HP gets go-ahead of Autonomy takeover

HP has won approval for its purchase of leading UK business information software house, Autonomy for £7.1 billion. The deal strengthens HP’s position in the enterprise information management systems market. ‘Autonomy significantly increases our capabilities to manage and extract meaning from that data to drive insight, foresight and better decision making’, Meg Whitman, HP chief executive said in a statement.

Thailand floods – how will they affect you?

You may have become aware that there has been some severe flooding in Thailand lately that has caused disruptions to transport and distribution and utility services in the region. A number of disk drive and component manufacturers have been affected as a result. It is also having a knock-on effect for some PC vendors. The upshot of this is that we are seeing inconsistencies and fluctuations in prices of hard disk drives and PC products. There may be a short period during which, we’ll be able to supply only a limited quantity of WD or Hitachi drives to individual customers.

The same may also be true of some PC lines – although stock levels are OK for the time being. The main impact on supply is expected to come from December onwards for PCs, so if you want to make sure that you secure product, now is the time to place your orders.

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What exactly is NAS?

What is Network Attached Storage (NAS)? As its name would imply, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server is a computing device that can be attached anywhere on a network. Its sole purpose is to store files and make them available to authorized network users. NAS devices offer a number of benefits over alternative storage methods. Clients can directly access the storage device, independent of a specific network or application server, thereby enhancing overall network performance, while improving storage accessibility. NAS servers offer the ease of use and flexibility small and mid-size businesses need, while providing the superior data protection they demand.

Iomega, with their Storcenter IX and PX range, is a leader in this field, especially for small businesses, remote offices, home offices, and consumers, having sold more than 400 million storage devices and disks since 1980. They have taken the industry a step forward with the introduction of the personal cloud that allows users to protect and share their data from any location.

Tablets to take a sixth of the market

IDC expects tablet sales to make up more than a sixth of the PC market in 2011. The analyst says that 62.5 million units will be shipped this year while overall PC shipments will be up just 3 percent to 357 million, which would give tablets a 17.5 percent slice. Around 18 million tablets were shipped in 2010. In Q2 this year, IDC says that Apple took a 68.3 percent share of the market. In EMEA Europe, tablet shipments were almost 4.4 million units in 2Q11 – an increase of 394 percent compared with the same quarter last year and up 82 percent compared with 1Q11.

The Long Term View

When was the last time you sold a product knowing what it was going to be used for? Certainly at a Distribution level until recently the answer would have been not often.  At a Reseller level you most likely had visibility of the immediate opportunity to bolster your quarterly revenue but little more than this if the skill sets for the entire opportunity required were out of your scope. 

Distribution is traditionally a Near Term Revenue (NTR) business; put simply it moves a box from point A to point B, and by doing this successfully it gains repeat business. 

Solution provisioning traditionally struggles to deliver against NTR and are often project based which places them into the Long Term Revenue (LTR) category.  This is one of the defining differences about Azlan; by recognising the long term view and enabling solution delivery for our Resellers we are witnessing growth at an unprecedented rate.

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