ShadowRAM: Novermber 10, 2003

During a keynote at Borland's BorCon event last week in San Jose, Calif., Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president for software at Sun, was running his presentation on a beta of the OS when the system crashed and he was forced to sheepishly apologize and reboot. Schwartz blamed it on his PC, not on Sun's desktop OS, but the blank screen that came up when he crashed looked much like the Windows "blue screen of death."

Sun's distributors, meanwhile, appear to be in a market-share battle of their own. Sources close to Arrow's MOCA division said at last month's Sun Net@Work event in Scottsdale, Ariz., put on by MOCA for its solution providers, one attendee was Eric Berry, vice president of sales at GE Access. Berry didn't have a badge but stayed on the periphery visiting with MOCA VARs and one or two GE Access VARs who were at the event. Berry, who stayed at the same hotel as most of the MOCA personnel and guests, was supposedly sent a flower basket by MOCA President Rich Severa.

Berry was unavailable for comment. However, a GE Access spokesperson said yes, Berry was in Scottsdale, and no, he wasn't poaching customers. Instead, he was visiting customers in the area and just happened to bunk at the same hotel.

Still, one channel source said Berry's visit to the MOCA event was likely inspired by GE Access' attempts to stem a flow of VARs to its competitor.

I guess it was inevitable for someone to test the alarms at a security show. Some joker got a kick out of pulling a fire alarm at 3:30 a.m. in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, where the Computer Security Institute was held last week.

Hewlett-Packard enterprise server and storage rebates that ran during its fiscal fourth quarter ended Oct. 31 are being extended through its first quarter ending Jan. 31. They include ones for HP Enterprise Storage Elite Partners in which rebates for first-quarter sales will be increased to 6 percent from 4 percent for HP Enterprise Storage product lines. There are about 50 Storage Elite partners in the United States. In addition, under a Unix server and storage attachment program, HP enterprise partners can receive an incremental 3 percent back-end rebate off net when an HP Enterprise Authorized Business Development Partner sells a combination of an HP Unix server together with HP enterprise storage.

Word has it the rebates may ultimately be extended through HP's second fiscal quarter ending April 30.