Farewell To A Friend
• Rich Farber, who held key channel management positions at IBM and BEA Systems, died Jan. 8 after a brief, valiant battle with pancreatic cancer.
Farber, 53, worked at IBM for many years in a number of channel management posts before joining BEA in 2000 as vice president of partner programs. In 2002, he returned to IBM and managed business partner programs for the company's System p servers and Linux systems.
"There was no one like Rich Farber. He gave the business and the channel partners everything he had," said Rauline Ochs, who worked with Farber at IBM and BEA. A regular at CMP Channel's XChange and an IPED's Channel Masters grad, Farber gained prominence as a member of the entrepreneurial team that built IBM's software channel. That team included Ochs and Ian Bonner.
Farber was born in Queens, N.Y., and over the years lived in various parts of the country due to his work. He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Deborah, his children Benjamin and Michelle, his mother, Henrietta, and brother, Jim.
Putting The Squeeze On
• More than 50,000 are expected to attend MacWorld Jan. 14-18 in San Francisco where Apple "affectionados" will flock to hear Apple guru and CEO Steve Jobs give his annual keynote. Last year Jobs used his MacWorld speech to announce the iPhone, which shipped midyear and made the company a formidable player in the smartphone space in addition to becoming a must-have for Macophiles. This year, rumors abound that Jobs will unveil a Mac tablet and an updated G3 iPhone capable of faster data transmission. Microsoft is expected to unveil Office 2008 for Macintosh.
A lot of Apple blogs have been trying to outguess each other about what will or won't be in Jobs' keynote. Perhaps we'll know which ones were the closest to being correct by waiting to see which ones Apple sues and then negotiates to shut down afterward. That's what it did with the popular Mac blog ThinkSecret, which folded its tent late last year.
Seen And Heard
• Novell finally posted the numbers on how much Microsoft paid it during 2007 following the two companies' landmark interoperability agreement and, well, Novell executives now consider the deal as successful as ever. The final tote: Microsoft forked over $355.6 million, according to Novell's most recent 10-K report with the SEC. To put it into perspective: Novell's total revenue for the year amounted to a little shy of $1 billion. Novell says it isn't recognizing all the Redmond cash up front and, given the continuing hue and cry by open-source community critics, it may have good reason for not wanting to be too flashy right now. Windows Server 2008 is due out later this year with all sorts of virtualization goodness (in the form of Hyper-V), and Microsoft continues slaving away on it with Novell developers. An early look indicates Hyper-V will sit very, very close to the processor's metal once fully configured with Server 2008; developers tell us that could have implications for other virtualization clients that want to operate on the Windows platform going forward.
• Novell finally posted the numbers on how much Microsoft paid it during 2007 following the two companies' landmark interoperability agreement and, well, Novell executives now consider the deal as successful as ever. The final tote: Microsoft forked over $355.6 million, according to Novell's most recent 10-K report with the SEC. To put it into perspective: Novell's total revenue for the year amounted to a little shy of $1 billion. Novell says it isn't recognizing all the Redmond cash up front and, given the continuing hue and cry by open-source community critics, it may have good reason for not wanting to be too flashy right now. Windows Server 2008 is due out later this year with all sorts of virtualization goodness (in the form of Hyper-V), and Microsoft continues slaving away on it with Novell developers. An early look indicates Hyper-V will sit very, very close to the processor's metal once fully configured with Server 2008; developers tell us that could have implications for other virtualization clients that want to operate on the Windows platform going forward.
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