Vendors Gunning for Partners

SAP started the day off with a nice breakfast presentation. They are the 3rd largest software company in the world (behind Microsoft and Oracle), and they are making a push into the SMB space with some of their lower level offerings (they have a huge installation base in the Enterprise space). After that, we were treated to small, meeting-style sessions with the likes of McAfee, Nortel, Quantum, ATEN, and AMD. The big news is, AMD is going into Dell 4-processor servers starting in Q4 of this year - relinquishing the Intel-exclusivity! Up next - who knows? Desktops? AMD claims faster processing with even lower power consumption than Intel, and a consistant architecture. McAfee has a huge Managed Services push, and claims to be the largest Security-specific software company. Quantum is an obvious choice for both tape-based and backup to Disk - with a various applications for all markets. The big news is, on the low end, DAT and Travan tapes are going away, to be replaced with swapable, rugged hard drives, up to 120GB’s in capacity - the product is called GoValt - this allows for backup to disk to be safely rotated off-site.