is an august organ with no gadgets and nary a nipple....

10 Features.(computer technologies)
January 14, 2008... Wouldn't you like to know which technologies you should be investing in during the next 12 months? So would we, which is why we have asked the great and the good, and they told us that 2008 would be the year of 64-bit Graeme Clark,...

14 Miscellaneous.(brand new computers used by consumers)
January 14, 2008... One of the most exciting times for any customer is when they put their brand new PC on the desk and switch the machine on. As the screen kicks into life and the user 'oohs' and 'aahs' at the experience that is Microsoft Windows Vista the next...

04 Hardware.(retail computer sector and economic uncertainty may impact consumer spending)(Brief article)
January 14, 2008... It was a sluggish end to 2007 for some in the retail PC sector and economic uncertainty may impact consumer spending this year but corporate refresh cycles coming online could counter that slowdown. Reduced consumer confidence as a result...

01 News.
January 14, 2008... The high profile cases of government data loss continue to provide joke material for comedians and chances for politicians to score points off each other. But the continuing concern about data leakage will be one of the main areas...

08 Storage.(Information storage)
January 14, 2008... Preparing for storage Armageddon? Nicholas Carr thinks you should be, because computing-as-we-know-it is in the process of vanishing. A real big cheese in the area of computing, business and society, ex-Harvard Business Review editor Carr...

09 Tech Traders.
January 14, 2008... At the start of last year there were weighty expectations for Microsoft's Vista operating system and hopes that the wave of enthusiasm would filter through to consumers and provide a surge in upgrading. But that did not happen and the...

01 News.(MicroScope Award for Channel Excellence)
January 14, 2008... Time is running out for channel players who want public credit for their hard work by winning a MicroScope Award for Channel Excellence. The submissions for the ACEs 2008, which are to take place at the Park Lane Hilton in London on 21 May,...

01 News.
January 14, 2008... The chances of a reversal in the fortunes of Vista have received a major blow with Becta advising schools not to upgrade to the operating system. The conclusions of a two-year review of Vista from Becta informed schools that unless it was...

01 News.(networking vendor Aruba is to start chasing the higher education )(Brief article)
January 14, 2008... Networking vendor Aruba is to start chasing the higher education vertical in 2008 after a report last year damned it for being "invisible" in the sector. An Aruba spokesman refused to reveal if the change in strategy was prompted by the...

01 News.
January 14, 2008... Foundry is lining up a UK distribution deal to be announced in February as part of a big channel expansion with Avnet-owned Acal tipped as front-runner for the revamped partner programme. The move to two-tier distribution would be...

02 Software.
January 14, 2008... If there were a couple of areas that dominated the software landscape last year, aside from the hype around Vista, it was software as a service (SaaS) and the chase for the SME market. Hosted SaaS had a buzz that got louder in the year and...

03 Networking.(Information technology services industry)
January 14, 2008... The networking sector appears to be insulated from the economic slowdown spreading across the IT industry, but there have been warnings that although the network has made itself an indispensable business tool, nothing can be taken for granted...

12 Soap.
January 21, 2008... What is the best/worst advice you have received and from who? The best advice was: 'If you've got a problem, write it down'. My mother gave me this gem, and it has helped solve many a tricky work situation and allowed me to sleep on nights...

Harness the potential of LTO 4.(18 Interview)
January 21, 2008... How can the channel profit from the margins to be made from the first tape technology to incorporate encryption? The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Programme recently announced that licences for LTO 4 tapes are now available. This new format will...

Stay close, stay flexible.(18 Interview)
January 21, 2008... Retailers are used to shortening the supply chain to maximise value in their product lines. But the same principles can be applied to technology purchasing to improve business agility Household names such as easyJet and Dell have become...

05 Editorial.(Editorial)
January 21, 2008... One of the more important themes at this year's Consumer Electronics Show was energy issues related to PCs and consumer electronics devices. In fact, the Consumer Electronics Association is pushing major initiatives to get all of its members...

12 Soap.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Just before we let the issue of Keegan dissapear it is worth mentioning one conversation with a Newcastle based reseller. He admitted that the city had gone mad with the news that the messiah had returned.He was not sure (typical reseller...

10 Features.
January 21, 2008... Vista's struggle to gain adoption at the corporate level in 2007 has been mirrored in the education sector. In a report on Vista and Office 2007 published this month, education technology agency Becta stated that upgrading existing ICT systems...

10 Features.
January 21, 2008... To many people, including most of the audience at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 100 million would sound like a pretty impressive sales number. So when outgoing Microsoft chief Bill Gates revealed it had sold 100 million...

01 News.
January 21, 2008... IBM is to radically overhaul the way it operates in the SME market and next month will introduce a reward scheme to pay resellers higher rebates for securing new accounts.The Pay For Contribution scheme will recognise resellers that invest in...

01 News.(Survey)
January 21, 2008... Government spending on technology will rise nine per cent this year to [pounds sterling]3bn but resellers should note that improving business processes and bolstering security are top of public sector IT managers' priorities. According to...

05 Editorial.(Editorial)
January 21, 2008... 'The mid market' is one of those phrases that trips off the tongue easily enough, without it ever being totally clear what the person saying it means. It lumps together all sorts of parts of the market and the result is confusion, and...

Logical and physical markets to converge.(07 Security)
January 21, 2008... The idea of convergence between opposite sides of the same sector has been a market trend over the past few years, but so far has not been too evident in the security space. But those keeping an eye on the future are pointing to a closer...

Clustering to shape future architectures.(08 Storage)
January 21, 2008... Consolidation at disk array level is forcing major storage vendors to reconsider more scalable options that industry observers predict will replace monolithic systems in the not-too-distant future. Evidence of this can be found in Dell's...

Global expansion for Dell's latest acquisition.(08 Storage)(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Dell has paid an undisclosed sum for UK server and storage consultancy The Networked Storage Company (TNWSC) and plans to offer its services globally. The Surrey-based firm specialises in helping customers in financial services, retail,...

08 Storage.
January 21, 2008... Briefs Iomega expands portable hard drive range Iomega has launched models with dual interface and higher capacity up to 250GB in its 3Go portable hard drive range, showing off the latest devices at last week's Macworld Expo in San...

01 News.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... These days you don't see too many people harking on about broadband, with most of us just signing up to services as a norm. But for businesses the issue of looking after their broadband continues to be an issue and so a reseller promoting a...

01 News.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... The outcome for unsecured creditors owed money by Maverick Presentation Products following its collapse last year remains uncertain according to the administrator handling the company's affairs. The specialist AV distributor saw a downturn...

01 News.(Bill Donohue resigned as managing director, days later Daniel Nichols resigned his directorship followed by finance director Darren Hart from Ramesys)(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Nottingham-based education specialist Ramesys has played down the departure of more than half the board in three months and insisted it is business as usual. On 30 September Bill Donohue resigned as managing director, days later Daniel...

01 News.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Cisco has stepped up the security around its certification exams to eradicate cheating, making it a condition that digital photos and digital signatures are to be taken before tests are sat. The vendor is moving to stop the practice of...

12 Soap.
January 21, 2008... Apple showman This time of year is dominated increasingly by one company and one man. The turtleneck sweater sellers in San Francisco must make a fortune as Steve Jobs arrives in town to deliver his Mac Expo keynote. As the charismatic...

01 News.
January 21, 2008... ProCurve's recently appointed UK country manager, Darryl Brick, has given assurances to the channel that the future ownership of the company is secure. Talk of the networking specialist spinning off from its parent Hewlett-Packard has...

01 News.
January 21, 2008... The wider economic world may be battening down the hatches in the first few weeks of 2008, but a crop of record results from many IT industry players has shown that things are still ticking over nicely. * Intel closed its fiscal 2007 on a...

01 News.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Graduates and school leavers have been demonstrating less resistance towards careers in the IT sector as increasing numbers sign up for training courses. Vendors and resellers across several markets have previously complained about the...

01 News.
January 21, 2008... The cost of dealing in pirated software has been highlighted with a prison sentence looming for an online auctioneer who resold versions of specialist CAD software at a fraction of its value. The case of Michael Walton, who is facing a...

01 News.
January 21, 2008... The ranks of security companies offering a hosted model have been bolstered with the move by anti-virus specialist Kaspersky Lab to take the wraps off its service. The vendor follows in the wake of rivals including Trend Micro and...

BEA brings two-tier strategy to Europe.(02 Software)
January 21, 2008... Middleware specialist BEA Systems has opted to switch to a two-tier model in Europe, mimicking its indirect strategy in the US. The decision by the SOA specialist follows in the wake of rivals that have already set up channel programmes to...

Smaller vendors drive rise in profit warnings.(02 Software)
January 21, 2008... Despite a generally strong year in the IT sector last year, there were worrying signs that the software and services sector was not in a solid financial state. Figures from Ernst & Young revealed that the software sector was the worst...

02 Software.
January 21, 2008... Licensing role for Vear Computer 2000 has named Steve Vear as software licensing manager. He will be responsible for helping resellers to navigate through the wide range of vendor software licensing schemes that are available. ...

03 Networking.(Cisco Systems Inc.)
January 21, 2008... Cisco partner s2s acquired Another Cisco Gold Partner has fallen under the spell of an acquisitive suitor as security-focused managed services provider s2s was picked up for an undisclosed sum by Bailey Teswaine, the IT division of...

03 Networking.(Avaya appoints Mark Mitchell as vice-president of EMEA and Pat Hume, joined Avaya )(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Avaya VP to tackle channel issues Avaya's freshly appointed vice-president of EMEA channels, Mark Mitchell, has promised to continue the comms kit vendor's focus on becoming easier to partner with during 2008. Mitchell, who replaces...

Smart digital photo tools.(09 Tech Traders)(StudioLine Photo Classic 3 Plus by H&M Software)
January 21, 2008... It is one thing to sell a digital camera, but it is quite another helping a customer to get the most out of the purchase. It is quite understandable why people might take digital photography for granted now that cameras seem to be able to...

A stylish alternative.(09 Tech Traders)(Laptop bags)(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Laptop bags have come on in leaps and bounds in the past few years and are now a far cry from the clunky freebies you got with mobiles in the past. The initial inspiration of designers of laptop bags seemed to be drawn from the big, bright...

13 Back Pages.
January 28, 2008... What is the best/worst advice you have received and from whom? I read an interview with Anita Roddick once, who said: "If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just." Or, "If you think you're too...

Zeus partners AdaptiveMobile.(03 Networking)
January 28, 2008... Application traffic management software vendor Zeus Technology has signed an OEM partnership agreement with Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile to sell its ZXTM software as part of Adaptive's technology package for large mobile telcos. Adaptive's...

03 Networking.
January 28, 2008... Briefs Swyx introduces upselling scheme IP telephony vendor Swyx has launched a sales partner initiative. The Swyx Upselling Machine uses the user's licensing information on their current installation to identify further opportunities....

Brick intending to build solid ProCurve.(03 Networking)
January 28, 2008... When HP ProCurve's UK country manager, Jon Weatherall, hit the road at the tail end of July 2007, some in the channel rushed to paint his departure as the end of an era. But six months later, and with his successor now installed in the hot...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... With everyone feeling twitchy about the state of the global economy any vendor releasing figures understandably comes in for scrutiny. Although the majority of the results were based on last year's performance there were almost no indications...

05 Editorial.(Editorial)
January 28, 2008... Sorry if this column is a little late I had to spend nearly an hour warming up on the Wii before the editor allowed me to get up close and confrontational with the keyboard. Wii warm-ups are all the rage now, or at least they will be in the...

15 Columns.
January 28, 2008... 'Business Intelligence 2.0' is the term now used to describe the rapidly growing business intelligence industry, which was reported at Gartner's recent Business Intelligence Summit in London to be 'stepping up' and becoming a standalone...

15 Columns.
January 28, 2008... With the hysteria surrounding recent problems in the financial market and the recent run on Northern Rock, you'd be forgiven for thinking Marx was on to something after all and that capitalism was about to come crashing down. The fact of the...

15 Columns.
January 28, 2008... When Intel legend Craig Barrett stood in front of the cameras and answered whether or not there was going to be a recession he patted the reporter on the arm and told him that the media was helping to cause one. "It's not my fault," said...

Special report: Education.(10 Features)
January 28, 2008... With the month being dominated by the BETT education show, we look at the education market and ask if it is still a good prospect for resellers. Simon Vail reports Education At BETT, the annual technology in education event held...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... Azlan has appointed Avnet's Kevin Markwick to head up a new IBM Business Software unit as the distributor ups its investment in the IBM enterprise software business. Azlan has already grown its sales of IBM products significantly over the past...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... Cisco partners have hit back at complaints from customers that they lack sufficient unified communications (UC) skills and are slowing adoption. At the vendor's Networkers Forum 2008, one user, who asked to remain anonymous, said that...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... Lenovo will enter the volume server market inside 12 months after signing a licensing agreement with IBM to manufacture one and two-way rack and tower systems. The deal follows months of negotiations between Lenovo and Blue Blue, which...

Notebooks drive PC growth.(04 Hardware)
January 28, 2008... The EMEA PC market grew 12.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared with the year earlier, as notebook sales helped to offset a lacklustre performance in the desktop form factor. More than 25 million units were sold across the...

Latest data loss puts focus on encryption.(07 Security)
January 28, 2008... The channel has been handed a gift with yet another loss of confidential data, this time from a Ministry of Defence laptop. The revelation towards the end of last year that HMRC had misplaced disks containing the records of 25 million...

Websense retains all distributors after merger.(07 Security)(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... Websense has dusted down its channel strategy following the completion of its merger with SurfControl, retaining the complete line-up of distributors used by both vendors. The number of distributors had been under review, but all four -...

Partial refreshes to rise up green agenda.(08 Storage)(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... In one of the more off-the-wall predictions for the storage market in 2008, IDC believes customers will increasingly demand partial hardware replacements to cut costs and up the ante on green initiatives. To date, the environmental debate...

Customers switch on to lights-out data centres.(08 Storage)(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... An era of unmanned data centres is drawing nearer as environmental and economic factors drive users towards a world where the technology takes the strain. David Pritchard, senior technology strategist at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, said...

08 Storage.
January 28, 2008... Briefs Panasas storage wins Intel certification Panasas has launched ActiveStor Storage Clusters, one of the first parallel storage solutions to be certified as part of the Intel Cluster Ready programme. Products in the programme have...

09 Tech Traders.(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... Technology becomes accepted into the mainstream so much more quickly than it ever used to, with home users embracing anything that will make their lives easier. Two things have driven wireless networking: the growth in high speed access,...

03 Networking.(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... The channel has been warned that a growing number of white-label hosted network services solutions could create an unsustainable bubble. In recent months a large number of resellers have been encouraged to get into network services to boost...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... Several major manufacturers have made, or are planning to make, changes to senior management in the UK before the year gets started in earnest. Nearly one and a half years after being made partner director for the UK and Ireland at EMC...

01 News.(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... In the new age of Web 2.0, businesses need to keep a tighter grip on security and corporate policies or risk heavy fines, according to Logicalis, which has acquired specialist governance vendor Iconium. The integrator last week bought the...

12 Soap.
January 28, 2008... What recession? It has been a strange week, with people popping up at every opportunity to talk us into recession. So a pat on the back should go to Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, who appeared on BBC Breakfast live from the economic...

01 News.(Forum of Private Business )
January 28, 2008... The UK's much-vaunted credentials as an entreprenuerial economy have come under fire from research that claims the growth prospects for small businesses are diminishing and that estimates on the numbers of SMEs are wrong. Claims by the...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... With everyone feeling twitchy about the state of the global economy any vendor releasing results understandibly comes in for scrutiny. * Those looking for signs of some sort of downturn would have struggled to find them in IBM's fourth...

01 News.
January 28, 2008... A 10 per cent reduction in software piracy could contribute a hefty [pounds sterling]1bn and 13,000 jobs to the UK economy. The latest costs of software piracy have been estimated by IDC in research commissioned by the Business Software...

01 News.(Brief article)
January 28, 2008... IBM has raised its ambitions in the SME software arena after taking the wraps off several initatives to seize a slice of the Software as a Service (SaaS) market. The vendor has been banging the drum at its Lotusphere event where it made...

02 Software.
January 28, 2008... The open source community and vendors promoting software-as-a-service (SaaS) will present a serious threat to software giants embedded in local Government as IT managers scrutinise budgets. This was according to the Society of IT Managers...

02 Software.
January 28, 2008... Sun's $1bn acquisition of MySQL has been described as "validating" the open source model. That verdict was given by Roger Burkhardt, CEO of open source database vendor Ingres, and echoes Sun's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz in his blog....

Alcatel-Lucent shuffles team.(03 Networking)
January 28, 2008... Troubled networking giant Alcatel-Lucent has made some internal changes to its senior management after appointing its networks operations head, Andy Williams, as services business president. Williams replaces John Meyer, who has left to...

13 Back Pages.
January 28, 2008... TENDER NOTICES 298764, Tender Invitation UK-Welwyn Garden City: network cabling Provision and maintenance of structured cabling systems. 12635, Tender Invitation UK-Stafford: IT equipment Supply and deliver ICT...