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:

IBM, HP, SUN/ORACLE, CISCO and NETWORKING, TELECOM, SERVICES:  Please join us at a RECEPTION in LONDON, ENGLAND.  This event is open to members and non-members.  Only $195.00 USD to attend! Come hear about the ASCDI's Anti-Counterfeit Policy and our update our Free and Open IT marketplace campaign and then network over dinner and drinks with your fellow IT resellers:

2011 EUROPEAN SPRING RECEPTION
Thursday, 19 May 2011
London, England

The following event will take place on the ROOFTOP looking over Wrigley Field.  We will eat, drink, and network while watching Chicago Cubs vs Milwaukee Brewers:

2011 USA SUMMER RECEPTION
June 15, 2011
Chicago, IL

2011 USA FALL RECEPTION
September 14, 2011
Boston, MA

2011 EUROPEAN FALL CONFERENCE
October 26 - 28, 2011
Hamburg, Germany

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
Cisco
Cloud
Dell
Forecast
HP
IBM

ASCDI Inside

New Orleans Conference on March 23 – 25, 2011
The ASCDI Winter Conference in New Orleans, LA was a huge success and relevant conference for all 100 delegates that attended.  We had a full house the first morning as Neil Vill, ASCDI Chairman, gave an update on ASCDI’s Anti Counterfeit efforts. The restaurant was packed for our LUNCH AND LEARN SESSION with three key account representatives from Northwestern Mutual.  The afternoon Scavenger Pub Crawl for Charity raised over $7,000.00 which goes to a Scholarship program to help kids get through college. The following day, every roundtable session (Sun/Oracle, Cisco, Services, HP, and IBM) was well attended. The Closing Gala Event was a private party at the famous Broussard’s on Bourbon Street.  We had fabulous food and wonderful entertainment by Bruce Daigrepont Band outside on their terrace.  All in all, the meeting was a huge success from everyone’s perspective.  To view pictures and presentations from this meeting, click on the following link: http://www.ascdimeetings.com/Pastascdimeetings.htm.



ASCDI membership adopts Reseller Anti-Counterfeit Policy to protect customers
Putting the safety and concerns of its customers first, the Association of Service and Computer Dealers (ASCDI) announced an industry-wide program to prevent the influx of counterfeit equipment into the IT supply chain, worldwide.  At its recent annual meeting, Members of the ASCDI adopted a sweeping Anti-Counterfeit Policy in order to eliminate, or mitigate the impact of, counterfeit IT goods and develop best practices and strategies to identify, inspect, test, properly dispose of and report encounters with counterfeit product.  Members pledged to quarantine equipment which is suspected or proven not to be authentic. Over the last two years the ASCDI has worked with law enforcement, manufacturers and technology resellers to establish the anti-counterfeit plan.  The non-profit organization continues to call upon all manufacturers to join the ASCDI in a partnership to eradicate the problem.  Besides pledging to work with the authorities and manufacturers when counterfeit equipment is discovered, the ASCDI will enforce its policy through the ASCDI Code of Ethics, which has been in place for over 30 years.  Customers of ASCDI Members can contact the ASCDI and file a complaint if they feel that they have not been treated fairly on a transaction with an ASCDI Member.  Violation of the ASCDI Code of Ethics is a serious offense which could lead to expulsion from the ASCDI.
Visit www.ascdi.com.
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Cisco

Cisco has the power: PoE shipment growth approaches 45% in 2010, says In-Stat
Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology describes a system to safely carry electrical power, along with data, on Ethernet cabling. This technology is especially useful for powering IP telephones, wireless LAN access points, cameras with pan tilt and zoom (PTZ), remote Ethernet switches, embedded computers, thin clients, and LCDs. As a result, port shipments are on the rise to the point where Cisco has seen a 45% gain in 2010, according to In-Stat. “After a sluggish 2009, Cisco’s Power over Ethernet port shipments took off in 2010,” says Brad Shaffer, an industry analyst with In-Stat. “Industry wide, shipments of Power over Ethernet ports remained relatively flat in 2010 accounting for about 15.6% of total port shipments. While Cisco is by far the market leader in Power over Ethernet shipments, the other top vendors also experienced an increase in shipments. NETGEAR and HP Networking both also posted impressive gains in Power over Ethernet shipments, rising 36% and 33%, respectively.”
Visit www.cisco.com and www.in-stat.com.
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Cloud

TechAmerica Foundation announces new commissioners on CLOUD²
TechAmerica Foundation announced 71 experts from industry and academia who will serve on the new Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD²). The commission’s three-month mandate is to provide the Obama Administration with recommendations for how government could better deploy cloud technologies, and for public policies that will help drive U.S. innovation in the cloud and spur economic growth.

CLOUD² will be broken into public sector deployment and commercial policy considerations. Technology visionaries Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com and VCE Chairman and CEO, Michael D. Capellas, serve as co-chairmen of the commission of experts. CSC President of North American Public Sector Jim Sheaffer will serve as Vice Chairman and lead the public sector deployment recommendations. Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Technology Policy and Strategy Dan Reed, who also leads the company’s eXtreme Computing Group (XCG), will also serve as Vice Chairman and will lead the commercial policy considerations portion of the report. The Commission’s recommendations for government deployment will be presented to Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. Commercial-facing recommendations will be shared with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Commerce Under Secretary for Standards and Technology Pat Gallagher. Joining co-chairmen Benioff and Capellas and representing academia will be John Mallery of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Michael R. Nelson, visiting professor of Internet studies in Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program.
Visit http://www.techamericafoundation.org/cloud-commission.

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Dell

Facebook ties up with Dell for 'open compute project'
Facebook, the world's largest social network, wants to get in on computer hardware as well. The company that revolutionized social networking on the Internet has teamed up with some of tech hardware's biggest names -- Dell, Hewlett Packard, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel -- to launch the open compute project. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the project aims to offer specifications and designs for more power-efficient computers that are specifically geared toward running Internet services, shared openly with other companies. "What we found over time is that a lot of the stuff that the mass manufacturers put out wasn't exactly in line with what we needed and what other social apps needed," Zuckerberg said. By sharing design specifications, he said he hoped to increase availability and demand for the specialized servers. Dell will build servers based on those technical specifications, while Synnex Corp will act as overall vendor for the systems. The technology will power servers in the social network's first custom-built data center in Prineville, Oregon. Until now, Facebook has leased data centers for its infrastructure.
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Forecast

Gartner raises 2011 IT spending prognostications
Market research firm Gartner has increased its estimates for spending on enterprise hardware, software, services and telecom - from a 5.1 per cent growth rate that Gartner projected back in early January to a 5.6 per cent rate in the most recent projection. Though the increase seems small, the commercial IT sector is so huge that a small change in per cent means a lot of money. In this case, it means corporate IT spending on the order of $3,598bn instead of $3,406bn, or an extra $192bn. As part of its most recent 2011 IT spending revisions, Gartner has taken a stab at adding corporate tablet sales to the mix for the first time; that is accounting for some of the change, but not anywhere close to all of it. Spending on tablets is, however, responsible for almost all of the expected growth in hardware spending in the latest Gartner forecast. Gartner says that companies worldwide spent $9.6bn on tablets last year, and guesses that they will spend $29.4bn in 2011. Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on tablet computers in the corporate space will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 52 per cent between now and 2015. The prognosticators say that enterprise software spending in 2011 will rise by 7.6 per cent, to $255bn, while IT services spending will grow by only five per cent, to $824bn. Telecom spending (data and voice services together) is still the dominant part of the IT sector, growing by 4.9 per cent, to $2,110bn.
Visit www.gartner.com.
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HP

HP suing former exec over theft of trade secrets
In a case that echoes of its turmoil with ex-CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard is suing a former executive, claiming he stole trade secrets before jumping ship to Oracle. In the lawsuit filed recently, HP alleges that Adrian Jones, the former head of enterprise sales in the company's Asian division, copied proprietary documents and e-mails about HP product information onto a USB device.  HP explained its part in the lawsuit: "HP takes the protection of its trade secrets and confidential information seriously. This action seeks to prevent Jones from using the theft of confidential HP documents to place HP in an unfair competitive disadvantage." The suit against Jones harkens back to the scandal last year involving HP's former CEO Mark Hurd and rival Oracle. Hurd was forced to resign after HP's board determined that he had violated the company's code of business conduct in light of a relationship with a former contractor and fudged expense reports. After being hired by Oracle as co-president, Hurd was presented with a lawsuit by HP, accusing him of breach of contract and the threatened misappropriation of trade secrets. That case was settled a couple of weeks later out of court with Hurd agreeing to honor his confidentiality agreement with HP but also returning some HP stock given to him as part of his overall compensation package.
Visit www.hp.com.


HP adds Egenera blade management to battle Cisco
HP is adding Egenera's blade management system as another arrow in its quiver in the continuing battle with Cisco Systems to offer the best unified computing services in the data center. Egenera will layer a respected high availability and disaster recovery system onto the converged networking that HP already provides with its BladeSystem c7000 enclosures. Egenera's own ability to supply converged networking puts it in a position to leverage HP's switching capabilities and add management features on top of it. HP blades and Egenera's PAN Manager management system "makes a great private cloud platform" for the highly virtualized x86 servers in the data center, claimed Egenera CEO Pete Manca in an interview. The management system treats a set of blades as a single system, with pooled memory and storage. It manages applications running on the blades as components of multi-tenant systems, and can apply chargebacks for their use to individual users. PAN Manager also converts the blade enclosure into a redundant, highly available computing system for critical production applications. In the event of a software fault or hardware failure, it offers automated disaster recovery.
Visit www.hp.com and www.egenera.com.
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IBM

IBM unveils cloud-computing initiative aimed at large companies
IBM unveiled new software to help large companies move some of their operations onto the Internet, the latest move by the technology company to capitalize on the fast-growing trend of cloud computing. IBM announced a new service--dubbed "Smartcloud"--that will enable clients to use a Web-based interface to install applications and configure databases on a platform provided by the company. The initiative is part of IBM's push to expand into the cloud, one of the fastest growing areas in information technology.
Visit www.ibm.com.


SugarCRM extends social business features in Sugar 6
SugarCRM announced new additions to Sugar 6 that enhance the product’s existing position as the leading CRM platform for social business. Highlights include integration with leading applications from IBM, Google, Cisco WebEx, Citrix Online and InsideView, as well as enhanced Sugar Activity Streams inside Sugar 6. SugarCRM has announced major improvements to its integration offerings for the IBM Lotus Collaboration product family, resulting from the announced acquisition of iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises. SugarCRM adds support for the IBM Lotus Notes product line, including native CRM support for the Notes platform and a Lotus Notes email and calendar plug-in. This new combination of additional functionality and connectors creates a fully integrated collaboration suite within Sugar. SugarCRM and IBM are also announcing general availability of Sugar for IBM LotusLive, first introduced earlier this year. Sugar for LotusLive enables Sugar 6 users to quickly schedule and host web meetings from inside their CRM solution, creating a more wide-reaching social collaboration platform. Sugar for LotusLive also enables users to upload, share and collaborate on important documents, such as quotes or contracts, right inside the Sugar 6 application – leading to more engaged customer interactions.
Visit www.ibm.com and www.sugarcrm.com.
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