IT Channel News Briefs, Dec. 15 |
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By Staff
15 Dec 2008 | SearchITChannel.com |
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Information technology (IT) channel news in brief for Monday, Dec. 15, 2008.
Cisco leads enterprise telephony growth
Cisco Systems took the lead in the worldwide enterprise telephony market for the first time, with Avaya coming in second and Nortel placing third, according to a new report by Infonetics Research. The report also showed that the enterprise telephony market grew 8% between Q2 and Q3. Pure IP PBX and hybrid PBX equipment sales increased, but traditional PBX equipment sales went down.
Cisco saw its PBX sales grow 19% in Q3, and Avaya saw a 10% growth. Still, the report predicts the enterprise telephony market will get squeezed in 2009, because there will be little business expansion and therefore less need for new PBXs. On the bright side, pure IP PBXs and IP soft phones will see some continued growth and new product launches in the coming year.
Symantec offers partner tips
Symantec has issued five tips to help partners grow their businesses in the tough economy of 2009. Most of the tips focus on improving the vendor-partner relationship; Symantec advises partners to get educated about vendor products, take advantage of vendors' marketing tools and training, align their vendors' programs with their business strengths and improve communication with their vendors. The security vendor also recommends more partner-to-partner relationships, which can help solution providers expand without adding overhead.
Microsoft seeks better relationship with open source
Microsoft, or at least some of its execs, wants to put the company's war of words with the open source community in the past, according to SearchWinIT.com.
In a press tour last week, Robert Duffner, director of platform strategy, said Microsoft wants to downplay past harsh words -- CEO Steve Ballmer has used words like "cancer" when talking about open source -- and work even harder to foster interoperability between Windows and open source. In October, Microsoft joined the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) working group, an open source project aimed at developing a high-speed messaging standard. In addition, Microsoft will pick up its activity in the Apache QPID project, which it also joined this fall. QPID is a messaging implementation built on AMQP.
Duffner is building on work done in past years by Sam Ramji and Bill Hilf. The problem is that Microsoft realizes many customers want fruitful coexistence between proprietary and open source worlds, but groups within the company still view various parts of the LAMP stack as direct competitors.
Check out last week's IT channel news briefs.
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