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:

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.

Cisco
Cloud
Dell
Fraud
HP
IBM
Market
No really...
Oracle
Security

Cisco

Cisco and SAP collaborate to enhance business intelligence
Cisco and SAP announced a collaboration to deliver optimized business intelligence solutions for enterprise, service provider and midmarket customers through SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) on the Cisco Unified Computing System server platform. SAP HANA is a multipurpose, data-source agnostic, in-memory appliance that forms the technology foundation for innovative applications. It handles business applications such as planning, forecasting, operational performance and simulation. SAP HANA's optimization rides on the Cisco Unified Computing System, which substantially increases the memory footprint and improves the performance of and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-data-set workloads. This innovative collaboration with SAP has been validated by the survey responses of information technology managers in the Cisco Connected Technology World Report: Part III, Data Centre, released in December 2010. About a third (32 percent) of the respondents indicated that improving agility and speed in deploying business applications will be their top priority for the data centre over the next three years, and 40 percent said that the increase in applications and data will most impact their data centre.
Visit www.cisco.com and www.sap.com.
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Cloud

New IBM cloud services to address education challenges
IBM announced new cloud services to deliver advanced software, computer lab resources and services to students and researchers at schools, colleges and universities, without the need for advanced IT expertise at those locations. The IBM SmartCloud for Education is a set of cloud services and offerings designed to help education systems leverage predictive analytics to get real-time insights on student and institutional performance, enhance researcher effectiveness, and alleviate constrained lab resources for learning. Schools can analyze their own data using new SPSS models and tools running in a cloud to identify at-risk students at an early stage. Additional cloud-based social networking tools help discover and recommend funding opportunities and collaborators to researchers. Students and educators can also benefit from self-service reservation of and seamless access to virtual computer resources both on campus and on the IBM public cloud.  
Visit www.ibm.com.
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Dell

Dell rumored to be looking at Brocade
US media outlets are reporting a Canaccord Genuity analyst's note saying Dell could and should buy Brocade. Brocade dominates the Fibre Channel storage networking business and has an Ethernet business courtesy of its Foundry acquisition. Dell – apart from its PCs, printers and services – also makes servers and storage. There is an increasing trend for system suppliers such as HP, IBM and Oracle to build converged IT stacks comprising storage, networking, servers and system software, inevitably hypervisor-based, as well as application middleware such as databases. Cisco is involved with EMC and VMware through the VCE concern which sells integrated vBlock systems using Cisco servers and networking, EMC storage and VMware's ESX hypervisor. Dell provides networking gear based on reseller and OEM deals with, for example, Brocade and Brocade's much larger rival Cisco. A purchase of Brocade by Dell would give it the third hardware leg - the networking leg - of a converged IT stack, enabling it to better compete with its three IT system selling rivals and the VCE trio.
Visit www.dell.com and www.brocade.com.
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Fraud

Man sentenced to prison for defrauding Cisco
A Maryland man has been sentenced to seven years in prison for directing a multimillion-dollar warranty fraud scheme targeting Cisco Systems, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. Iheanyi Frank Chinasa, 39, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Chinasa and partner Robert Kendrick Chambliss submitted 414 equipment return requests to Cisco from 2007 to 2010, with the pair sending counterfeit equipment to Cisco in exchange for replacements, according to court documents. Cisco returned more than 950 pieces of equipment to Chinasa and Chambliss, worth about US$27 million, according to the DOJ's complaint in the case. Chinasa built the counterfeit computer networking and telecom equipment the pair returned to Cisco, the DOJ said in a press release. Chief Judge James Spencer ordered Chinasa and Chambliss to pay nearly $18.8 million in restitution. Chinasa was convicted on Feb. 7 of one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, eight counts of mail fraud, one count of wire fraud and one count of obstruction of an official proceeding. Chinasa and Chambliss, 31, of Henrico, Virginia, were indicted in August. Chambliss pleaded guilty on Jan. 12 to conspiring to commit mail fraud and wire fraud. He was sentenced on April 13 to 12 months and one day in prison.
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HP

VMware helps move customers using SAP solutions to virtualized environments with HP converged infrastructure
VMware, Inc. announced the availability of solutions that will enable customers using SAP solutions to easily migrate to virtualized infrastructure powered by VMware and HP technologies. These solutions, which include HP reference architectures for use with SAP solutions, are designed to increase agility, performance and scalability of running SAP applications while reducing capital and operating costs -- helping customers accelerate their journey to the cloud. Customers looking to refresh their current hardware, migrate from proprietary platforms or deploy SAP solutions for the first time can benefit from virtualizing SAP solutions on the VMware platform, increasing availability of SAP applications and supporting key business processes more efficiently.
Visit www.vmware.com and www.hp.com.
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IBM

IBM and Solarflare achieve lowest latency and highest message rates
Solarflare announced the results of a recently completed multi-vendor benchmark test with IBM. The vendors used the STAC-M2 Benchmark to measure the messaging performance of the solution stack. Once again, Solarflare was chosen as the preferred 10GbE server adapter. The company has now participated in more audited STAC M2 benchmarks than any other 10GbE adapter vendor. Using standard Ethernet and UDP protocols, the mean latency of the solution did not exceed 10 microseconds, while the standard deviation of the latency was measured at zero microseconds. At the highest tested rate of 2.3 million messages / second, the mean latency of the solution was just 14 microseconds, while the standard deviation of latency was measured at 2 microseconds. These results are significant for IT managers and Linux engineers building high-frequency trading systems because they show that a low-latency, highly-deterministic system that achieves near zero jitter can be built with standard, off-the-shelf Ethernet and IP network equipment. Other recent tests have used special protocols to get low latency, but at the cost of higher jitter, which is a highly undesirable trade off for high-frequency trading applications that require predictability and low jitter over the course of the trading day.
Visit www.solarflare.com and www.ibm.com.
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Market

Revenue growth for computer hard drives slows in 2011
Battered by various factors including rising sales of tablet devices, the market for hard disk drives (HDDs) used in computers will slow in 2011, with revenue growth this year decelerating dramatically compared to 2010, according to new IHS iSuppli research.
Revenue for computer HDDs, a category including drives for PCs and servers, is projected in 2011 to reach $28.1 billion. But while this is 4.1 percent higher than the $27 billion in 2010, the anticipated HDD growth this year almost halves the 7.0 percent expansion posted by the industry last year. And except for a growth spike in 2013 that will result in a 4.5 percent expansion of the market, HDD revenue will continue to show ever-smaller increments of growth in the years to come—slipping to a 3.9 percent expansion in 2012, to 2.8 percent in 2014 and to 2.1 percent in 2015. In addition to the influence of tablets, HDD sales have been impacted by rival storage such as flash memory and solid state drives eating into traditional hard drive strongholds and showing up in devices like netbook computers. On another front, HDD revenue growth has slowed as manufacturers introduced lower-priced drives with higher area densities. A third factor is more efficient cloud storage. As consumers and corporate entities replace local storage and look to the cloud, HDD makers lose another important piece of their market.
Visit www.ihs.com and www.isuppli.com.
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No really...

Larry Ellison issues statement
Larry Ellison recently issued this statement:
"All of the newspaper stories reporting that I am buying the house next-door to my San Francisco home for $40 million are untrue," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "No one has ever offered to sell me the house next-door for $40 million or any other price. If someone does offer to sell me the house next-door for $40 million or an amount anywhere near $40 million I will not buy it."
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Oracle

Oracle introduces Oracle Financial Services Hedge Management and IFRS Valuations
Oracle Financial Services Hedge Management and IFRS Valuations is now available to help financial institutions easily comply with regulatory requirements for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). New IFRS requirements for documentation and transparency make manual and siloed hedge accounting and valuation processes impractical. Given market volatility, hedge accounting must be a fully automated process. Oracle Financial Services Hedge Management and IFRS Valuations helps financial institutions: address regulatory requirements for IFRS by classifying and computing the fair valuation of financial instruments, calculating effective interest rate, and computing and monitoring the effectiveness of hedging relationships; create and tune hedging strategies for optimal capital utilization; monitor retrospective hedge effectiveness, apply what-if and stress scenarios to test prospective hedge effectiveness and readily handle hedge de-recognition processes; and leverage a common computation engine for consistent valuations between treasury and accounting, and utilize common data quality and reconciliation processes across finance and risk applications.
Visit www.oracle.com.
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Security

Global Crossing expands global portfolio of security solutions for enterprises
Global Crossing announced Global Crossing Security Solutions, an enhanced portfolio of security capabilities that allow customers to more easily and thoroughly protect, manage and monitor enterprise networks. The new suite of security features includes a firewall, intrusion prevention service, web content filtering, and antivirus and anti-spam capabilities, and provides reporting and analysis via Global Crossing’s award-winning uCommand customer portal.  The company is using a new Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform, which generates the reports and posts them to the customer portal.  The SIEM platform resides in the Global Crossing Security Operations Center (SOC), where security professionals, analysts and engineers monitor and assess customers’ network security.  Global Crossing customers also now have access to a full array of professional services from Global Crossing Security Consulting.  These consulting services provide security assessments and audits, penetration testing, and vulnerability evaluations.  Global Crossing professionals also review and create security policies and provide on-site incident response services.
Visit www.globalcrossing.com.
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