Prices, Policies and Spifs
Come January, Tech Data will reward the top solution providers in each of its business units. Rewards include education and training, marketing funds, special pricing on support, and more. The first loyalty programs focuses on the components business unit.
Hitachi Data Systems revived its lead-generation program and announced it will offer spifs of $500 to $2500 per array sold until March 31. HDS will offer another 10% of the spiff to systems engineers who work with sales reps. Both can get another 30% of the spiff if the client replaces certain arrays. HDS will also reward a solution provider's sales rep for using its new online configurator, and the company.
Faced with losses for the past three years, Gateway announced it will de-emphasize computers and promote sales of flat-screen televisions and other consumer electronics. Prices of Gateway's merchandise, sold online and in its chain of stores, compare to those of large discount stores, such as Wal-Mart.
Changing Places
Samsung has hired Gregg Prendergast, former vice president of U.S. retail channel sales at Acer America, as its vice president of sales for the commercial channel of the Digital Information Technology Division. He will be in charge of all U.S. commercial distribution channels and will oversee the company's IT product lines.
EDS named Michael Boustridge its vice president for global sales operations. Scot McDonald has been named vice president, controller and chief accounting officer. Boustridge replaces Steve Smith, who left the company.
New Products and Updates
Google is offering Deskbar, free software that places a search box inside the Windows toolbar. Users can type search terms into the box, and a window will pop up with results linking to Web sites. Windows 2000 or XP, Internet Explorer 5.5 is required.
Microsoft released its new Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals, designed to speed the work of sales representatives. This is one of seven accelerators in a series under development, including business scorecarding, Six Sigma, XBRL and Sarbanes-Oxley.
Mergers & Acquisitions
Connected is acquiring Archive-it, an e-mail archiving solutions provider. MailStore v2.1, Archive-it's e-mail archiving technology, features 256-bit encryption, audit trails, search and recovery functions, and automated retention of emails. It currently works with Exchange. Modules for Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise will be developed by late 2003 or early 2004.
Adobe Systems acquired Yellow Dragon Software and plans to integrate the company's ebXML technology into its own products by next year. Ivan Koon, a senior vice president at Adobe, said he believes governments will mandate XML functionality soon.
Trends
The Liberty Alliance group, an industry coalition founded by Sun Microsystems, finalized a framework that would allow users to share identification with Web services. Last week the group launched a new a new expert group to expand the technology into geo-location, contact-book and presence services.
Seagate Executive Vice President Brian Dexheimer told investors at the Gartner TechInvestor Summit Tuesday that terabyte disk drives would cost about $200 in two years, and only $15 in 10 years. Dexheimer also predicted 10 gigabyte drives for Pal devices and 200 gigabyte laptop disk drives within two years.
Researchers found a hole in Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), the mechanism that replaced the highly vulnerable Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security scheme in 802.11 wireless computing devices. Robert Moskowitz, senior technical director for ICSA Labs, warned that the pre-shared key for SOHO networks is vulnerable but pointed out that passphrases longer than 20 characters and enterprises with authentication servers are not vulnerable. Moskowitz says that vendors should supply tools that generate random numeric passphrases. A draft of his paper is posted at http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002452.html.
Elsewhere in the News
Just one week after Novell announced it would acquire Suse Linux and IBM announced plans to offer level 2 and 3 support for both Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux desktops, research firm IDC projected Linux on the desktop could hold a 7 percent market share by 2006
Oracle vowed to continue its takeover of PeopleSoft, despite PeopleSoft's plans to give customers full refunds if their products and support policies change. Oracle executives called the plan illegal and PeopleSoft officials predict it could cost as much as $800 million. Wall Street reacted. Both companies' stocks fell on the news.
Microsoft wrapped up its defense in the European Union's antitrust case against it, hoping to win a settlement and avoid fines, following two days of closed-door sessions before the European Commission. Microsoft is said to have argued that Windows' inclusion of Media Player does not give it an unfair edge over competitors. The company countered accusations that it controls an unfair competitive advantage in the low-end server market with arguments that its dominance of the market disappears when servers costing more than $25,000 are included in market statistics.
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