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.

Chances are at least SOME portion of your business comes from wireless networking at this point, but I’d bet most of it is of the indoor variety. Well, Tech Data is throwing down the gauntlet to some of the specialized wireless distributors through its new relationship with BIG Wireless, which sells various outdoor wireless technology and services.

The deal, which points back to Tech Data’s Wireless Specialized Business Unit, will let Tech Data VARs “purchase, brand and resell” BIG Wireless’s services. The company’s specialty is outdoor wireless for municipalities, corporate campuses or universities. These include wireless site surveys, point-to-point path studies, voice/video over wireless, GPS location, Federal Communications Commission licensing compliance and so on. Many of the more obscure requirements for outdoor wireless that a traditional solution provider might not have been able to invest in. If the reseller chooses, they can brand BIG Wireless’ services as their own.

How much business is in outdoor wireless? My gut is that it’s going to be sort of like Wi-Fi adoption: It will creep up in adoption for the right reason, it helps people do their jobs better. There will be some debates over format of course (ala the WiMax specification I wrote about in January), which is all the more reason why you might choose to team up with a company like BIG rather than investing in your technical skills right now.

Heather Clancy is a widely published business journalist and strategic channel communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. You can reach her at hclancy@swotmg.com.

Cisco Systems Inc. has shopped successfully for a set of tools that can help its wireless customers clean up the interference and improve the efficiency of their networks.

Cisco announced today that it has agreed to acquire Cognio Inc., which makes spectrum analysis products designed to identify, locate and eliminate sources of radio-frequency interference that can do to a wireless network the same thing that high-power lines do to reception on an AM radio.

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The last few days have not been kind to radio frequency identification (RFID).

ABI Research reported today that Wi-Fi is “muscling in on RFID’s location-based services markets,” predicting that the market for Wi-Fi as a real-time location services (RTLS) provider will grow by more than 1300% over the next five years. That forecast came just four days after the managing director of Heavey RF, an Irish firm, issued his own report calling RFID “potentially one of the biggest technical blunders in history.”

The Heavey RF report says that RFID has a place in the market but will never fully live up to its hype because it is less reliable and cost effective than bar-coding. If you agree, that opens the door for a new technology in the RTLS market. Enter Wi-Fi, whose revenues in the market will increase from $59 million this year to $839 million in 2012, according to New York-based ABI.

“In the past, companies wishing to deploy RTLS had to buy proprietary RFID systems, inlcuding very expensive readers,” said Stan Schatt, ABI’s vice president and research director, in a statement. “But there is now such a large installed base of Wi-Fi equipment worldwide that Wi-Fi-based RTLS becomes cost effective for companies that had never considered it before.”

ABI recommends that vendors — including market leader Cisco and main competitors Aruba and Trapeze — work with channel partners who have RTLS experience to best take advantage of this new opportunity.

“It is a sophisticated solution that requires a knowledgeable reseller,” Schatt said.

ABI pointed out several benefits of Wi-Fi RTLS over RFID: Users that already have wireless networks don’t need to install extra cabling, and it utilizes specialized software to maximize its effectiveness. But there are also some problems with Wi-Fi RTLS compared to RFID, according to ABI: It’s “somewhat less accurate,” less secure and requires more wireless access points.

A recent press release from California-based Meru Networks announced the mobile and wireless networking vendor’s newly enhanced partner program. According to the release, the new partner program “is designed to enabled and reward partners for the value they add in helping customers address business critical wireless challenges.” To catch the value-added reseller’s (VAR’s) attention, though, they promise “financial incentives and simplified program requirements”.

Apparently, Meru is attempting to make their partners’ jobs of selling their products easier. One of the larger changes to the vendor’s partner program is the offering of free software downloads and discounts on products so that VARs will have the latest releases and versions of Meru’s products to demonstrate to potential customers.

With these changes and fortifications to their partner program, Meru is joining a growing number of networking vendors who are recognizing the importance of their resellers and partners, and doing their best to meet those partners’ needs. For more information on their partner program, contact Meru.

~Eric Pierce

Network consultant firm Evolve Technologies is swinging for the fences with a creative and original sales event. Teaming up with Microsoft, Global Wireless Data and Palm, the networking reseller is taking small business owners to the ballpark.

Sitting in the stands at RFK Stadium on May 17, watching the Nationals-Braves game, participants will reportedly use provided mobile networking tools to play “General Manager for a day”. Evolve’s event organizers hope that this firsthand experience will succeed in proving to their customers’ the usefulness and viability of mobile technology.

Consultants, value-added resellers and sales engineers who are struggling to drive interest in their respective technologies, and even those who aren’t, should take a page from Evolve’s book. Getting up and selling to the customer’s CFO with charts, graphs and a practiced sales pitch is all well and good. But, as Bruce Campbell will tell you in his Old Spice commercial, nothing beats experience where the customer feels the need and then sees how your technology or strategy fills that need.

~Eric Pierce

SearchNetworkingChannel.com recently published a tip on the promising new draft of IEEE 802.11n, just approved by the 802.11 Working Group, and what its significantly increased bandwidth potential has to offer resellers. The tip’s conclusion, essentially, is that the only drawback we can see at this point regarding the new wireless standard is that nobody’s making equipment that’ll carry 802.11n yet.

Hopefully you’ve had a chance to start planning a transition with your customers already, because the arrival of Draft 2.0-compliant equipment seems to be fast approaching. Wireless network vendor Meru Networks has announced a new line of access points (APs), wireless controllers and software that will be able to carry the estimated 300 Mbps (maximum) data flow.

This is all good news for resellers and integrators as, according to industry expert David Jacobs, the transition too 11n “will require a far more extensive set of equipment replacements than the earlier move from 802.11b to 802.11g.” Where upgrading from 11b to 11g was a (relatively) simple process of replacing APs and interfaces, 11n will frequently demand changes to customers’ entire wireless architecture in order to handle the increased data rate.

To add some perspective to this upgrade, the maximum data rate for standard wireless today (11a,b and g) is a respectable 54 Mbps. The minimum data flow for 11n is two to three times that at 100 to 200 Mbps. Rewriting the DNA of an entire wireless architecture is more than justified with that kind of performance increase. And with Meru Networks’ unveiling of their 11n-compliant line of equipment of software (set to be showcased at Interop later this month), resellers (and their customers) are one step closer to realizing the new standard’s full potential.

~Eric Pierce

Intel has announced it is building WiMax capability into wireless chipsets that should hit the market early next year, according to reports from the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing this week.

WiMax — a microwave-based technology defined by the IEEE 802.16e standard for broadband wireless access – has the potential to provide wireless-network access across distances as great as 30 miles. Sprint is working on a WiMax network that will reach two miles, which is still vastly better than the few hundred feet most WLAN methods provide.

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Technology companies face sweeping changes in IT delivery models Technology companies will need to change the way they operate over the next five years to accommodate a major shift in the delivery of IT services. Instead of buyers integrating technology themselves, it will be assembled and managed by outside providers, according to a new Forrester study. [Tekrati]

Intel prices up updated Core 2 Duos, Quads Steering into the mainstream [TheRegister]

AMD’s well may be running dry The high-flying Advanced Micro Devices Inc. of 2006 has given way to a company in financial peril, saddled with debt and bleeding from a brutal price battle with its larger and suddenly resurgent
Silicon Valley archrival, Intel Corp. [AP]

HP crosses blades with IBM Not so much a Cold War, more a Cooling War. [TheRegister]

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Not too long ago I wrote about the opportunities that exist for VARs in the RFID market. Today it looks like that market may have come into its own. AeroScout just received $21 million of venture capital. While the details aren’t being disclosed, you can bet this will be a nice boost for the RFID marketplace.

RFID — radio frequency identification — tags can help streamline manufacturing operations and other business ventures that require up to the minute product tracking. I still think it’s a good idea for VARs to begin looking into this field. It’s only a matter of time until SMBs and other small shops start clamoring for the “on demand business” that IBM has been promising in its commercials for the past couple of years. RFID may be one way to provide it.

VARs should be aware of this technology and know  it could be applied in a company. RFID tags will allow VARs to provide information about product production and location immediately. This way, when a customer is looking for a missing piece of inventory or a product that is shipping, VARs will have the answers to their questions within minutes. That’s a pretty powerful business advantage.