This seems to be my week for rambling about training. In the blog I write for my employer, SWOT Management Group, I coughed up these thoughts about whether or not vendors should tier their training and favor their most committed VARs. This post here for TechTarget falls more along the lines of suggesting where you might consider spending your own training budget.

CompTIA reports that in all but two of 14 countries surveyed, wireless and radio frequency technology implementation and service skills will dramatically increase in importance over the next five years. Wireless skills were actually the second most important skill set for future hiring in South Africa (behind security) and France (where it came after Web technologies.) The countries covered by the survey included the aforementioned nations plus … Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

When it comes to specific industries, healthcare managers and IT teams in the education sector were more likely to say wireless would be critically important three years from now.

What does this all mean? For starters, this just plain makes sense in emerging countries, where the investments in data communications infrastructure have been less substantial than in the United States. Why on earth wouldn’t you look to advanced wireless first in some of these countries? Meanwhile, the radio frequency movement, believe it or not, is gaining some momentum from all of the green technology and sustainability efforts going on. One big growth area will be wireless sensors: for home energy management applications, in the so-called smart grid (on your electric meters) and within data centers, where they’ll be used to track energy efficiency.

Here’s some more data on where IT managers surveyed by CompTIA see future potential skills gaps.

Heather Clancy is a channel communications consultant for SWOT Management Group, where she focuses on simplicity and seeing eye to eye. You can e-mail her at hclancy@swotmg.com.

Last week’s Microsoft Live Mesh announcement had many observers dreaming of the day when their PCs, cell phones and other devices would all communicate and share data with each other.

At least one Microsoft partner had an even grander vision — one in which Live Mesh would promote truly open interaction among different devices and platforms. But Microsoft is still stressing how Live Mesh will work with Windows and Windows Mobile (even though it will be able to run on any device). And now that partner, Digipede Technologies CTO Robert Anderson, is calling that strategy “disappointing.”

“… it is a little disappointing that there is such a heavy emphasis on Windows and Windows Mobile,” Anderson writes on his blog, Expert Texture. “I discount the coming Macintosh support because support for non-Windows mobile devices is really the issue. If iPhones and Blackberrys are out of the equation, then the synchronization story isn’t so compelling.”

Live Mesh will run, as Anderson describes it, “as a set of open protocols that anyone can implement.” He had hoped that Live Mesh would run on a modified version of Silverlight — Microsoft’s .NET runtime for Internet applications — which would make it available on any device without the need for third-party development.

As my editor Barb Darrow pointed out during last week’s Partner News Podcast, Live Mesh is starting off as a consumer-oriented strategy, but it will sooner or later have ramifications for business users, the VARs who sell to them and the ISVs like Digipede who develop additional software for them. And if Microsoft plans to use Live Mesh to help compete against Google in the SaaS and Web-based applications markets, more partners should be like Anderson and start paying attention now.

If you’re an ISV in the era of Saas vs. on-premise delivery models, the stack question has never been bigger.

If you’re going the on-premises route for your applications you must weigh the whole Java/Eclipse vs. .Net/Windows issue. If you’re going to SaaS, there are SaaS-based alternatives including Salesforce.com’s heavily touted environment to be considered.

Narinder Singh, founder of Appirio, says it’s cheaper and less risky to use someone else’s already-built-and-tested services stack to build and field your own software services. He’s cast his lot with Salesforce.com and Google toward that end. Singh was a featured speaker on Salesforce.com’s recent ‘Tour de force’ road show, so his preference is understandable.

At the Boston event last week,  Singh said Appirio saved $300,000 to $500,000 last year in IT costs alone by using Salesforce.com  (and Google infrastructure) as a foundation. It’s not coincidental that Appirio’s services–a CRM dashboard, calendar synchronization, online storage, are for Salesforce.com and Google universes.

The company, now up to 60 employees from ten or 15 a few years ago, uses exactly zero servers for development. It has no servers at all. Singh estimates that the company’s entire IT spend (not including laptops) is in the “hundreds of dollars per year per user.” That includes $50 per user per year for Google apps, $40 per user per year for the Salesforce.com platform license. Oh, and “we give everyone Microsoft Office” because they have to work with outsiders. So that’s probalby the biggest chunk of change outside the laptop. Appirio uses its own internal builds for recruiting, HR at very low cost compared to what he said could be $6,000 to $12,000 per user if SAP were used. (Singh used to be with SAP).

So Appirio gets all that foundational stuff and Salesforce.com doesn’t even get a cut of the action on Appirio’s sales. Hmm. Guess the upside for Salesforce.com is platform credibility and more application choices in its stable.

But Singh also says partners on Salesforce.com side of the fence can win deals by saving corporate customers significant money. He cited one unnamed Midwestern company that evaluated a Microsoft Dynamics on premises financial solution and a Salesforce.com competitor for about 1,000 users. The Microsoft software and services would have been over $4 million. The winning Salesforce.com/Appirio deal came in at between $1.2 and $1.5 million — roughly a third the cost.

The burning question then becomes whether that’s enough money for a services partner. “It’s enough for us to make money. It’s not clear whether it’s enough for Accenture,” Singh said. Accenture is a large services partner often aligned with Microsoft.

Another featured Salesforce.com partner paints a more nuanced picture because the ISV, Coda Financials, is both a Microsoft Gold ISV partner and a fairly new Salesforce.com partner. It’s upcoming on-demand financial services software, coda2go, build on Salesforce.com, will launch in June.

The speed of development was fairly dizzying using Salesforce.com, said Coda CTO Jeremy Roche. “From the minute we committed [to building the app services]  to cutting the actual application took three weeks. Now Coda’s been writing finance systems for 30 years so we know what we’re trying to do in terms of business requirements, but that’s still pretty fast.”

There was some retraining for developers in Apex vs. Java although even that learning curve was short because Salesforce.com’s Apex supports the Eclipse IDE which most of its developers already know.

Coda will continue to work with Microsoft for its on-premises implementations. But as a point of comparison, the company runs something like 356 servers for development of its Microsoft-based on-premise financial software compared to no servers for Salesforce.com.

Of course, with its mesh strategy, Microsoft will no doubt come up with a development platform for SaaS rather than the ad hoc toolsets it now offers, but no one expects deliverables any time soon.

Coda2go users will need a Salesforce.com license or Coda will OEM with Salesforce.com but again, Salesforce.com doesn’t get a piece of each sale.

Roche says the mixed stack mirrors his customer base. Some businesses are “actively moving to on demand. Some aren’t.” For companies wanting to deploy a a mix of both models, Coda will supply a connector to link on-premise and on-demand iterations.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

It’s Sunday and it appears that Yahoo has let Microsoft’s “take our offer or else” ultimatum pass without action.

By now everyone knows that those at the top of Microsoft are obsessed with Google. What’s unclear is if that power structure will be able to do to that market dominator what a Microsoft was able to do years ago to previous rivals: Companies like Lotus, Novell, and Netscape.

Maybe not. With all respect to Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, et al., Microsoft is exhibiting some of the same behaviors that led to the demise of its previous rivals. Namely, they appear obsessed with a competitor to such an extent that they may be missing other opportunities.

Novell owned the file-and-print then network operating system business. It built the best partner channel in technology. But Ray Noorda became obsessed with Bill Gates et al. So much so that Novell management took its eye of the prize. One could argue the same affliction affected Lotus’ Jim Manzi. Excel chipped away at 1-2-3 dominance As for Netscape, well; Microsoft spent billions building its own browser then gave it away. Bye bye Netscape.

Now Microsoft is focused on Google’s Internet search and ad business, but after many years and multiple billions it has thus far been unable to make itself credible. The Yahoo bid convinces some that it’s given up on fighting Google with its own technology and resources.

You have to wonder if the Google obsession has kept Microsoft from executing well both on its cash cows (Vista, Office 2007 etc.) and in new arenas beyond Web search etc.

So an interesting question is whether Steve Ballmer is the new Ray Noorda?

You tell me. Post comment below or send email to bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Salesforce.com is reportedly dumping its Windows machines (Dell Windows machines, to be more precise) for Macs on the next corporate upgrade. This post, found by my office pal Colin Steele, has all makings of a great story The blogger, an iPhone developer and thus probably not the most neutral of observers, called his own source “impeccable.”

Salesforce.com could not be reached for comment, but the tidbit, if true, is a juicy part of a much larger narrative.

[Update: No sooner was the publish button hit than SF.com CEO Marc Benioff responded by email: “Employees can choose whatever they want pc or mac or blackberry for that matter. all of our servers are Dell, however. My opinion is the client is a commodity.”]

Early in its history, the SaaS trailblazer touted its “tight” integration with Microsoft Outlook, blah blah blah. Not so anymore. Especially since Microsoft started beating the drum about its CRM Live/CRM Online whatever, which is now available.

Salesforce.com is now blaring about its tight integration with Google Apps. Google, Benioff reminded Boston attendees, is Salesforce.com’s “karmic” ecosystem. As he spoke, he was flanked by a podium running a Dell and a Mac. Hmmmm.

Again, if true, this would make Sf.com one of the larger enterprise Apple shops.

Mr. Impeccable, a Salesforce.com employee, said the reason for shifting 4,000 employees to Macs as the Dells come up for upgrade was: “Security.”

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Microsoft has lured David DeWitt, former head of the Univerity of Wisconsin Computer Science Department aboard as a Microsoft Fellow.

He won’t be leaving Badgerland behind: DeWitt will lead the new Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, an advanced development center right there in Madison.

Gray, a respected researcher and database guru, was assumed lost at sea last year after during a solo sailing trip. He was last seen January, 2007 and a wide-ranging, high-tech search was suspended the following month.

Wisconsin’s Computer Science Department has its share of luminary alums including fellow Microsoft Fellows Peter Spiro and Rakesh Agrawal.

DeWitt is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and remains emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin.

There’s been a lot of talk about Google’s recent moves into security, productivity applications and CRM. But the Mountain View crew may have some more, um, unique business plans up its sleeves, if the domain names it owns are any indication.

Royal, the official blog of website monitoring company Pingdom, claims to have found “thousands” of .com domain names owned by Google. Some of the more intriguing ones include:

• thesecretofburritos.com
• mariolovespasta.com
• googlepersonals.com
• ebay-google.com
• googlepaperproducts.com
• googlecasinogames.com
• googlereligion.com
• googledaycare.com

Some of these names have no apparent logical explanation. It would be nice to know what the secret of burritos is, for example, but I’m skeptical of Google’s expertise in the Mexican food market. As for paper products, I really don’t think Google will be competing with the likes of Dunder-Mifflin any time soon. And I know some people accuse parents of “using the Internet as a babysitter,” but Google Day Care seems to take that a little too far.

Some other names might give a little more actual insight into Google’s future, however. Does ebay-google.com foretell a future partnership with the online auction site? Is another registered name, googleauctions.com, a contingency plan in case that partnership falls through?

Google Personals and Google Casino Games could compete with similar services offered by Yahoo — or join forces with them if Yahoo teams with Google to thwart a Microsoft takeover.

And Google Religion … well, let’s hope it doesn’t get that far.

At the witching hour, Microsoft is set to post information, including a link to a “limited technology preview” of its promised Live Mesh platform. Info will be posted to the Mesh site.  Here’s Ray Ozzie with Jon Udell.  And here’s Abolade Gbadegesin talking Live Mesh architecture on Channel 9.  Also Channel 10.  And, don’t forget Live Mesh GM Amit Mital’s blog.

Generally, these promised infrastructural services would let your PC, cell phone etc. detect, recognize and interact with each other. The foundation would include unified device management, unified data management, unified application management and centralized management for all your devices.

The preview will be limited to Vista and XP machines to start with Mac and mobile device support to come

Microsoft pledges to make services the core of the platform. Yeah, that sounds like a no-brainer given the heat Microsoft faces from Google, Salesforce.com and other SaaS pioneers who beat it to the services punch, but it is nonetheless a key aspirational message from a company built on shrink-wrap software.

Microsoft also promises to use the same APIs on clients and in the all-knowing “cloud.” That sounds like a write-once-run-anywhere promise. (Where have we heard that before?) Also, an extensible data model and flexible application model.

Tomorrow afternoon at Web 2.0, Mital will talk more about the mesh view.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

This battle just keeps getting hotter.

Marc Benioff brought the traveling Salesforce.com “tour de force” road show to Boston today, complete with live customer and ISV testimonials.

Today was also the day Microsoft went live with CRM Online and is poised to take (at least some of) the wraps off its thus-far-very-vapory Mesh concept. (Does that make this Mesh Eve?)

Microsoft co-opted the mesh concept to connote the underpinnings of Web-connected people and devices. Amit Mital is slated to talk about Microsoft Mesh tomorrow at the Web 2.0 show and Microsoft is supposed to post related video and content tonight at midnight.

What really gets me in all this hoo haw, is speculation that Microsoft may not build its uber-web-computing platform on Windows. Umm, have any of those chatterers ever seen or used Windows? If so, that’s a big “duh.” Not even the great Ray Ozzie can, to borrow a once-favored Microsoft phrase, can put lipstick on that particular chicken.

No kidding, Microsoft has to come up with something new. And real

Benioff scooted out of the Boston event before he could be asked in person about these things. But he ain’t buying that Microsoft’s might means victory in SaaS. Asked by email to respond to the impending Meshiness (and also to Microsoft’s bundling of 5 GB of storage with basic CRM Online compared to 1 GB for Salesforce.com), here is his response:

“After a decade of using their monopoly to stop saas innovation through false prophecy and rhetoric; Microsoft has relented by delivering a service that is still too little too late without the platform as a service customers are demanding to succeed.

Microsoft’s answer to platform as a service is just more .net software in a world where cloud computing negates their monopolistic control of the Windows desktop.

Microsoft has let us all down through their lack of innovation; fortunately, the SaaS and PaaS movements will finally release us all from their old software models and outdated business practices.

We offer customer pricing of our services and storage for our customers through our global sales force and partner organization on a per agreement basis.”

Oh, and the inevitable, “aloha.”

So, Salesforce.com, which famously pioneered the Software-as-a-Service model is pushing hard to become a power in platforms. So is Google. So is Amazon. So is eBay. That sounds very much like Microsoft’s raison d’etre.

Microsoft meanwhile has to build credibility in “the cloud” with this mesh thing.

Can you say collision course?

This is gonna be good.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Dell is coming out with a blog specifically devoted to its fledgling partner program.

Dell’s small business community manager, Kelly Curnow, made the announcement on The VAR Guy blog, during a discussion in the comments section about Dell’s channel approach. The “dedicated channel blog” is due within the next month, Curnow said.

Blogs are an increasingly common way for vendors to reach out to partners and keep them in the proverbial loop on new training programs, rebates and discounts, channel events and other news. For Dell, the blog will probably take on a PR role as well, as the company tries to win over partners skeptical of its direct sales history. Dell just launched its first formal channel program, PartnerDirect, in December.