Upcoming Meeting Notice

The Association of Service and Computer Dealers International (ASCDI) is a 30 year old, worldwide non-profit organization made up of companies who provide technology solutions, technical support or value added services to the business community.

Members and non-members are invited to learn how to grow your business, find new business opportunities, hear from industry representatives and enjoy some fabulous networking events at our conferences:

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE: June 17 - 19, 2009
Prague, Czech Republic

FALL USA CONFERENCE: October, 2009
Location under review

Click here for more information on ALL ASCDI MEETINGS, to view the agendas, lodging details, attendee lists and to REGISTER AT THE EARLY BIRD RATE.

Upfront
Book review
Case study
Economy
HP
IBM
Intermec
Mobile
Open source
Recovery
Unified communications

Upfront

IBM withdraws offer for Sun
IBM Corp. withdrew its offer to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. for about $7 billion, clouding the prospects for a deal that would have shaken up the computing industry.  Talks were in their final stages, but IBM took its offer off the table after Sun terminated IBM's status as its exclusive negotiating partner, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the negotiations. The breakdown in the negotiations was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.  IBM was believed to be offering about $9.50 per share for Sun. That was about double the price the Santa Clara, California-based server and software maker was trading for when the discussions leaked. Sun still owns key server and business-software technologies that might have fit in IBM's product and services lineup. But a deal likely would face antitrust questions, and Sun has been pushing IBM to make certain commitments to seeing the deal through such scrutiny.
Visit www.ibm.com or www.sun.com.^Back To Top

Book review

Telecom for Non-Engineers

Telecommunications, by its very nature, is a technical field, but you shouldn’t have to be a degreed engineer to make sense of it. Telecommunications and Data Communications Handbook by Ray Horak is the one book you’ll need to understand the entire telecom landscape, from copper to fiber, wireline to wireless, LANs to MANs to WANs, TDM to IP, from AAL to Zigbee and everything in between. Written in a plain-English, commonsense style by an authority on the subject, this critically acclaimed book is at just the right level for the serious professional who wants to get at the whole truth—without the math.

Author: Ray Horak
Publisher: Wiley-Interscience (July 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470396075
ISBN-13: 978-0470396070
List Price: $99.95
Digital Guru Price: $79.96
Back To Top

Case study

CYBRA's EdgeMagic to help medical supply company comply with Medicare and Medicaid initiatives
CYBRA Corporation announced that Elite Medical Supply of New York has signed an agreement to deploy CYBRA's EdgeMagic RFID and Bar Code Software at Elite's West Seneca warehouse location. Elite Medical Supply, a durable medical equipment supplier which was established in 1997, specializes in disorders of the spine. Products stocked include collars and orthotics for lumbar bracing, cervical bracing and ambulatory traction, as well as electrotherapy and bone growth stimulation products. To combat home health fraud, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently announced heightened scrutiny of the home health care industry. The CMS initiatives include increased medical review and unannounced site visits of HHA (Home Health Agencies) and HME (Home Medical Equipment) and DME (Durable Medical Equipment) suppliers. According to Elite Medical Supply's owner Gary Nikiel, "CYBRA's EdgeMagic will give us a robust solution to respond to an unannounced Medicare audit. By using EdgeMagic RFID and Bar Code Software to track our inventory, we will be able to quickly retrieve records and match equipment to patients and HHA and HME providers. By supplying the information at a moments notice, Elite Medical Supply will always be prepared for a CMS audit."
Visit www.cybra.com.
^Back To Top

Economy

ISM: Majority of respondents say will benefit from stimulus package
According to the latest non-manufacturing sector report on business (ISM), economic activity in the non-manufacturing sector contracted in March, say the nation's purchasing and supply executives. Anthony Nieves, chair of the ISM Non-Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, said "The NMI (Non-Manufacturing Index) registered 40.8% in March, 0.8 percentage point lower than the 41.6% registered in February, indicating contraction in the non-manufacturing sector for the sixth consecutive month at a slightly faster rate. A reading below 50% indicates the non-manufacturing sector is generally contracting.”

Survey respondents were asked special questions designed to learn more about expectations regarding the Economic Stimulus Package. The questions were structured to determine if respondents believed that their industry and organization will benefit from the program as they understand it. Of all respondents, 52% indicated that their industry will benefit. The industries with a majority of respondents indicating that they expect to benefit are: Real Estate, Rental & Leasing; Public Administration; Educational Services; Utilities; Finance & Insurance; Construction; Health Care & Social Assistance; and Professional, Scientific & Technical Services.
Visit http://www.ism.ws/ISMReport/NonMfgROB.cfm.
^Back To Top

HP

Big Blue Products, Inc. becomes remarketing distributor
HP recently designated Big Blue as a U.S. distributor of HP’s refurbished and excess PSG business products.  Big Blue maintains a multi-million dollar, onsite inventory of personal systems including blades, desktops, notebooks, workstations and more.  Additionally, they specialize in end of life and hard to find computer parts.  The immense size of Big Blue’s inventory, their unique value proposition, and the competence of their technical sales teams make them an excellent source for Channel Partners.  Big Blue has been a remarketing partner for HP since 1997, and an Authorized Parts Reseller – permitting them to sell parts to authorized dealers, service providers and third party maintainers – for the last four years.  Currently, they are one of three distributors of remarketed PSG business products.
Visit www.bigblueonline.com. ^Back To Top

IBM

IBM announces program to help customers manage their infrastructures
IBM announced the iLoyalty program, a new initiative designed to help mid-sized customers update their System i infrastructures and reduce hardware and software maintenance costs. By moving to a newer solution, clients can purchase a more powerful system capable of running the latest software, such as business intelligence and web applications. Specifically, IBM's iLoyalty program offers AS/400 and iSeries customers an attractive option to move to new selected i Editions of the Power 520, Power 550 and IBM BladeCenter solutions with a no-charge IBM i processor license. Additionally, for a limited time only, customers can acquire selected IBM i user licenses at a 50-percent discount. This offer is available now and will be available until June 19, 2009 throughout North America. Customers can contact their IBM sales representative, IBM business partner or reseller for more information.
Visit www.ibm.com/systems/power.




IBM delivers cloud social networking and collaboration service for business
IBM announced LotusLive Engage, an integrated social networking and collaboration cloud service designed for businesses of all sizes. LotusLive Engage enables companies to communicate and collaborate in new ways without increasing the resources in their IT departments. The easy to use, security-rich services of LotusLive Engage include profile and contact management, online meetings, file sharing, instant messaging and lightweight project management capabilities. Integration between services is key to the design of LotusLive. The services are built using open, Web-based standards and an open business model. LotusLive services will enable "Click to Cloud" -- the seamless integration of the LotusLive online services with existing on-premise Lotus solutions. "Click to Cloud" will help customers extend the value of their existing investments by making it easy to bridge solutions inside the firewall to the cloud.
Visit www.LotusLive.com.
^Back To Top

Intermec

Intermec's business model changes
Intermec Inc. earned nearly $9 million for the last quarter of 2008, as the Everett-based electronics firm outsourced its production work to Asia to remain competitive in the global market. The company reported net earnings of $9.1 million, or 15 cents per diluted share, for the quarter ended on Dec. 31. That's down from $16.4 million, or 27 cents per diluted share, a year ago. During the fourth quarter, Intermec also spent $3.2 million moving its manufacturing operations to Asia as well as consolidating its depots to streamline its supply chain. It also took a $1.1 million flood-related charge for damages in 2008. Intermec reported a $35.5 million net income, or 58 cents per diluted share, for 2008. That's up from $24.3 million, or 40 cents per diluted share, in 2007. In North America, the company's revenues increased 11 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year ago. Its revenues in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America declined. Intermec produces computerized devices that help businesses and governments label, identify and track their inventories.
Visit www.intermec.com.
^Back To Top

Mobile

Google brewing 'offline' web office apps
Embracing the web's next-generation "markup language" - HTML 5 - Google is prepping versions of its online office apps that also work offline.  As Google revealed in February, it's already built an HTML 5 version of the five-year-old Gmail that runs on the downsized browsers of devices like the Apple iPhone and Google's own Android phones. Google confirmed the company is moving all of its web-based business apps to HTML 5, so that, in part, these apps are suited to devices with intermittent internet access. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C's) as-yet unfinished HTML 5 includes an app cache, which can automatically make local copies of, say, email or documents so they can be accessed when a device is offline. The other advantage of the HTML 5 Gmail incarnation is that it operates across disparate mobile platforms.
Visit www.google.com. Back To Top

Open source

Microsoft's latest open-source release catches a wrinkle
Microsoft has published its .NET architectural pattern under an OSI-approved open-source license to a mixed reception. The company's ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), released at Mix 09, has been published under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).  MVC is a design pattern that separates the business logic from the interface and provides a recipe for quickly and efficiently building applications. Bringing that to ASP.NET potentially helps the development of web applications built using Microsoft's stack. Publishing it under MS-PL also potentially extends those benefits to the Linux and Unix communities working with open-source versions of Microsoft's architecture. MS-PL doesn't restrict the code's use to Windows, so you can run it on Mac OS X, Linux, or Unix. There is a downside, though, and it comes in the way MS-PL lets you modify and redistribute the source code. The MS-PL license specifies: "If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software." Also, source-code licensed under MS-PL can only be licensed under MS-PL. There's also a question mark over how much freedom the ASP.NET MVC installer's end-user license agreement (EULA) confers on developers who might need to pass the code downstream to customers of applications they build that also require the installer.
Visit www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html.
^Back To Top

Recovery

SafeData publishes iSeries rapid recovery white paper
SafeData, LLC announced that it has published a new white paper titled "Best Bets for iSeries Rapid Recovery with Virtualization: An Executive's Guide to Affordable IBM iSeries Recovery in 12 Hours or Less". In this white paper, readers will gain a better understanding of the backup and recovery options available for the IBM iSeries platform and the value of virtualized recovery. The paper compares the benefits of virtualized recovery to traditional solutions for protecting the IBM iSeries and it discusses the cost differentiators as well as the risk and challenges of traditional methods. The white paper is available for download at: http://www.safedata.net/papers_reg_rapidiseries.asp.
Visit www.safedata.net.
^Back To Top

Unified communications

Plantronics teams with IBM to enhance business communication
Plantronics, Inc. announced plans for integration between IBM Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony and Plantronics' suite of Unified Communications (UC) products. Plantronics is participating in the Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony Validation Program to test its broad range of corded and wireless solutions to ensure full interoperability and easy implementation within existing IT environments. As adoption of UC solutions for improving business collaboration increases, Plantronics and IBM are working together to optimize the user experience for Sametime Unified Telephony and Sametime-based telephony and web conferencing. Customers using Sametime Unified Telephony with Plantronics UC products, including the recently announced Savi Series, are assured of plug-and-play simplicity, superior audio quality and, with Savi Series, enhanced agility for managing calls routed by Sametime Unified Telephony across multiple devices.
Visit www.plantronics.com.
^Back To Top