Sorry that I did not blog about the Channel Elite Awards yesterday, but it was so busy for the entire team here. I want to thank the more than 200 solution providers, customers and industry executives who attended the event at the Paramount Conference and Event Venue in North Toronto on Wednesday night.
My hat goes off to Don Conaby and Terry Buchanan of Conpute, this year’s Solution Provider of the Year. They definitely deserve it. They are great group and they work really hard. I also want to congratulate the rest of the winners and runners up.
I also want to thank Ken Presti of Presti Research & Consulting Inc. for a fantastic keynote presentation that got practically everyone in the room participating.
I also want to thank the all the solution providers who submitted and became finalists. This year’s crop of submissions was the best I have read. It just goes to show that the channel is setting high standards out there. It is great to see.
I really tried to talk to everyone last night and if I missed you by some reason I am truly sorry. I like to say hello to everyone. I love this community. I love the spirit it has and I only wish everyone the very best.
I also want to pass along my best wishes to Karen Brodie of Brodie Computes and her family.
In closing, I want to make a promise to everyone out there that next year’s Channel Elite Awards will be even better than this year’s. So sharpen up your pencils and turn on your word processors and start crafting your submissions for 2008.
Four quick hits before I go. Michael Moskowitz, the long time president of Palm Canada, will be leaving his post in a few days to start at XM Satellite Radio. I still have not learned what his position will be. When I get that I will update everyone.
I wanted to congratulate Oksana Bieksel of Lenovo Canada. She had a baby girl a few weeks ago.
Arrow ECS, a business unit of Arrow Electronics, has appointed a new executive to head its storage business, and has tapped a former EMC execute Sean Kerins for it.
Seiko Instruments USA Inc.‘s Micro Printer Division has changed its name from Seiko to the Thermal Printer Division.
Visiting the NexInnovations office
Yesterday I had an opportunity to visit the former offices of NexInnovations. The building is located near the 401 Highway in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, Ont.
Their name is still on the side of the all glass façade. When entering the main reception area there is no sign that says: “We are out of business.” The NexInnovations logos are everywhere.
I am asked to sign in and the sign in book also has NexInnovations letterhead.
Now it has only been 30 days and I do not expect SoftChoice to move that quickly, but despite some of the building esthetics the company has moved fairly swiftly.
SoftChoice virtually overnight purchased all the assets except for the break fix portion of the business for $10 million. They worked over the weekend to offer positions to everyone they could. Most of the sales staff has been retained. They did lose, however, a lot of NexInnovations professional services staffers.
As I got off the elevator to the second floor I saw many of the company’s awards. There were so many that I could not count them all. There were IBM awards, Cisco awards, Tech Data Circle of Excellence awards and even the CDN 2003 Solution Provider of the year award. We tend to forget that NexInnovations set the standard for excellence in this country.
The place was virtually dead and it had a eerie feel about it. It was the sort of feeling you get when visiting a house for sale and there is no furniture.
On the next floor there were signs of life. As I entered there were many people standing and talking to each other. Some were on the phone. Compared to the dead silence of the first two floors the third floor was like the Toronto stock exchange trading floor.
It was actually a welcomed sight. SoftChoice does have a culture issue at hand. They are trying to integrate a company that was staunchly corporate Canada. SoftChoice is a very open, trusting, fun-loving type of community. I think only Dave MacDonald wears suits at SoftChoice.
I did not get a chance to talk too many of the NexInnovations employees who stayed on. I did talk to Kevin Felton and he told me they are welcoming the change with open arms. He added that who would not like a beer cart on Friday afternoons. Friday beer carts have been a staple at SoftChoice for many years.
The next floor was the executive offices and I got to tell you the set up reminded me of the last scene in the Sean Penn film Dead Man Walking where he walks down a long empty hallway to the gallows.
Gord Schofield’s office door was closed, but the other offices were open and teams of people were working in them. I think they are from the receiver Prowis. I stepped into Hubert Kelly’s office and it is a simple office set up; roomy, but not overwhelming. He has a desk with cabinets and a roundtable. There are pictures and awards on the wall and that is pretty much it.
One quick hit before I go. Lenovo Canada tells me that Erin Roy, a Canadian, has been selected to compete for the chance to participate in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay.
Lenovo launched the torchbearer search program in early August with the help of Google to find “new thinkers” from around the world to run the torch in China. This is the longest ever Torch Relay in Olympic history with more cities visited than any past Games.
Who owns telepresence?
I was baffled to learn that Nortel will be calling its high end video conferencing suites telepresence.
Now Nortel Networks will be using it all lower case, while Cisco is capitalizing the T and the P; but come on folks.
Nortel can’t come up with a name. What about the Nortel TP1000 or the TP 2550. A lot of other IT vendors using number/letter naming conventions for products. It really is that easy.
This reminds me of the when the CFL had two teams named Roughriders in a nine team league. The league too tried to downplay it by saying: “Well one team is called the Rough Riders, while the other are the Roughriders.”
To me this is sophomoric.
Now Cisco wanted to label TelePresence as an industry standard sort of Kleenex and while that is a good notion I do not think they thought that one of its main competitors would actually use the name for its product.
Of course the obvious thing here is that it leads to confusion. The market may be hot for Cisco TelePresence, but instead will get Nortel telepresence.
Another similarity is with chocolate chip cookies. Mr. Christie’s Chips Ahoy is the best available chocolate chip cookie on the market, but President’s Choice has its own chocolate chip cookie that’s not bad but isn’t as great as Chips Ahoy.
At the end of the day this is very bad for Nortel because instead of describing how great their product is and how it differentiates against Cisco or HP’s Halo the Nortel executives will be answering questions about why they named it telepresence.
That is not the message they want to deliver. At least I do not think it is.
One quick hit before I go. Novell has named its channel chief and it is not Canadian