I use Zimbra all of the time to access my Gmail based email accounts and to manage my calendars, the integrated Zimbra Calendar fully synchronizes with my Gmail calendars/schedules which proves to be very helpful and makes the product almost as versatile as MS Outlook running under MS Exchange.

So, when I heard that VMware is looking to buy Zimbra, it got my immediate attention and created a little stress to boot. Personally, I am hoping that VMWare does not screw up what I consider to be a good thing.

However, the real question here is why would VMWare want Zimbra? That question has many analysts scratching their collective heads. The company does offer some commercial products, such as the Zimbra collaboration suite, which boasts some 50 million paid seats – perhaps that is the catalyst behind VMWare’s interest, but VMWare has never really been about email or collaboration.

When Yahoo paid some $350 Million for Zimbra a while back, it made some sense – after all the desktop client supports Yahoo’s mail system and could have easily been transformed into a SaaS communications client for the company, but Yahoo seemed to drop the ball and all but abandoned Zimbra.

I hope that if VMWare buys Zimbra they will invest in the products to make it even better, but one has to wonder if the Zimbra desktop will remain part of the open source community or become a commercial product?

Either way, solution providers should familiarize themselves with Zimbra and perhaps offer the Zimbra Desktop as an alternative email client to their customers. Solution providers should be able to garner a little revenue from setup and training, while preparing for the product to go commercial and then be able to sell upgrades. One thing is certain, if VMWare buys Zimbra, a lot of advertising and marketing will follow, making Zimbra a well known player in the email and collaboration field.

And, even if the deal falls through, solution providers will find that the features and functionality of Zimbra Desktop may make their customers very happy, especially with a purchase price of zero $.

Cablevision blames a contract dispute with Scripps Networks as the root cause of dropping Scripps Networks’ HGTV and The FoodNetwork channels, yet the whole situation stinks of corporate greed and the need to maximize profits at the expense of the customer, a practice that cablevision has become very adept at.

When it comes down to it, the Scripps debacle is only the icing on the cake of cablevision’s anti-consumer practices – 2009 has been filled with examples of Cablevision’s  questionable practices that have one goal in mind – Increasing revenue, regardless of how customers are affected, an ideology leveraged by monopolies for centuries. However Cablevision needs to be very careful – the company is no longer a monopoly and each strike at the consumer moves those customers closer to the competition – namely satellite and phone company alternatives.

Over the last year, cablevision has made several changes that highlight the company’s goal to increase billing, while limiting services. One of the first concrete indications of Cablevision’s anti-consumer practices came with the company’s switch to digital broadcast technology – the company removed popular analog channels from their system, under the guise of creating more bandwidth for digital TV. While on the surface, that sounds like a customer-orientated goal, a deeper dive shows how the move was engineered to force consumers to pay additional fees for services that were once free.

First off, a look at the analog channels that were eliminated shows that the company targeted popular channels such as TLC, SyFy, MSNBC, AMC, MTV, VH1, Lifetime, Spike, ABC Family, BET, WE, History Channel, CNN Headline News, Fuse, C-Span, and others (for more info, please read this consumer reports post).

Consumers who used to get those channels for free now had to pay for digital equipment to receive them – in other words, consumers were forced to rent a digital cable box at $6.75 per month for each television in the household and with many households having three or more TVs, that could really boost cablevision’s profits. The move to digital would not have been so bad if Cablevision did not decide to scramble that digital content, which forces consumers to use Cablevision’s proprietary equipment. It seems that the only reason that cablevision would scramble those channels is to prevent consumers from using integrated digital TV tuners, clearQAM or other technologies to receive those channels – one has to wonder who benefited from the move to digital and the scrambling of content.

In 2009, Cablevision was also pushing the move to HDTV, by offering High-definition content (on their own digital equipment of course) to consumers. One of the highlights of Cablevision’s HDTV content was VOOM networks, with offered 15 channels of unique specialized content to Cablevision subscribers. Cablevision dropped VOOM (which is owned by Cablevision’s subsidiary Rainbow networks) in January of 2009, claiming that VOOM would cease operations due to financial reasons – yet, VOOM still offers HDTV content internationally. One could believe that VOOM was eliminated simply because Cablevision had reached it HDTV subscription goals and VOOM was no longer needed to entice new customers. Once again, Cablevision showed that it could eliminate services, without lowering prices to customers.

The examples of Cablevision’s anti-consumer posture abounds. One just has to cruise the various blogs and forums to find many more examples of how Cablevision can offer less and charge more, or see examples of how over the years Cablevision has argued for rate increases, yet has had ample cash reserves to purchase Madison Square Garden, News Day and even the failed Wiz electronics store chain.

Perhaps things will change, the latest problem created by Cablevision is based upon a claim against HGTV and The Food Network’s provider wanting higher fees for content, while that may be true – it is interesting that no other Cable TV providers, Phone Company TV service providers or Satellite TV providers have dropped Scripp’s programming. So, what is the truth here? Is Cablevision the bad guy or is it Scripps Networks’ fault? One may never know – but the stage has been set for a potential industry change to occur that will harm broadcasters and change the way content is consumed – and that is called on-demand Internet TV.

Those that have been denied access to channels are turning to the Internet to watch their shows, and are able to do that according to their own schedules. As Internet enabled digital TV devices arrive on the market and more people adopt entertainment system PCs – there will be a shift and once that happens, a combination of over the air digital broadcasts and internet enabled TVs might just meet the typical consumers needs – good news for PC vendors, bad news for Cable, phone-company and satellite TV broadcasters. All the technology needs is a little push – and perhaps Cablevision inadvertently gave that new technology a much needed push.

I checked my personal email accounts today (I have 2, one with a Major ISP and another with my local cable company) – and found this gem in both accounts:

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After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you
are suitable to receive a tax refund of 324,66 GBP.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 5-7 business days in order to process it

Note: A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records of applying after the deadline.

To acces the form for your tax refund, Click here

Best Regards,
HM Revenue & Customs UK

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Since I have done business with European firms, to me this almost seemed legitimate, except that it arrived on both of my personal accounts – and examining the embedded link , that link, if clicked would establish communications with my PC via UDP port 7633, clearly showing that the email was an attempt to compromise my local PC. Out of curiosity, I decided to run a Shields Up scan from Gibson research, just to see what ports on my PC are visible to outsiders – luckily, my firewall was configured correctly and I had no spyware or hidden applications installed on my system that allowed access to the port.

This type of Spam clearly shows that Phishers are getting more creative, selective and are finding ways around the free anti-spam services- and most important of all, it makes it that much easier to demonstrate to customers how creative Phishers are getting and why they still need email security packages on their desktop PCs

However, there is one area that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into, and that is integration with the web. There seems to be a great many “hooks” into the web with Office 2010, and that is surely in response to the success of products like Google Docs and other free online word processing services. While previous versions of Office were able to share files via the web and Microsoft offered rudimentary online Office applications, Office 2010 is aimed at making an evolutionary leap to improve the web/online experience.

Microsoft plans to release a fully online version of Office 2010 and provide services that allow users to collaborate on documents/spreadsheets/presentations via the web, all without having to use Microsoft’s advanced collaboration products, such as SharePoint.

So, other than a minor facelift, Office 2010 seems to offer very little for the traditional user, which might make this a difficult product for the Channel to sell. On the other hand, Office 2010 may create a completely new ecosystem of online integration opportunities for solution providers by allowing them to create new ways for their customers to share and store documents/spreadsheets/presentations. What’s more, if Office 2010 is successful in moving that information into the cloud, perhaps those expected new capabilities will become the catalyst for the SMB market to adopt the cloud and move away from traditional onsite servers and applications. Time will only tell if Microsoft can pull any of this off and with the Office 2010 beta currently lacking the online features, it is hard to judge what the product will mean to the SMB market and the cloud. Channel players need to keep an eye on the beta and then jump on board as soon as the lion’s share of on-line features become available for testing. Until then, it’s probably best to not put too much effort into playing with the product.

While 3Com may have had its nose bloodied and lost significant portions of the market, the company survived and carved out an interesting niche in the security market with TippingPoint’s intrusion prevention hardware as well as secure wireless products and traditional switching and routing hardware. HP recognized that and with the combined product matrix of 3Com and HP products can now offer everything to build the data center, from servers to switches to security.

While it may take some time for HP to penetrate Cisco’s 70% market share, it is inevitable that it will happen, simply because HP seems to play better with their channel partners than Cisco does. So, while the battle for the data center may be waged in big shiny buildings, it is more than likely that HP’s channel partners will be on the front line engineering HP’s conquests.

The company is now “giving away” a managed endpoint security client to its partners to redistribute via the N-Able MSP platform. While the company announced this move back in October, it is now gaining some adaption and in unique ways.

N-Able partners are going out to prospective clients and just giving away the service in hopes of gaining a foothold on that prospective clients desktop, and that seems to make a lot of sense. Yet other partners are being a little more creative and giving the solution away for free to non-profits, chambers of commerce and few other “non-standard” business entities in hopes of getting some free press and hopefully getting the members to start thinking about managed desktops.

Personally, I would add volunteer organizations to the list (like fire houses, environmental groups, school boards, village and town organizations) and any others that may have influence in the community, while struggling with underfunded budgets.

Perhaps, with a little luck, offering some charity will turn recognition into tangable sales.

One of my first observations was how many VARs  were rabid proponents of what ConnectWise has to offer. The general consensus was that ConnectWise is a company that listens to their partners, implements partner generated ideas and offers outstanding support. Many of the partners there also came in to the fold from competing or home grown PSA products and have not looked back since.

When a company has such a loyal following, I have to wonder if someone has been sneaking something into the fruit punch, I tried a few cups myself and came to the conclusion whatever ConnectWise is doing, it isn’t in the water.

So, I sat down with a few ConnectWise Partners and discussed what they thought was so great about ConnectWise, the answers were surprisingly simple.

Beyond the great support and productive partner interaction offered by the company, most partners commented on how easy ConnectWise’s PSA makes it to run their businesses and when coupled with MSP or other hosted services, increase profits. What’s more, the partners saw tremendous benefits from how ConnectWise is building their ecosystem of technology vendors, bringing companies such as SonicWall, Level Platforms, N-Able, Reflexion and many others into the fold. Making it that much easier for partners to offer complete managed and hosted solutions that generate recurring revenue. And besides, ConnectWise knows how to throw a heck of a good event!

While I may not have become a disciple of ConnectWise, I do have to say that if you are looking at PSA for your business and making the move into the cloud, then it sure doesn’t hurt to give a long hard look at Connectwise. As for myself,  I’ll be taking a closer look at ConnectWise and their technology partners in the near future just to see how well it works.

That has translated into limited appeal for solution providers looking to sell inexpensive networking hardware into small businesses and has also cast a dark cloud over those same brand names in the channel. SMC has realized that the key to growth in the business realm will only come by eschewing its consumer grade branding, and has annouced that it is spinning off its SMB products (as well as a stab at the enterprise) under a new business name, EdgeCore Networks Inc.

The move to the EdgeCore brand is more than just a rebranding of existing products, it amounts to a complete re-invention of the company. Of course, SMC will continue to exist, but the SMC name will further shift to the consumer side of the equation, while EdgeCore will encompass business solutions sold via the channel. Accompanying the new brand will be products that are more business centric and a re-engineered channel program that puts partners first.

As more details trickle out, it will be very interesting to see if SMC’s bold move will indeed set the company apart from the consumer competitors that have infiltrated the market over the last few years. To fuel that success, EdgeCore will have to embrace the rules of ROI and TCO and make sure that their partners know how to use those calculations as powerful tools to sell against the established business level networking vendors already occupying the field, such as Cisco, Adtran, and countless others.

While Rebel EFI is clearly a threat to Apple Computer, it also may be a threat to Microsoft and Windows 7. One has to wonder, should I spend 200 bucks to upgrade to Windows 7, when for about $79 ($50 for Rebel EFI & $29 for OS X 10.6) I can run the latest Apple OS?

Well, as it turns out, Microsoft may not have to worry, I gave Rebel EFI a try on a couple of different PCs and the results were less than stellar. I could get OS X to work on PC hardware, but a lot of the components did not have drivers and did not work, resulting in a half baked Apple Macintosh clone. With a little planning, testing and effort, I’m sure a technically savvy individual could get a fully functioning “hackentosh” up and running, after all, Psystar is selling their own functioning Mac clones. Perhaps the trick is to take a close look at Psystar’s own PC configurations to get a jump start in the Hackintosh world.