Awareness Technologies, Inc., (ATI) said today that it has expanded its Partner Program and will now offer the opportunity to qualified partners to self-host their own data. In addition to already offering the ability to co-brand the client portal (reports and settings), ATI Partners will now have the option to host their client data directly, and thus significantly increase their account control.

“Our Partner Program is experiencing significant growth, and we’ve added more than 150 partners in 2011, including a cloud distribution relationship with Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Many of our Partners want to own the client relationship more completely and, while our standard partner enablement allows significantly more branding opportunities already, we are now offering a complete autonomous relationship by allowing partners to self-host,” Ken Totura, Awareness Technologies’ Chief Channel Officer, said in a press release.

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By Regina Ciardiello, Editor, SMB Nation

Autotask Corporation said today that it will be holding its annual Autotask Community Live 2012 event at the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes in Orlando, FL. Held in Miami, FL, in previous years, Autotask Community Live attendance has grown an average 35% per year, attracting Autotask users and IT professionals from around the world. The three-day conference features multiple, concurrent education tracks including both product-centric and broader business-building courses.

Having attended the event previously, Harrybbb and I know first-hand that Autotask Community Live delivers an event that is packed with vendors introducing new products, quality partners looking to make deals and educational sessions that will keep attendees ahead of the learning curve. In fact, Autotask Community Live 2010 was where Harrybbb and I first connected when I was working for a competing channel publication. Who knew that we would be working together 2 years later!

The product training tracks includes a range of role-based and business process sessions, from basic to advanced training, to deliver tips, time-saving workflow automation techniques and best-practices for optimizing the use of various Autotask Pro modules and features.

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SMB Nation has teamed up once again with the SMB Technology Network to bring the SMB 150 back to the channel for its second year. Sponsored by Blackberry, this year’s SMB 150 will honor the channel’s top 150 professionals later this spring at a Hollywood-themed awards dinner in Los Angeles.  Honorees will also receive public acknowledgement in SMB Nation Magazine, as well as on SMBnation.com and SMBtn.org.

The SMB 150 List acknowledges those professionals or “influencers” who have had the largest impact on the SMB IT channel within the past year. Individuals from vendors, partners, service providers, trade associations, media companies, and other communities serving the channel are all eligible for nomination. Channel organizations may also be nominated. Community members should submit nominations—for either themselves or others—at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W6SXLZ2.

Last year’s SMB 150 event proved popular with channel members, who nominated over 900 peers from around the world. Awardees ranged from leaders of the most well-known MSPs to rarely acknowledged small business heroes. 

Harry Brelsford, founder and chairman of SMB Nation, hopes

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Today, leading SAN storage solutions provider, Dot Hill Systems Corp., announced that they will be offering one full year of free onsite support for all Dot Hill AssuredSAN systems purchased through authorized resellers.

Vice President of Channel Sales at Dot Hill Systems, Corp., Brad Painter, explained the reasoning behind the new offering in a press release today: “The addition of free onsite support serves as the latest testimony to Dot Hill's highly reliable AssuredSAN storage, which continues to gain momentum in the distribution channel. We want our channel partners and end-user customers to know that 'Assured' is not just the name of our SAN solutions, but also how we want them to feel when they turn to Dot Hill products to manage and protect their critical data assets.”

Dot Hill AssuredSAN systems currently come with a

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ShoreTel Inc. said that as part of its strategy to further its cloud presence, the UC provider plans to acquire M5 Networks. As a result of the acquisition, ShoreTel will be positioned to provide customers a choice between on-premise and hosted UC solutions.

The acquisition of privately held M5 enables ShoreTel to expand its solutions into the cloud and reach a large and growing market segment of customers that are looking to deploy IP communications through a hosted model. Industry trends such as cloud computing, virtualization, data center economics and the flexibility of services-based models are driving the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, which provides businesses another way to bring unified communications to their workforce.

“The acquisition of M5 positions ShoreTel as a leader in the fast-growing cloud UC market and delivers a suite of hosted telephony solutions that is unmatched in the marketplace,” Peter Blackmore, CEO of ShoreTel, said in a media statement. “This acquisition is a critical step in our evolution and enables the company to capitalize on trends in cloud computing and advance our enterprise communications strategy.”

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Microsoft is currently hosting a 30 To Launch challenge for all mobile app developers. Professionals and hobbyists alike are welcome to come create an app on the Windows Phone platform, which is becoming one of the industry’s fastest-growing on the market.  Developers have 30 days to build a Windows Phone App, starting Jan 31, 2012. Microsoft is offering daily tips and tricks to keep contestants on track for the 30-day deadline. Interested parties can sign-up here.

As part of this challenge, Microsoft is hosting on-site events in Dallas, TX and Philadelphia, PA. Each Wednesday in February, interested parties can join training sessions and meet Windows Phone App developers. Attendees also have the chance to win a Windows Phone device. For a full schedule of the Dallas and Philadelphia offerings and registration links, please see the site here. The first session: “Getting Started with Windows Phone Development” begins tonight at 7:00pm Central and Eastern time.

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Thoughts on Business Continuity from StorageCraft

Words are funny things. We like to think they’re solid, immutable, set in the proverbial stone. But really, they’re more like chameleons. We toss them around, use them, and they soak up new meaning with each new use, changing themselves to match the scene.

A few years ago, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, made a comment  to this effect about a popular IT buzzword:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements….Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

The same thing seems to be happening to “business continuity.” The phrase is everywhere these days. Everywhere you go, you hear about it, about why you need it. More and more, however, as people adopt the term for their own purposes, its meaning gets muddled. Somewhere along the way, business continuity became just another way of saying backup and disaster recovery.

You can see an example of this in the October 2011 issue of Channel Pro. In an article specifically designed to highlight the difference between the two topics (it’s even called “Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity”), the author says this:

“Backup gets your data back after a mistake, such as deleting the wrong files. Disaster recovery gets your data back after a small disaster, such as a server hard disk crash or the wholesale theft of your servers. Business continuity gets your business back after a big disaster, such as a fire, tornado, or hurricane that destroys not only your data, but also your workplace.”

In other words, the only difference between backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity is

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Today, Austin Texas-based monitoring company, CopperEgg, Corp., announced the addition of support for Windows Azure operating systems in their RevealCloud Pro solution. RevealCloud Pro is a SaaS monitoring program that is designed to provide in-depth server reporting.

Users will be able to receive real-time updates about server loads, potential performance issues and all service deliver components. RevealCloud Pro will support monitoring on the following operating systems: Hyper-V, Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, Windows and Windows Azure. This monitoring system is ideal for providing split-second reports for application service providers. Users can look at customer usage patterns and be alerted to potential service outages. This service can be installed quickly to monitor servers across all platforms, including physical, virtual and the cloud. Users can customize dashboard views and alert thresholds to serve their specific needs.

Scott Johnson, CEO of CopperEgg, spoke a bit on the addition of Windows Azure support on the RevealCloud Pro system: “RevealCloud Pro is quickly gaining traction with our customers deploying and managing services in the cloud, virtual environments and data centers. The addition of server monitoring for Windows Azure addresses the needs of developers building services on the Azure platform as well as hybrid environments, who are looking for a robust server monitoring solution that is quickly deployed, easy to use and provides instant insight into server health.”

CopperEgg’s RevealCloud currently comes in

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D&H Distributing said today that it has launched a Partner Services Program, giving its customers access to a versatile, web-based library of marketing materials to help them publicize their own offerings and grow their businesses. The program includes a series of centralized links to vendor logos, product images, collaterals, resource libraries, tutorials, training videos and details regarding specific programs from D&H’s vendor partners.  D&H VARs can visit the Partner Services web site at www.dandh.com/partnerservices. 

As part of the program’s line-up, resellers can make use of a series of brochure templates addressing popular topics and hot markets.  Some of these pieces may be customized by the VAR to reflect its own corporate branding.  The available templates will change over time, enabling VARs who frequent the site to deliver new collaterals on a regular basis.  This is particularly important, especially as many of today’s VARs do not have the bandwidth, time or funds to hire an in-house marketing specialist or outside firm to help with these efforts. Oftentimes, the VAR ends up trying to handle the company’s marketing strategies on their own, along with everything else they need to be responsible for.

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The Intel Corporation announced the promotion of two executives to the role of senior vice president yesterday. Intel’s board of directors selected Richard Taylor and Mooly Eden for their outstanding performance at the company.

Richard Taylor will be taking on the position of Senior Vice President and Director of Human Resources. At this position, Mr. Taylor will be responsible for overseeing all HR programs and policies for all of Intel’s global operations. He joined Intel Europe in 1986, and he’s been in Human Resources for Intel since 1999.

Mr. Eden has been promoted to the position of Senior Vice President of Intel Israel. He will be in charge of the operations and strategic planning for Intel Israel’s manufacturing facility and development centers. Mr. Eden has been at Intel for 30 years, during which time he has been an intergral part of Intel’s microprocessing design sector. He helped develop Intel’s Centrino Processor Technology and Intel’s Pentium Processor with MMX Technology.

For more news from Intel, please see their news site

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