ShadowRAM: February 2, 2004

Of course, we were also certain it was going to be an Eagles/Colts Super Bowl, so who knows.

By contrast, there was little drama when IBM replaced Dan Fortin as Americas channel chief last week. Fortin and Greg Adams, IBM's vice president of small and medium business for the Americas, simply swapped jobs, and the change was announced via an internal e-mail.

The new requirement that all HP Gold and Platinum PartnerOne members participate in customer satisfaction surveys to maintain their membership status still has some solution partners grousing. They point to continuing problems on orders shipped directly from HP to their customers. Guess who takes the heat when ship dates are missed?

Mother Nature refused to cooperate with Westcon Group on the eve of its first Convergence Symposium. First, dozens of attendees were forced to cancel or arrive late to St. Pete Beach, Fla., due to winter storms. And Florida had its own problems. A severe lightning storm hit the Tampa Bay area last Monday night, knocking out power at the symposium's hotel and surrounding buildings for more than an hour. The next morning, there was no hot water. Normally, we'd say just get us back home to New York, but then we remember there's almost a foot of snow waiting for us.

For all that it took to get the Spirit rover safely to Mars, the mission would have been irrelevant if we were unable to receive the data it is gathering. At least so say the BEA Systems folks. The spectacular pictures we've viewed and the revealing data streamed to NASA scientists are being delivered to Earth and distributed globally via BEA technology. The data transmissions via NASA's Deep Space Network to a server at Mission Control are powered by BEA WebLogic Server. Before the data is delivered to NASA scientists and mission managers, it is sent through BEA's Web services and middleware layer. The data is then viewed and integrated with prior mission data via NASA's Collaborative Information Portal, which also relies on BEA WebLogic.

Of course, all this technology appears lost on George W. The president wants to spend a trillion or so dollars sending humans to Mars. We think President Bush should listen to a solution provider's ROI pitch before he rockets our people to the Red Planet.