ShadowRAM: January 16, 2006

In a note to partners planning to attend, Atkins and McCabe said the "global event did not support the requirements of a new model based on lowering the center of gravity and driving sales execution at the region and country level."

IBM is setting a "new direction" with a "set of interactive, Web-based tools and content, and leveraging more integrated, localized events at the country and integrated market team levels," they said. Partners should get word on the new initiatives soon.

At last week's Sun-Oracle lovefest at Oracle's HQ, Sun folks referred to the mood ambiance as "Larry lighting." I guess that means "flattering," as in making whoever's on stage look younger, thinner, taller. Bathed in the Larry lighting was, well, Larry, along with Scott McNealy, whose wife Susan, sat up front as the two traded yuks.

The musical chairs between HP enterprise solution providers and distributors continues. Last month Logicalis said it was leaving Arrow for Avnet, along with a deal that saw Logicalis take over the bulk of Avnet's end-user HP integration business. Now we hear that late last year Total Tec Systems, too, made the jump from Arrow to Avnet.

FrontRange Solutions is finishing up hosted versions of Goldmine CRM. The project targets hosted CRM leader Salesforce.com, and the proposition is to provide resellers with something Salesforce.com cannota simple, hosted CRM platform that can eventually be brought in-house and run securely within the network as a customer outgrows Salesforce.com.

Levi Strauss has come out with a line of high-tech, hip denim. The company has designed jeans to be compatible with Apple's iPod, featuring a joystick in the watch pocket. Levi's RedWire DLX Jeans for men and women also have a built-in docking cradle for the iPod and retractable headphones.

Remember Mainsoft? The Microsoft partner that (oops) leaked NT 2000 source code to the Web two years ago? Well, Mainsoft is all warm and cozy with none other than IBM now. ISVs now can recompile .Net apps for WebSphere using Mainsoft's Visual Win for J2EE. One Mainsoft exec insisted that his firm had already decided to move to Linux and open source before the aforementioned leakage. Yeah, right.

Mainsoft execs said the company remains a Microsoft VSIP partner and has a "decent relationship" with Microsoft but "our partnership is with open systems." They also said the feds continue to investigate the leak.