PC Sales Rate Slow (or Is It?)
Fears of a double-dip recession in the U.S. and Europe caused Gartner to revise its personal computer sales forecast for the second half of 2010. Originally, Gartner said PC sales would rise at the steady clip of 17.3 percent in the last six months of the year. Economic uncertainty giving businesses pause in their IT spending resulted in the reforecasting to 15.3 percent.
CRN and Channel Insider were quick to pounce on this doom-and-gloom news as a sign the recession isn’t over and the channel remains in at risk – economically speaking of course. And it’s easy to understand this interpretation – the recession hasn’t been easy on the traditional hardware VAR, and there are numerous stories of solution providers either cutting back dramatically or closing shop all together.
Ah, but The VAR Guy was right (at least partially). From its vantage point, the sky isn’t falling at all since Gartner says PC sales are still climbing at a healthy double-digit rate, which is good news. If there’s any uncertainty to be found it’s in Gartner’s forecasting, the blogger says.
So I’ll join The VAR Guy in pondering if Gartner’s initial forecast was overly optimistic, and I’ll add two more questions:
- Is it still possible to build a business around PC sales?
- Are any of Gartner’s numbers reliable? (Over the years, I’ve seen few come to fruition.)
HP Victor in 3Par Bidding War
To the victor goes the spoils. In the bidding war for cloud storage vendor 3Par, the spoils go to Hewlett-Packard, which won a hard fought victory over rival Dell.
After nearly two weeks of tit-for-tat bidding, HP won the right to acquire 3Par for $2.33 billion. At some junctures, the counterbids came just hours after one another. The bidding war over this acquisition is significant since the winner gets assets that will greatly enhance cloud storage capabilities.
How rich is the 3Par prize? Time will tell if HP gets its money back. To put it in perspective, though, HP is paying $2.33 billion. Dell started the bidding at $1.1 billion, which was considered a reasonable price. The initial counterbids by Dell and HP of $1.5 billion were considered premiums.
Ingram’s Seismic Gets New Leader
Ingram Micro’s Seismic services program will no longer be under the stewardship of regents. The distributor announced this week that it hired Renee Bergerson to replace Justin Crotty at the helm of its managed and cloud services division.
Bergerson is an interesting choice, as Joe Panettieri points out in his MSP Mentor blog. She comes Fujitsu America, where she ran a $300 million IT services business unit, and has extensive experience in building managed services programs and operations.
Bergerson is filling big shoes. Crotty literally built Seismic with blood, sweat and tears. Launched in 2006, Seismic grew from zero to more than 1,600 providers delivering services developed or hosted by Ingram. Crotty recently left Ingram to assume the role of senior vice president and general manager of service provider NetEnrich.
Welcome aboard, Renee Bergerson. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from her in the near future.
VMworld: Did Anything Happen?
I’m going to admit that I’ve been fairly distracted this week. I’m actually writing the Channel-Lands update on a plane flying over the Sea of Japan en route to Shanghai; so you can imagine that I spent a fair amount of time this week getting ready for this working vacation. Nevertheless, I did start the week in anticipation of flood of news coming out of VMware’s VMworld conference.
Much to my surprise, there wasn’t much to report there. Yes, VMware did make the obligatory announcements that “the cloud” is an unstoppable trend that won’t happen without VMware. However, there was no grand announcements, no real buzz, no excitement coming out of this event.
As I said, I’ve been distracted this week trying to get work done prior to my departure for China. But I don’t think this accounts for the lack of news out of VMworld. In fact, the buzz I heard was about the lack of buzz at this virtualization confab.
When it comes to vendor conferences, we often cite Faulkner: “Sound and fury signifying nothing.” Well, what does the lack of sound and fury signify?
Chrome Looking a Bit Shinier
Last fall, a friend stopped by my office and gave me a lot of grief when she saw that my preferred browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer. I believe her exact words were, “Oh, ‘I’m a big security guy’ is using IE. I’m so disappointed you’re not using Firefox.” After suffering through a series of browser crashes this spring, I finally made the switch from IE to Firefox. And it appears I did so just in time to see it overtaken by Google Chrome. D’oh!
OK, Chrome is still a ways off of topping Firefox’s market share numbers, and Internet Explorer pretty much dominants the entire field of Web browsers. But the folks over at TechCrunch are reporting that Chrome is on the verge of overtaking Firefox in browsers accessing the popular blog. In August, Chrome users comprised 26 percent of the TechCrunch audience, while Firefox users represented 34 percent. Clearly, Firefox is in the lead. But consider the year-over-year comparisons; in August 2009, Chrome only had 10 percent of the audience, while Firefox held 46 percent.
It the TechCrunch trend proves true, it looks like I’ll be changing browsers…again.
Well, that’s all the week’s news from Channel-Lands where all the technology works, all the deals are profitable and all of the companies are above average. If you want to follow me on Facebook or Twitter – feel free to connect. Share your suggestions and news with me at lmwalsh@the2112group.com.
