Jeff Jedras

After a tumultuous year for Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), new CEO Meg Whitman brought the vendor back to its roots and delivered the messages channel partners wanted to hear in her keynote at the global partner conference Wednesday: HP is proudly a hardware company first and foremost, and its primary route to market will be through the channel.

Whitman took the helm at HP in September afterformer CEO Léo Apotheker led the company through a period that saw a major re-focus on software with the US$10.3 billion acquisition of Autonomy, and the future of the personal systems group thrown up in the air with a strategic review that could have led to the sale or spin-off of the business unit.

With technology becoming more complex and access to skilled IT staff more expensive, remote monitoring and management automation software vendor N-able has gathered managed service providers (MSPs) at its annual N-Able Summit to help them learn how to tap the growth potential in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market.

A key part of Ottawa-based N-Able's SMB strategy is a $115 million "freemium" program that will see some N-able MSP partners provided with up to $108,000 in free licenses, depending on partner size, for N-able offerings such as Essential, Policy Manager and Security Manager to help them convert new customers to the managed services model and go deeper with existing clients.

Michael Calce, the reformed hacker from Montreal who will forever be known as Mafiaboy, told a group of IT professionals Tuesday that he has serious concerns about the inherent vulnerabilities in the latest evolution of information technology: cloud computing.

Calce was a guest-speaker at storage vendor Hitachi Data Systems' (HDS) (NYSE: HIT) annual Information Forum event in Toronto. He came to fame in 2000 when, as a teenager, he launched a series of denial of service attacks that crippled the Web sites of companies such as CNN, Amazon, Dell and Yahoo, leading to a manhunt by the RCMP and the FBI and his eventual arrest.

Cloud computing is no fad, so it's time to make it enterprise ready. That's EMC's (NYSE:EMC) goal with its launch on Monday of EMC Atmos onLine, a new Internet-delivered cloud storage service built on Atmos, EMC's policy-based information management system. But while analysts agree the cloud is here to stay, they say the jury is still out on if service providers can monetize on it or not.

Atmos onLine provides what EMC is calling Cloud Optimized Storage (COS) capabilities that can scale effectively, coupled with security and management tools. While you don't need Atmos to use Atmos onLine, EMC is offering federation to allow clients to set policies that determine the automatic federation of information between what it's calling your "private cloud" and your on-premises data centre based on its sensitivity.

Customer-relationship management vendor Maximizer (TSX: MAX) says most of its mobile CRM users favour the BlackBerry platform, and the ever-changing dynamics of mobility require more frequent platform refreshes, leading to the recently released Maximizer 10.5 Freedom for BlackBerry.

Developed by Vancouver-based Maximizer Software, Maximizer is a portfolio of CRM and contact management solutions for business users. Maximizer Freedom is designed specifically for mobile users to extend the capabilities of their CRM platform to their smartphones said Angie Hirata, worldwide director of marketing and business development for Maximizer.

Despite releasing stronger than expected earnings on Tuesday and at the time expressing optimism for 2009, a round of job cuts is underway at IBM Corp.

The week has already seen heavy layoffs in the IT sector, including 5,000 at Microsoft and another 5,000 to 6,000 at Intel. Thus far, while IBM has yet to comment publicly on any layoffs or specific numbers, the Internet is rife with reports from allegedly laid-off IBMers.

With the launch in Canada this month of the Slingbox Pro HD and the Slingcatcher, Sling Media is deepening its penetration of Canadian living rooms. While that's still its bread and butter, the company says they're seeing increasingly innovative enterprise opportunities they'll need the channel's help to leverage.

Based in Foster City, Calif., Sling Media is best known for the Slingbox, which allows someone to watch their home television anywhere in the world via an Internet-connected laptop. The Slingbox sits near the television, connecting to either the digital cable box via different video outputs or directly into the coaxial cable, and also connects into your Internet router. Through a Web connection and a computer, either at home or on the road, someone can control and watch their television as if they were at home.