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:


2010 WINTER CONFERENCE:
March 10 - 12, 2010
Orlando, FL - Walt Disney World Swan Resort


2010 EUROPEAN CONFERENCE:
June 23 - 25, 2010
Dublin, Ireland - Radisson Blu Royal Hotel


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.

ASCDI Inside
HP
IBM
Leasing
Security
SIP
Software
Storage

ASCDI Inside

MasterWorks International earns coveted HP Authorized Parts Reseller designation
MasterWorks International (MasterWorks) is proud to announce their new status as a Hewlett-Packard (HP) Authorized Parts Reseller (APR). MasterWorks’ designation as an HP Authorized Parts Reseller gives the company the ability to stock and sell parts for all HP systems, as well as for their full line of peripherals.  As one of only a handful of companies in the country with this ability, the APR status puts MasterWorks in an elite group of HP partners. Achieving HP Authorized Parts Reseller status highlights not only MasterWorks’ commitment to being the best, most comprehensive source for HP parts, but also underscores the relationship MasterWorks and HP have built through the years. Besides the new title, MasterWorks is also a recognized leading HP Remarketing Distributor selling End-Of Life, Factory Refurbished, and As-Is products to HP’s tens of thousands of HP Authorized Resellers across the United States. 
Visit www.mwintl.com.
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HP

HP to acquire 3Com for $2.7 billion
Hewlett-Packard Co. said it agreed to buy networking-gear maker 3Com Corp. for $2.7 billion in cash, the latest move by HP to bulk up its product line amid a broader push by the few remaining technology giants to turn themselves into one-stop shops for corporate customers. The Palo Alto, Calif., company—the world's largest tech company by revenue—also preannounced positive fiscal fourth quarter results. It posted an 11% jump in operating earnings and an 8% decline in revenue from a year ago, beating analyst estimates.
Visit www.hp.com.



HP scales new heights
Goodby, Siliverstein & Partners is rolling out a new HP campaign in January, which sends celebrities trekking 19,340 feet up Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness for the global clean water crisis. The public is invited to follow the seven-day journey in real time via a Web site that boasts a home page as tall as the highest peak in Africa. The site, Summitonthesummit.com, is built at 16, 709, 709 pixels, says the agency, in order to allow visitors to virtually join the group of celebrities. The climbers will use HP notebooks to chronicle their experiences and post photos, clips, blog items and tweets that will be displayed on the site at the altitude the content is created. A tech group that includes an agency employee will travel with the climbers to capture and post the content in real time. The communication effort leading up to the climb includes a TV spot explaining the ascent and what to expect from the online experience in the format of HP's "The computer is personal again" campaign, which focuses on the celebrities' hands as they discuss how they use their computers.
Visit www.hp.com.
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IBM

Connectria aligns with CCSS to maintain peak performance of its IBM iSeries hosting
Connectria Corporation announced its partnership with CCSS, a worldwide leader in IBM i System Performance Monitoring, Message Management and Wireless Solutions. As a result of the partnership, Connectria’s world-class data centers have adopted two key products within CCSS’s portfolio, QSystem Monitor (QSM) and QMessage Monitor (QMM). With Connectria’s extensive IBM Power Systems and iSeries presence within the managed hosting market and the quality iSeries system monitoring and message management of CCSS, a partnership is a natural fit. "Given our high degree of specialization in IBM iSeries environments, we clearly recognize the value CCSS brings to our data centers and customers" said Rich Waidmann, President and CEO, Connectria, Inc. "The CCSS QSM and QMM products enable Connectria to ensure the consistent reliability and performance that our iSeries customers expect."
Visit www.ccssltd.com or www.connectria.com.

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Leasing

Bloomberg: Equipment Acquisition was Ponzi scheme
Equipment Acquisition Resources, the seller of refurbished semiconductor-making machinery that filed for bankruptcy Oct. 23, was a Ponzi scheme that wiped out as much as $175 million borrowed from lenders, the company’s chief restructuring officer said. Creditors include Hewlett-Packard, with a $15 million claim related to equipment leases, and IBM Credit, with a $10.7 million claim, according to court papers. Fifth Third Bancorp, Ohio’s largest lender, has a claim of $6.11 million.
Click here to read this story in its entirety.
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Security

nuBridges and PGP Corporation partner to protect transported digital information
nuBridges announced that it has partnered with PGP Corporation to provide nuBridges Exchange customers with PGP encryption technology. Utilizing the PGP Software Development Kit (SDK) from PGP Corporation, nuBridges has now integrated the award winning, trusted PGP encryption technology into the nuBridges Exchange managed file transfer (MFT) and B2B gateway software solution. nuBridges Exchange helps organizations safely share documents and files internally and with business partners, to monitor and manage the flow of information, and to meet governance and compliance requirements. To support the heterogeneous requirements of today’s extended enterprise, it supports multiple protocols including sFTP (SSH), FTPs (SSL), FTP with OpenPGP, HTTPs, and AS2; runs on Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and AS/400; and handles transfers to and from mainframe, midrange and workstation endpoints.
Visit www.nubridges.com or www.pgp.com.




Somansa introduces the Mail-i appliance server
Somansa launched the Somansa Mail-i appliance box for small businesses, which manages electronic messages for regulatory compliance and data leakage security. Somansa provides companies with total electronic messaging management solutions to monitor, block, archive, and retrieve messages using powerful search and security policy functions. Somansa Mail-i supports various electronic messages including Email, Web-based email, Instant Messenger, FTP, Telnet, HTTP, P2P Application, Tunnel, Proxy, Terminal, and other Port 80 traffic. The Somansa Mail-i appliance is an affordable and easy to use solution specially designed for small businesses with approximately 75 users, and is also available for medium and large enterprises.
Visit www.somansatech.com.
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SIP

SIP Forum forms Smart Grid Special Interest Group
The SIP Forum announced that it has recently formed a new Smart Grid Special Interest Group (SIG) with the focus of evaluating the appropriateness of using SIP as a protocol for a number of Smart Grid areas, including the Home Area Network (HAN), Utilities' Operational Network, and PEV (Plug-In Vehicle) deployments. The Smart Grid initiative is founded on the premise that communication between devices using standard protocols will bring significant value to the electricity industry. The challenges facing the electricity industry are very similar to the challenges that the telecommunications industry faced a decade ago which subsequently led to the deployment of IP based networks and SIP as a de-facto protocol for session management. It is the SIP Forum's belief that the 'communications overlay network' of the Smart Grid industry is very similar to the communications network of the telecommunications industry, and it would benefit the Smart Grid immensely to assess how protocols such as SIP addressed the challenges in the telecommunications industry and how it may be able to address their challenges.
Visit www.sipforum.org.
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Software

BlueZone 5.1 certified for Microsoft Windows 7
Rocket Software announced that BlueZone 5.0 and 5.1 is certified for Microsoft Windows 7.  BlueZone supports both Web-to-host and desktop users, and provides automated migration tools and expertise to make the transition to BlueZone as seamless and fast as possible. BlueZone’s terminal emulation software is the world’s most popular replacement for desktop-based terminal emulators including Extra, Rumba and Reflection. BlueZone provides desktop and Web-based access to back-end systems including: Mainframe (TN3270), iSeries (TN5250), Unisys (T27 & UTS), Unix (VT) and Secure FTP.
Visit www.rocketsoftware.com.
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Storage

DataDirect Networks simplifies storage scale-out
DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that users can now reduce infrastructure and scale out complexity with a new file-system hosting feature enabled by DDN's Storage Fusion Architecture. With the first product to feature this capability, the SFA10000E Open Storage Appliance, users will now be able to host and serve scale-out file systems natively from the industry's leading transactional bandwidth storage system. These scale-out storage building blocks are designed to eliminate the need for external storage switching and file system gateways, radically reducing the cost and complexity of parallel file storage deployments. The Open Appliance offerings from DDN will include both the DDN ExaScaler platform, featuring the Lustre File System, and the DDN GridScaler platform, featuring IBM's General Parallel File System.
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