Larry Walsh Posts

I’ve spent the week monitoring the Channel-Lands from afar in the Far East this past week. Honestly, I’ve been a bit disconnected between trying to keep up with a regular workload and taking in the sights and sounds of Shanghai and the surrounding countryside. Nevertheless, all of the headlines and drama of the channel back home have found me behind the Great Firewall of China. Here’s what tops my list for the stories of the week.Have You ‘Hurd’ about the HP-Oracle Drama?As we used to say in my ...

Dim news of the U.S. unemployment situation seems inescapable. The official unemployment rate stands at 9.5 percent. Despite trillions (with a big T) of dollars spent on stimulus programs, the sluggishly recovering recession isn’t doing much to spur jobs creation.Comparatively speaking, the tech sector’s unemployment rate – roughly 6 percent – isn’t bad. During the depths of the recession, IT vendors shed tens of thousands of workers, and solution providers eliminated jobs as spending grounded t ...

Hewlett-Packard showed no signs of disorientation or cowardice once it engaged with Dell in the battle over 3Par, a cloud storage specialist. After 10 days of bidding and counteroffers, HP emerged with the prize, and Dell was left to contemplate its next move in building out enterprise and business-to-business offerings.What can we in the channel learn from this bidding war? Storage is hot, but that’s too easy. The bigger lesson is mergers and acquisitions are a tool for accelerating growth and ...

The last week of summer is supposed to be lazy and quiet, and this past week in the Channel-Lands didn’t disappoint. Well, it was quiet with one exception in the ongoing HP-Dell rivalry. In fact, the quiet could actually signify something deeper brewing beneath the surface.PC Sales Rate Slow (or Is It?)Fears of a double-dip recession in the U.S. and Europe caused Gartner to revise its personal computer sales forecast for the second half of 2010. Originally, Gartner said PC sales would rise at th ...

On Capitol Hill, Congress is loosely debating the merits of nearly three dozen different pieces of cybersecurity legislation. These bills would impose new requirements for disclosing security breaches, guaranteeing the privacy of individual citizens and giving the government new powers in defending critical infrastructure and prosecuting a cyberwar.To date, the federal government has about a dozen or more cybersecurity laws on the books and scores more that address cybercrime and hacking. All bu ...

The cloud isn’t the most disruptive technology to sweep across the IT marketplace. It’s virtualization, for virtualization is the underlying technology that is enabling new architectures and delivery mechanisms for IT infrastructure, applications and data. Through virtualization, solution providers are delivering and end users are adopting new techniques for maximizing their IT investments and capabilities.We’ll be getting a steady stream of reports out of San Francisco as the virtualization zea ...

“Wall Street” character Gordon Gecko said in the 1987 film, “Greed is good.” Well, there’s plenty of greed to talk about this week in Channel-Lands. We have bad (and illegal) behavior revealed and a major bidding war to acquire a storage vendor. Not all the news is bad: we also get to celebrate stellar vendor performance and tips for building innovative businesses.Poor Ethics and Bad BehaviorNo industry is immune from greed and corruption. Even the channel has its bad apples. CRN isn’t just call ...

A lot has been said about Mark Hurd since his fall from grace at Hewlett-Packard, but the one thing that his detractors can’t take away is his aptitude for analyzing data and making rational business decisions. It’s a skill sorely missing in the channel, mostly because of the lack of tools and information.Earlier this week, analytics vendor CoreConnex inked a deal to extend its Corelytics Financial Dashboard to members of MSP University. The distribution deal is similar to a deal CoreConnex stru ...

Head-scratching. That’s the best way to describe the surprise acquisition of security vendor McAfee by chipmaker Intel. Sure, an imminent McAfee had been perennial watercooler scuttlebutt for the past few years, but everyone – and I mean everyone – thought it would be Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Microsoft or EMC.The market reaction has been swift. Since Intel paid a premium, McAfee’s stock soared nearly 50 percent on the announced deal; Intel’s stock swooned slightly. Partners have been seeking answ ...

Mid-August is the time of year many of us in Channel-Lands long for throughout the year. Moderate weather, a little time left before school starts for the kids, and everyone taking their foot off the business pedal just enough to get everyone a breather. Things seemed quiet this week until a bomb in the form of a massive surprise acquisition went off. And while unemployment woes and the economy struggles to regain its footing, there’s plenty of good news from IT vendor earnings reports. And ther ...