VAR500: Logicalis Promotes Tax Break; HP Services Inks Maersk Line Deal

It's Thanksgiving week, a week in which solution providers are giving thanks. Logicalis is showing its gratitude for a successful year by helping generate awareness of Bonus Depreciation tax benefits, which lets companies write off 100 percent of qualified IT investments against their 2011 income taxes. Meanwhile, immixGroup is offering companies a guide to doing business with the federal government.

In other VAR500 news, HP Services signed a deal with shipping giant Maersk; GlassHouse names a new top exec and Fiserv's co-founder dies.

ImmixGroup has made its FY12 Budget Survival Guide available at no charge online. The guide features a collection of on-demand Webinars, newsletters, and articles for IT solution providers and manufacturers, that sell to the public sector. The resource provides practical tips to help sales, marketing, and business development personnel identify sales opportunities and build stronger relationships with government customers.

Aiming to stimulate the sluggish U.S. economy, Congress is offering unprecedented tax benefits to encourage IT and other business-related capital investments by December 31, 2011. VAR500 solution provider Logicalis is helping generate awareness and is encouraging IT professionals to understand how this year’s Bonus Depreciation tax benefits lets companies write off 100 percent of qualified IT investments against their 2011 income taxes instead of spreading the tax deduction over a traditionally longer five-year term. “The point of the Bonus Depreciation allowance is to incentivize business leaders to invest now for their future competitiveness,” says Greg Baker, Logicalis’ CFO. “Essentially, the government is offering an interest-free cash advance to help spur even more investment activity, particularly in the technology arena."

George Dalton, who co-founded financial services IT solution provider Fiserv, died last week of natural causes. Dalton founded Fiserv with Les Muma in 1984, when they merged their two companies, Sunshine State Systems of Tampa, Fla., and First Data Processing of Milwaukee, which was part of First Bank. After Dalton retired from Fiserv in 2000, Muma took over as CEO. Dalton is credited with Fiserv's explosive expansion in the latter part of the 1990s.

GlassHouse Technologies has named Patrick Scannell CEO, effective immediately, succeeding former CEO Mark Shirman who stepped down from the position. Scannell is charged with guiding the company's growth as the market for its cloud, virtualization, security and next generation data center services continues to accelerate.

In addition to serving on GlassHouse's Board of Directors, Scannell is also a board member for Kiva Systems and Xtalic Corporation. Most recently, Scannell was the SVP and CFO of Netezza Inc., and was instrumental in leading the data warehousing and analytics company through its public offering on the NYSE in July 2007 and its subsequent sale to IBM in November 2010 for approximately $2 billion.

Hewlett-Packard has signed a $150 million-plus infrastructure services agreement with Denmark-based Maersk Line, the largest global shipping company. Under the five-year agreement, Maersk Line will use HP's cloud-enabled data centers and HP Workplace Services to optimize its technology infrastructure. HP will create a private cloud computing environment for distributed and local applications and will take over the Service Desk function for the shipping giant.