American Idol No Fan Of VAR Archuleta

The hard-charging Salt Lake City VAR was reportedly booted from American Idol rehearsals after pressuring his son David, a top favorite, to insert phrasing from Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girl" in his performance of the classic, "Stand by Me," by Ben E. King. The move reportedly cost the show to pony up additional money for music publishing rights.

According to ABC News, Jeff was previously warned not to use the lyrics. He has already raised the ire of producers and fans by his backstage antics, and has been portrayed in the media as an evil backstage father. Meanwhile, David, is one of the top three contestants left, and may take home the winner's crown even without his father's coaching.

Archuleta, the founder and principal of Arch Consulting Group, a Salt Lake City-based high tech equipment reseller of high tech equipment, started the company in 1998. It buys entire IT infrastructures, data centers, warehouses, inventory and other large lots of equipment. Its inventory includes: HP, Dell, Compaq, IBM, Sun Micro single or multi-processor servers; disk arrays, NAS, SAN, SCSI/Fiber Storage Solutions; and Cisco, 3Com networking hubs, routers, switches, cabinets and components among other equipment. The company declined to comment about Archuleta.

According to Arch's Website, "secondary equipment market has grown in response to market pressures until the quality and availability of secondary equipment is often as high as new equipment, and because the IT assets are pre-owned their cost to our clients is significantly reduced. Despite being pre-owned, most secondary market equipment still carries warranties, service contracts and support."

Arch was well in position when the dot-com bubble burst.

"When a big dot-com goes under and we do a complete takeout, it's anywhere from little deals of $800,000 to $1 million in new equipment to $5 million new," Archuleta told CRN in a 2001 article. "The VC capital was there one day, and the next week it wasn't there. A lot of these companies made [equipment] acquisitions with a 30- to 60-day [delivery] period and couldn't implement the project. During the last two and a half months, 80 percent of our business has come from dot-coms."