Business intelligence software vendor Cognos’ acquisition of corporate performance management vendor Applix will unify the two companies’ partner networks, said Cognos’s vice president of product marketing Doug Barton.

VARs and system integrators (SIs) who currently sell either company’s products will be able to train for and sell both after the merger, Barton said. Although he declined to comment on the eventual partner network’s structure after the merger in detail, citing legal confidentiality agreements, Barton did say that Applix resellers will be brought into the fold of Cognos’ partner network.

“We do have a very, very strong infrastructure around partners, and we would hope they would be able to avail themselves of that infrastructure and its leadership,” he said. “It’s gotten the time and attention of our senior management.”

Barton would not comment on whether Applix partners would report to new regional managers after the acquisition, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter this year. Cognos does not expect much channel conflict as the companies’ partners merge, essentially because there will be enough demand to keep all partners in business, Barton said.

“We’re going to embrace partners to service that demand,” he said, “and for those reasons we expect that the areas of potential conflict will be minimal.”

Analysts predict a convergence of BI and CPM, and Barton said that Cognos and Applix target similar companies, those in the midmarket and large enterprise spectrum.

Oracle unveiled the latest version of its enterprise-edition database yesterday, but the product isn’t likely to be huge news for most resellers and system integrators, according to the company’s president.

At a press conference following the Oracle Database 11g release in New York yesterday, Oracle’s president Charles Phillips fielded a question about channel partners’ roles in selling the Oracle enterprise database.

“The way it works is today the channel, at least for the [high-volume] distributors, [is] mainly focused on SE1 [Standard Edition One] and SE. Because of the packaging and the pricing for that market, that’s appropriate,” Phillips said. “There’s nothing prohibiting them from selling the high-end product, it’s just not their natural space.”

Phillips added that about 90% of sales for the Standard Edition and Standard Edition One product lines go through the channel. Those lines of software are prepackaged and stripped-down versions of Oracle’s customers geared for the lower end of the SMB market. Oracle launched a new partner program for those SMB products last month which allows resellers to sell them without formally enrolling in the company’s partner program.

IBM announced today a set of new sales and marketing resources for its small and midsized business (SMB) partners, including systems integrators, to help those partners push more products and services based on IBM’s platforms. While most of those partners are independent software vendors (ISVs), SIs will also be able to use the services, said IBM’s vice president of strategy for ISV & developer relations Chris Wong.

Members of IBM’s PartnerWorld — the company’s formal partner program for VARs, SIs and ISVs — will have access to “marketing resource managers” who will try to understand each partner’s specific needs and formulate a sales, marketing and lead-generation plan with that partner, Wong said.

Many of IBM’s SMB partners “don’t really do a lot of marketing — or, if they do do a lot of marketing, they don’t really have a lot of resources, skills to do that,” he said.

The company is also working to connect more SIs and ISVs with one another, he said, including a series of Second Life meetings that started this year.

IBM also announced today a new Innovation Center in Dublin, Ireland, and plans for four additional centers in Europe. Innovation Centers are locations where PartnerWorld members — mostly ISVs — can get access to IBM hardware, software and technicians. The five European centers announced today would bring the total number of centers to 38 world-wide.

Oracle announced today a new program aimed at bringing downscaled versions of its software to small and midsized businesses (SMBs) through resellers and regional systems integrators (SIs).

Through the Value Added Distributor (VAD) Remarketer program, resellers and customers will be able to purchase SMB-tailored software under a simplified, standard licensing agreement. Those purchases will have to go through Oracle’s VAD remarketers, currently Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Resellers selling those products will not have to join the Oracle Partner Network (OPN), which requires a contract and a program fee.

Oracle products currently require lengthy, complex licensing agreements that are reworked for each deal — a process too cumbersome for most small-scale deals, according to Judson Althoff, Oracle’s vice president of global platform and distribution sales.

The SMB Technology line of products are bundled applications that include various elements of the Oracle stack prepackaged for a given application, such as business intelligence (BI) or database. Resellers or SIs who want to sell Oracle’s higher-end enterprise line of products will still have to join the OPN and work with the more complex licensing agreements.

Stay tuned for more news on the VAD Remarketer program from SearchSystemsChannel.com .

Software vendor CA announced Monday the latest update to its ERwin Data Modeler, which includes integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals.

ERwin DM r7.2 also includes better native support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. That combination could help VARs cross-sell between ERwin and Visual Studio, according to Danny Sandwell, CA’s product manager for the ERwin Modeling Suite. The company is moving to have all of the product’s sales in North America go through resellers by April, he said.

“We’re looking for [resellers] who understand the space, who understand the nuances” of data modeling, Sandwell said. Most of that channel is straight reselling, at least for now, he said.

The need for more sophisticated data modeling is driven largely by increased storage requirements many companies face, said Simon Nynens, CEO of Wayside Technology Group, Inc., one of ERwin’s top resellers. Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley require companies to store more data, and technologies like virtualization are making it easier for companies to store it — meaning they need better ways to develop data models, Nynens said.

Data backup vendor eVault announced today a plugin that will let customers back up virtualized servers running on VMWare.

EVault’s backup — which is available as on-site software, software as a service (SaaS) or a managed service through eVault or one of its resellers — already works on individual instances of virtual servers, but the plugin will consolidate that process and allow backup of the virtual machines’ metadata, said the company’s senior product manager Patrick Dowlaszewicz. This will allow the virtual machines themselves — and not just the data they host — to be backed up.

About half of eVault’s business is conducted through resellers, and the company intends to grow that segment, said Dana Loof, eVault’s vice president of marketing. Evault, based in Emeryville, Calif., was recently acquired by Seagate Technologies, which Loof said is “a primarily channel [oriented] company.”

Loof admitted that virtualization has been slower than many of eVault’s resellers would like, but she said the new plugin will allow for cross-selling opportunities for those resellers to suggest migrating customers to virtual environments.

Most customers don’t know to ask specifically for virtual machine backups, but walking them through specific scenarios helps them see exactly what they would use virtual machine recovery for, said Dan Holt, CEO of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based HEIT Consulting.

“You come in as a full solution, instead of saying, ‘I have this point product and this point product.’ I’m coming in from a disaster recovery perspective,” he said.

The plugin itself is simple to install, so companies shouldn’t expect it to add much to their bottom lines directly. But for HEIT, which offers managed services, network design, security and other services, eVault and the new VMWare addition are “just portion of the pie” that will help HEIT expand its portfolio, Holt said.

Almost half of companies that have not yet started implementing service oriented architecture (SOA) plan to within three years, according to a survey by TechTarget sister site SearchOracle.com.

SAP’s NetWeaver shows customers the benefits of SOA better than Oracle’s Fusion project, according to experts quoted in the article, but IBM surpasses both. Of companies that responded to the survey, 84% haven’t started implementing SOA at all.

Companies should understand their businesses needs before they pick SOA products to address them, experts said, and they should consider that SOA isn’t about specific products — it’s about the approach for getting those products to work together.

Oracle amended its lawsuit against SAP today to include allegations of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The suit still lists 50 “Doe” defendants, which Oracle will try to identify during the discovery phase of the suit. Oracle suing SAP could be trouble for resellers and systems integrators, experts said, if they used materials which are deemed to have been illegally taken from Oracle.

Oracle would not comment further about the suit. SAP wrote in a press release that it is “eager to vigorously defend” the allegations, but could not be reached for further comment.

Ok, so maybe cars aren’t the core business of most IT VARs. But still, when the Linux car at the Indy 500 is the first to crash, that can’t be a great sign, right? Driver Roberto Moreno hit the outside wall on turn 1 of lap 38 and eventually came in last in the race.

Roberto’s car #77 featured Linux’s mascot, Tux the penguin — the culmination of the Tux 500 project, which raised $18,308.90 to put the logo front-and-center on the car.

Oh, well. Good drivers were never Linux’s strong point.

SAP and Novell announced last week that SAP is offering support for Novell’s SUSE Enterprise Linux through its Solution Manager, the solution through which customers report and track troubleshooting tickets.

The partnership is designed to cut down on “finger-pointing” that can arise when users running SAP applications on Linux file a ticket which is tracked to a problem with the operating system itself, according to Frank Witte, director of SAP’s global open source office.

Once SAP’s Linux lab determines that the problem is with the OS itself, customers often find they do not have an adequate support contract from their Linux distributor, Witte said. Under the partnership, customers will be able to purchase a “premium” support package from Novell through the Solutions Manager application, he said.

In addition to SUSE, SAP is also certified under Red Hat and Red Flag, a Chinese Linux distribution. Of those, only SUSE is currently included in the Solutions Manager, but Witte said SAP is in negotiations with Red Hat would consider a deal similar to the one with Novell.

SAP is also endorsing SUSE Enterprise Linux as a “preferred platform” and plans to work with Novell on future integration, including virtualiation and stability under high-load situations, Witte said.

Other Linux companies have announced similar programs that aim to deliver customers a complete stack with a single point of contact. Oracle, one of SAP’s main rivals, announced in October its Unbreakable Linux, a support program for a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat itself unveiled the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) earlier this month, a Web portal through which the Linux vendors distributes and supports third-party applications.

But Witte said the SAP-Novell deal, which was first brainstormed a year and a half ago and ramped up about three months ago, was driven by customer demand and is not a response to other companies.

-Yuval Shavit