3/06/06
issue
Next due date to submit stories: 3/08/06 to [email protected]
Tech's China
policy a 'disgrace'
IBM takes Advantage to its iSeries
resellers
ASCDI Inside
ASCDI Chair attends NATD Meeting As convergence continues, synergies grow between dealer
groups ASCDI Chairman Evan Windholz of Frontier Computer
Corporation attended the North American Association of Telecommunication
Dealers (NATD) Meeting in Orlando, FL, in late January in search of finding
synergies between the two groups. Windholz was particularly interested in
NATD’s expanding involvement with the Cisco product line, as well as other
products typically considered ‘data.’ “As telecom networking and data
networking technologies converge, it makes sense for the NATD and ASCDI
leadership to look for ways to work together and to develop meaningful
programming for both memberships,” said Windholz. The change in focus from used to new in telecom is another
shared experience. The two groups began over twenty years ago, both primarily
consisting of companies selling used technology products: computers in the
case of ASCDI and telephony gear in the case of NATD. Increasingly, however,
many NATD members have become authorized dealers of new complete platforms
and/or accessories, even while continuing to have a secondary market
business. As a result the NATD has been strengthening its direct
relationships with OEMs such as Avaya and Cisco. This shift occurred in the
data world some years earlier, so that the ASCDI’s migration path may have
much to offer the NATD as telecom evolves to a more software based industry. Visit www.natd.com. Billing
Verio launches business
management tools Verio Inc., a US-based subsidiary of NTT Communications
Group and a leading provider of hosting and Internet services for small to
midsized companies and partners, announced the availability of its Verio
Reseller Business Tools (RBT), a suite of tools designed to assist viaVerio
resellers with the management of their businesses. The new service will help
to ease the burden of performing many billing and accounting, reporting and
other tasks for value-added resellers, enabling them to focus on business
growth and customer needs rather than administrative tasks. The functionality
of RBT also ensures that users can better manage customer information by
creating and managing customer groups for customized mailings and email
promotions, and enable customers to update their own contact and billing
information and track trouble tickets. Additionally, RBT integrates with
Intuit QuickBooks Pro for automatic synchronization with order, payment,
refund, customer and product information, allowing resellers to streamline
accounting processes and improve financial planning.
Editorial
Explore the IBM Output
Environment Update In this issue: David T. Mendelson IBM
Power6 gets second silicon Some of the mystery surrounding the future Power6
processors from IBM Corp, due in 2007 in a new generation of pSeries,
iSeries, and OpenPower servers, has been dispelled as Big Blue presented a
bunch of papers at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San
Francisco. The Power6 chip is in second silicon, and IBM felt comfortable
enough about the state of the chip to do a little bragging. The Power6 chip will have approximately
750 million transistors, a feat made possible by the transition from chip
making processes with wires 90 nanometers in size to those with 65 nanometer
widths. Such radical shrinking in process allows transistors to be etched on
silicon much smaller, which, in general, allows processor cycle times to be
jacked up to boost performance. The Power6 chip is a dual core processor, and
it will look very much like a Power5 and Power5+ chip conceptually. The clock speed on the Power6 chips will
be in the 4 GHz to 5 GHz range, and the pipeline in the Power6 chip will be about
the same length as in the Power5 and Power5+ chips. IBM is also adding
electronics that allows it to take a central clock and use it to branch out
to other parts of the chip that dynamically reduce or increase the cycle time
of the electronics as needed by the workloads. By having a distributed clock,
the chip can run on a lot less power (you have to boost the clock signal a
lot as you add more and more, and this consumes a lot of juice) for a given
amount of performance. Visit www.ibm.com. iSeries
IBM takes Advantage to its iSeries resellers IBM has launched new Ts&Cs for its iSeries resellers,
in a move that some VARs have called the “future blueprint for all channel
programs.” The new terms will come into force during the first quarter this
year, and involve IBM helping its value resellers to make more margin on
certain deals, according to resellers. “We realized that we were losing
partners because we weren’t investing in the channel,” said Steve Gibbs, UK
iSeries channel manager at IBM. “So
we began working on this program two years ago to bring all our different
programs under one umbrella that partners can understand.” Gibbs said the new
program, Opportunity Advantage, is IBM’s attempt to improve the retained
margin in the channel. Under the Ts and Cs the base discount has been bought
down, and resellers have to register deals and the value around each deal.
“This means that VARs who add more value will be adding more margin.
Resellers can stack up margin according to how much value they stack up.” Visit www.ibm.com. Moves, adds & changes
Perimeter
Internetworking acquires Red Cliff Solutions Perimeter Internetworking, theleading provider of managed security services for financial institutionsand other businesses with high data availability and security requirements, announced their acquisition of Red Cliff Solutions,the leading provider of managed security services to credit unions. We are very excited about adding Red Cliff to the PerimeterInternetworking team. In addition to their dominant market share in thecredit union movement, they possess a very deep expertise in complianceregulations,” said Brad Miller, CEO of Perimeter Internetworking. “The addition of the CounterPhish anti-phishing service to ourindustry-leading on-demand platform is very exciting,” Miller added. “The Phishing problem has emerged as a critical challenge for creditunions. The CounterPhish service addresses the full phishing cycle fromearly warning of the incident through the final site take down.” http://www.redcliffsolutions.com/
or www.perimeterusa.com. Public policy
Tech's China policy a 'disgrace'
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