Avaya appointed former Motorola channel executive Jeremy Butt to be its worldwide channel chief today. The appointment is the latest in a series of executive changes at the company in recent months.

Butt most recently served as vice president of worldwide channels for Motorola’s enterprise mobility business, and he is credited with greatly expanding the division’s channel reach globally. Read more »

The Microhoo saga continued Sunday when Microsoft said it was looking into “an alternative” transaction with Yahoo rather than an outright acquisition of the portal and search player.

Microsoft pulled back its offer to buy Yahoo in early May, citing Yahoo’s resistance and working relationship with Google. Since then, financier Carl Icahn has been buying Yahoo shares and proposed a new slate of Yahoo directors in an attempt to get the company back to the bargaining table.

Microsoft pulled one over on the Windows Vista haters yesterday, releasing a supposed Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) internal sales video. The video, “Rocking Our Sales” by Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band, features a Bruce Springsteen lookalike singing about Vista’s improvements in “security, desktop and mobility, and productivity.” And there’s even a sax solo.

Bloggers jumped all over the video, criticizing it as “the most painful Microsoft video ever made” and “appallingly embarrasing,” and even saying it “damages the dignity of not only everyone involved in its production, but everyone who watches it.”

All the while, ”Rocking Our Sales” sorta seemed almost too ridiculous to be real. And it was. Later in the day, it was revealed that the video was a spoof by Microsoft in an attempt to show its lighter side. And all the critics had egg on their faces.

But “grayforge,” a reader on CNET’s Coop’s Corner blog, did raise a good, serious point about the whole silly incident: “The sad thing is… Microsoft has become the kind of company people think this sort of thing (a crappy marketing commercial) can come from.”

UPDATE: It appears that a certain blogger who likes to refer to himself in the third person still hasn’t gotten the joke. 

Too much information!

Warning customers against posting personal data to the Web is one of the most important services VARs can provide.

Many in the business community are enamored of social networking sites and appear to feel that more is more when it comes to “sharing” their lives on LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, insert-your-favorite-social-site here.

The problem with that is  cyber miscreants lurk just waiting to pounce on these nuggets. Something as innocuous-seeming as college affiliation, job history, names of family and friends can be used by social engineers to craft e-mail messages that will suck you in. That simple click will then unleash threats on your very own hard drive. Executables embedded in Word or Excel or PDF attachments will search your data to harvest -and secretly send out– passwords, account numbers, and other riches.

This online information trove is like a “playground for hackers,” says Yacov Wrocherinsky, CEO of Infinity Info Systems, a New York Sage Software and Microsoft partner specializing in business applications.

And for high-net-worth (ie. rich) executives who are  likely targets, it’s important that their wives, kids, friends also be careful about what personal details they divulge.

The beauty of LinkedIn is members can see who their associates know. “It’s great for making connections or for finding people if you’ve lost their business cards,” Wrocherinsky says. But that doesn’t mean you should bare any more than is absolutely necessary.

And on the less-business oriented of the social networking sites, say Facebook, people tend to put in way too much information-birthdays, anniversaries, travel plans, kids names, etc. All of that is gold for social engineers with evil intent.

George Brown, CEO of  Database Solutions, a Cherry Hill, N.J. solution provider tells his customers to keep their data zipped and not to post anything they are not required to do by law . As it is now with SEC filings for public companies, a lot of information about execs is already out there. No need to supplement that for the bad guys, Brown says.

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

Are VMware partners making money? Company execs at VMworld in San Francisco, Calif. last week said yes,  but not always in the ways you’d expect. 

“There are areas of our partner ecosystem where we can quantify that they actually make a lot more money than we do,” according to Brian Byun, VMware’s vice president of global partners and solutions. “Every time we sell a dollar of VMware license revenue you will see some of our partners making several times that because again there is a drag and a refresh effect.”

Read more »

Avnet Technology Solutions, a division of Avnet Inc., has announced an agreement under which its thousand-plus solution-provider partners will be able to distribute the open iSCSI storage area network technology of LeftHand Networks.

“Avnet is looking to expand its storage solutions, in particular in the virtualization and consolidation space,” according to Mario Arjona, Avnet Technology Solutions’ Partner Relationship Manager.

“LeftHand Network’s products work with IBM and HP servers, so their technology complements what our partners are already selling,” Arjona said.

The agreement quintuples the 200 or so partners currently authorized to sell LeftHand’s iSCSI SAN products and help the company meet its goal of 100% growth per year, according to David Bangs, LeftHand Networks’ VP of sales said.

LeftHand’s software customers will like the fact that LeftHand’s SAN/iQ storage clustering software, can be combined with industry standard hardware from HP, said Scott Pelletier, vice president of enterprise sales and engineering at Denver, Colorado based Lewan & Associates.

“Avnet is the first distributor LeftHand has worked with who also partners with HP and can deliver pre-integrated systems to us on any LeftHand compatible hardware platform,” Pelletier said.  “This will be faster and more cost effective for us as a VAR. We hope to continue expanding our storage practice, and this partnership can only help that effort,” Pelletier added.

Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and others sued for automating their e-mail The companies are accused of violating a patent on automatic message routing held by Polaris IP. The patent has a long history in litigation, but all the cases have been settled out of court. [InformationWeek]

EarthLink to trim work force and close offices Shares of the Internet service provider EarthLink climbed sharply Tuesday after it said it would cut 900 jobs — about half its work force — and close four offices. [NYT]

Microsoft releases two Vista hotfix packs via Windows Update Microsoft quietly released two mega-hotfix packs for Windows Vista via Windows Update on August 28. [All About Microsoft]

Read more »

It was bound to happen. Google, the maestro of sleek (i.e. non Microsoft-like) interfaces and Web applications and services, is starting to feel some pain.

Netcraft, picking up a report on the Blogger status page, reports that Blogger and Blogspot — Google sites both — were offline for an hour on Wednesday.

Google apologized “profusely.”

Mitigating factor: Google’s outed itself on its own site. Counter-mitigating factor: Given the gazillions of self-posters affected, this was probably pre-emptive PR. Nothing like ticking off a nation of navel-gazers.

It’s one thing for freebie services to crap out — even many bloggers have to agree that you get what you pay for. But, as Google pushes more and more into real-world business apps, the stakes change and so does the scrutiny.

You can practically smell the schadenfreude from Redmond. What company gets slammed more for outages, bugs, and hack attacks than Microsoft? And what company look more like an old fogey compared to Google’s glitz?

Now it’s time for Google to be measured for maturity.

And, some folks are also starting to wonder publicly if Google is really a good open-source netizen. It uses the stack but critics say it releases only a tiny portion of the enhancements it makes.

Money quote from The Register’s Ashlee Vance:

“Google has become the poster child for the software as a service (SaaS) abuse of open source software. The ad broker uses copious amounts of open code but gets around returning changes to “the community” by claiming it does not redistribute the code. Instead, Google simply places the software on servers and ships a service to consumers.”

Somewhere, someone in Redmond is smiling. Barbara Darrow, a Boston-area journalist, can be reached at badarrow@comcast.net .

Worldwide server shipments and revenues rose in second quarter of 2007 Worldwide server shipments for the second quarter of 2007 increased 2.7% over the same quarter last year, while worldwide server revenue for the same period climbed 5.1% according to Gartner. Worldwide server revenue totaled $13 billion for the quarter, as worldwide servers shipments reached just over 2 million units. [Tekrati]

Windows Live suite debuts … on cell phones If you dig into Microsoft’s newly minted Windows Live Services deal between the Redmond software maker and “the world’s largest mobile device manufacturer” Nokia, which the pair announced on August 22, it’s basically a deal to preload the promised Windows Live suite on Nokia phones. [All About Microsoft]

SAP to debut Web-delivered software line SAP AG said on Wednesday that it will release a line of business management software next month, featuring programs that are designed to be delivered to customers over the Internet. [Reuters]

Read more »

Gartner: Vista will surpass XP, but not any time soon

Windows Vista will overtake Windows XP sales, but not for a couple of years, according to recent Gartner estimates.

Gartner predicts Vista sales will surpass declining XP sales sometime in the middle of 2009.
Their projections show worldwide sales for Vista that year will be around 596 million units vs. 516 million for XP. In 2008, Vista is expected to hit the 324 million mark vs. close to 660 million for XP. (Vista became widely available early this year.)

Read more »