Rumours

I've heard a couple of juicy acquisition rumours are circulating. I may be a bit behind the time actually, Googling them brings up stories from weeks ago. Finger back on pulse from now on...

Firstly, I've heard that VMware may be looking at buying Novell. This I can fully understand, VMware need to work with a full-blown operating system and they'll never be on Microsoft's Christmas card list. Novell also bought PlateSpin a while back so VMware would inherit those VM reconnaissance, right-sizing and management capabilities. I just wonder what they'd be prepared to pay; Novell have refused $1 billion in the past. VMware have loads of cash and I can't see Novell attracting any other serious suitors in the way 3Par did recently so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Quite honestly, I think VMware would be far better off buying F5 - especially if they are serious about delivering desktops.

The figure of $1 billion pales into insignificance compared to the other rumour I've heard though: EMC being bought by Cisco. Can you imagine it? This would comfortably be the most significant IT acquisition ever, both in terms of value as well as industry fallout. Symantec paid $13 billion for Veritas, HP paid $25 billion for Compaq but, according to V3, this could be the largest ever. Regardless of what the final figure is, it will have to be north of $30 billion anyway - surely?

There are thousands of people better qualified to assess the impact of something like this than I but, in all honesty, I must admit I'd be surprised if it did happen. At least right now anyhow. Not that Cisco couldn't afford it - it has $26 billion in the bank at the moment - I'm just not sure shareholders would approve of such a major play in these times. Yes it would extend their reach further up the stack and the whole EMC/VMW/RSA Security family is a great proposition but banks are still jumpy and debt ain't cheap.

My, my, my - and there was me thinking I was quids in by selling a golf trolley I won in a raffle for 300 quid.

The new practice laid bare

The new virtualisation practice is now up and running at COMPUTERLINKS and things are moving on incredibly quickly. All the legals are long gone, the official launch PR has been and gone, the vendors are bedding in nicely and getting to know COMPUTERLINKS as a company and we are now concentrating on going to market with their solutions. The most recent development has been the confirmation of two major events and, if you would like to hear more about what we are doing, these would be the best opportunities:

1. We will be exhibiting, together with all our new vendors, at IP Expo in Earls Court, London on the 20th / 21st October. You are very welcome to come along, meet the guys and see the technology in action in some cases. You can register for free entry through our dedicated IP Expo portal.
2. Alternatively, we are also holding an official launch event for the new virtualisation and cloud computing practices in our London offices on Friday 8th October. More information and registration for this is through the COMPUTERLINKS website.

Would be great to see at one of these opportunities but, of course, if you can't make either, we'd be more than happy to come and see you face to face at your offices as well.

Security in a virtualised world

COMPUTERLINKS, together with several of our vendors, recently sponsored the CRN Golf Day at Foxhills in Surrey. A large part of the sponsorship package was the filming of an expert panel discussing the questions and issues around security in the modern, virtualised data-centre. CRN provided all of the filming and editing and the final version is now ready. CRN are currently showing it on their homepage. Have a look for yourself, it lasts about half an hour:

http://tinyurl.com/2bosx67

The panel is a great line-up. It consists of:

1. My boss, David Ellis, Director of New Technology and Services here at COMPUTERLINKS
2. Caroline Ikomi who is Technical Director at Check Point
3. John Hurley, Senior Technical Consultant at RSA
4. Andy Dancer, CTO at Trend Micro and
5. Nick Hutton, Technical Director at Virtual Machine Company.

Let me know what you think.

Dearest trusted one

I've had a few of these emails in the past but none has captured my attention like this one did. Needless to say I made contact immediately and am arranging the transfer of deeds to my house to this poor unfortunate woman as fast as the legal process will allow. Here, verbatim, was the desperate plea for help that so tugged at my heart strings.

Dearest trusted one,

Based on the trust and God's divine guidance that I have this great oppoutunity linking up to you, though we have not meet before but I believe that one have to risk in confiding his secret to succeed sometimes in life. My name is Sussan Bien Salah, 20 years old i am deaf and dum.And i am only daughter of chief/Mrs Ali Salah a major cocoa exporter cum politician.I am native of Lorma in western part of liberia,Africa.I was born out of tragic fate.my mother died from cancer when i was only 4 years old,my father nurtured me with great care and love before he met his own untimely death on the way coming back from business trip from overseas,on his arrival to the airport his driver went to drove him back home on the way they have a fatal car accident which killied his driver at spot while my father spent 3 painful days at hospital before dying.my uncle seized all my father's companies and properties because of our traditionl believe that i'm a woman and deaf and dum.I was left with nothing and dropped out of shool because of finacial difficulties and my uncle's wicked attitude.

my father let me know a deep secret on his sick bed which I want to share with you in a full confidentiality.He deposited a huge sum of (18.5million USD)in one of reputable bank here because of polictical instability in our country Liberia without the knowledge of my uncle.presently i'm in Burkina Faso since the civil war broke out in liberia as a refugee in one of missionary home while my uncle flew to the london with his children.although i have contacted the bank they comfirmed the funds.

Dearest all I want you to do for me is to step forward as my foreign partner to the bank so that the money will be retrieve,I have all the neccesary information to back you up.i will sincerely give you 15% out of the money,5% for any expenses incurred during the transaction and the rest will be used for any investement preferred by you in your country. I am pleading to you with the name of Almighty Allah to help me out of this problem.I am kindly waiting for your soonest response. MAY Allah BLESS YOU.

All my love,
Sussan Bien Salah.

What a heart-wrenching story. The poor woman.

The COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack

A few months ago, COMPUTERLINKS announced that we were re-structuring our business slightly, to try and take advantage of other growth areas of IT. Many in the market regarded us (and possibly still do) as a niche distributor in the IT security space - although thankfully most also think we are very specialised and deliver considerable value in this area. We want to replicate this good reputation outside of the specialist security market; we've always had several non-security vendors in our portfolio but the accusation could perhaps be levelled at us that we haven't shouted loudly enough about them.

Enter Virtualisation, Cloud Computing and Professional Services. All of them considerable markets already, but with tremendous growth and potential. A colleague and myself were tasked with putting together a selection of vendors, products and technologies that make up an end to end deliverable and taking this to market with the help of several sales specialists and business development staff.

My area of expertise, thanks to 5 years as Citrix Product Manager, was obviously the virtualisation piece and the first steps on this journey are now complete. We announced our suite of "co-brandable" (everything we do is delivered through the channel) virtualisation services a while ago now and we have been selling the Virtual Machine Company dedicated virtualisation appliances for some time too. Throw in the market leader in desktop virtualisation, Citrix, some serious heavy-hitters in the virtualisation security arena and F5's storage management and app delivery capabilities and you could argue we had the basis of a great line-up already.

However, alongside all this is now a round-up of new vendors that really complete the COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack nicely. The products that will fall under my responsibility are as follows:

Akorri provides virtual infrastructure management software that assures performance and optimises utilisation and operations of server and storage infrastructure.

NetEx is a software-only, virtualisation-ready WAN optimisation solution, ideal for moving large data sets across WANs securely, swiftly and seamlessly.

SteelEye provides business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery solutions for Windows, Linux and virtual platforms.

Virtual Machine Company manufacture dedicated, purpose-built virtualisation hardware appliances, designed specifically for the demanding requirements of virtualised data-centres.

It's a great challenge and I look forward to helping shape the future of COMPUTERLINKS. As always, feedback very welcome.
Click here for the COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack

All change

Those of you who are subscribed to this blog on RSS would have had pretty continuous radio silence for quite some time. I do apologise but the title of the blog is virtualisation tribulations after all – it would be far too easy if everything ran smoothly, wouldn’t it?

I won’t go into the reasons I suddenly stopped writing in any detail, suffice to say it was decided that there was an inherent conflict of interest. My position as a Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS often permitted me access to information about products and companies that was not in the public domain. This, on occasion, presented a challenge when writing something that I was trying to make an interesting and thought-provoking (perhaps even controversial…?) read. For these reasons, I decided to stop writing.

However, things have now changed. I am no longer doing the role I was previously, I have now taken on the exciting task, as Virtualisation Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS, of setting up a virtualisation practice. With that, I wanted to re-start my blog and tackle some of the issues faced by IT administrators and resellers in the virtual world. A lot has happened in the last few months.