Larry Walsh Posts

For most of us in the Channel-Lands, it was a short week. The Thanksgiving holiday usually means two-and-a-half days of work, most of which is consumed with preparations for the annual festival of food, family and football. Ah, precisely the reason our forefathers ventured to this great continent. But the technology world didn’t stop spinning just because the menu included cranberry sauce and mashed sweet potatoes. Channel-Lands was still very active with the acquisition of Novell, Oracle winnin ...

Some of the latest Microsoft TV commercials reflect scenes familiar to us all: stranded at airports waiting for crowded flights. In one spot, a couple is dismayed by the wait time for their delayed flight. How will they pass the time? “To the Cloud,” the man exclaims! He connects to his home PC to access a recorded TV show, “Celebrity Rehab: Season Premier.” Boredom abated, his wife says, “Yeah cloud.”Is this the cloud? Or better yet, what is the cloud?Defining cloud computing continues to confo ...

Despite all the attention placed on the importance of health care records and patient confidentiality, U.S. hospitals say data breaches are a fairly common and expensive experience, according to a new report by the Ponemon Institute. The study, sponsored by ID Experts, released last week finds that data breaches are exacting a heavy toll on health care providers. Sixty percent had more than two security breaches in the last year, and the average security breach costs $2 million in direct and in ...

The good people of the Channel-Lands are growing tired of the calendar packed with vendor and industry channel events. The last thing many VARs want to do is climb on another plane to go to Las Vegas or Orlando for another confab. And that’s partly why Comdex returned this week as a virtual trade show. It’s one of the many big things happening in the Channel-Lands this week.Comdex Returns Virtually; RetroDex Debuts LiveBack from the dead, virtually, this week was Comdex. Everything Channel reviv ...

Last night at an event at the Seattle Music Experience, I met a couple of seasoned IT professionals – one a former head of security for a major (albeit defunct) bank. When I say they are “seasoned”, I mean their experience is matched by the number of gray hairs on their head. They had worked for major corporations, held numerous technical and professional certifications, and both are out of work and back in school.Continual education is one of underpinnings of the technology industry. Vendors re ...

Cloud computing is the much overhyped term reflecting businesses migrating their consumption of applications and IT infrastructure to services remotely delivered over the Internet. There’s no question that “the cloud” is transforming the way businesses use and pay for IT, as well as how vendors develop and sell technology. But where does the channel fit into that equation?A new survey by IBM and MicroScope of solution providers in the British Isles asks that very question: What impact will the c ...

Just when you thought the good times were back again, Cisco comes out with an earnings report and forecast that don’t exactly instill confidence in the tech world. That’s just one of the big stories in the Channel-Lands this week, and thankfully not all the headlines are grim.Cisco Earnings Shake Tech ConfidenceCisco Systems has long stood as bellweather of the tech market’s health, so it came as no surprise when Wall Street analysts were spooked by the networking company’s soft quarterly earnin ...

It wasn’t intended to be the highlight of the Symantec Partner Engage conference, but it is creating a lot of buzz among Big Yellow’s partners: the Symantec Digital Whiteboard. Developed exclusively by Symantec, the Digital Whiteboard is a downloadable application with a patent-pending file type designed to give users the means of communicating concepts, ideas and plans just as they would with a physical whiteboard but with the benefit of being able to save, share and iterate.The Digital Whitebo ...

While many solution providers spent the last week in Orlando for the ConnectWise IT Nation conference or Las Vegas for the Symantec Partner Engage confab, those who remained at home in the Channel-Lands were busy absorbing several significant news stories – including Google getting aggressive in the federal market, the birth of a new billion-dollar VAR and new data on channel performance.Google Sues Feds over Microsoft DealLawsuits between vendors isn’t uncommon, just look to the legal row betwe ...

Finally, Microsoft has something to celebrate: Windows 7. More than 240 million licenses have sold since its release a year ago. It’s an amazing accomplishment considering the beleaguered Windows Vista only sold 300 million copies over its lifetime and most of those became shelfware collecting dust.But is Windows 7 the last hurrah for Microsoft and the desktop operating system? Outgoing Microsoft chief architect Ray Ozzie seems to think so. In a farewell memo sent to Microsoft employees that som ...