Briefs: April 3, 2006

ENZWEILER TO STEP DOWN AT LENOVO

Enzweiler's departure is expected to come in the next several months, just about one year after Lenovo completed its acquisition last May of IBM's $11.5 billion PC business, sources said. Enzweiler was named to the top channel job as vice president of global channel strategy and sales last March.

A Lenovo spokesperson said the company would not speculate on rumors.

The former IBM veteran's departure comes in the midst of cutbacks in both the company's channel management ranks and among customer account reps, sources said. Last month, Lenovo said it was undergoing a restructuring that calls for the layoff of 1,000 employees and moving corporate operations from Purchase, N.Y., to Raleigh, N.C.

Approximately 10,000 IBM employees officially joined Lenovo when the deal was completed. Lenovo is now moving its desktop operations to China and will take a restructuring charge of $100 million.

FRONTBRIDGE REBRANDED AS EXCHANGE HOSTED SERVICES
Microsoft is re-branding FrontBridge hosted e-mail filtering, archiving, continuity and encryption services as Exchange Hosted Services.

The company is positioning the hosted lineup as the "in-the-cloud" alternatives to its on-premise Antigen and Spam Manager offerings. Microsoft bought Sybari and its Antigen line just over a year ago and FrontBridge last August.

The four hosted services will go on Microsoft's volume licensing plans on April 1 and will be licensed on a per-user basis, according to Eron Kelly, director of Exchange Hosted Services.

For example, hosted filtering is available for a free 30-day trial and will have an estimated street price of $1.75 per user per month. The hosted archiving will be $17.25 per user per month and will support an unlimited retention period and offers 3.6 Gbytes of storage per user. The continuity services, guaranteeing fast recovery from outages and a 30-day rolling historical mail store, is $2.50 per user per month. Encryption is $1.90 per user per month.

Microsoft is moving toward quarterly updates with Exchange Hosted Services with the 5.3 release due in April featuring faster full-text archive index, optimized filtering and admin center security enhancements, the company said.

A full Exchange Hosting Services 6.X release is timed to coincide with the promised Exchange 12 wave, due late this year or early 2007.

ZIMBRA, SCALIX SET TO LAUNCH E-MAIL IMPROVEMENTS
Two small e-mail vendors already offering affordable alternatives to IBM Domino and Microsoft Exchange Server have some new tricks up their sleeves.

Zimbra Software has a new program for partners who want to host its collaboration and e-mail offering outright or offer managed services based on it. VARs servicing small- and midsize customers pay $1.75 per mailbox per month and can mark the service up depending on the value they add, said Satish Dharmaraj, CEO and co-founder of Zimbra. In addition, VARs can use Zimbra's APIs and toolset to "collaboration-enable" existing applications.

Meanwhile, ease of deployment and use is the goal for a new Scalix e-mail appliance "kit" slated to debut at LinuxWorld in Boston this week.

The Scalix Appliance Kit layers preconfigured Scalix e-mail and calendaring, ClamAV antivirus and SpamAssassin atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 for loading on the inexpensive Linux-ready server of choice. Pricing starts at $995.

LOGICALIS ACQUIRES ALLIANCE CONSULTING'S SW BUSINESS
Logicalis said last week it would acquire Alliance Consulting's Southwest region business, bolstering its Contract Consulting Services Group (CCSG) and putting the integrator on track to reach close to $500 million in revenue this year.

Jeff Reed, Logicalis' chief technology officer, said the acquisition adds 70 consultants to CCSG, bringing the total number of consultants in the group to more than 250 and pushing annual revenues for the unit to about $50 million. Reed declined to disclose terms of the deal.

Alliance Consulting is a wholly owned subsidiary of Safeguard Scientifics. Anthony Ibarguen, Alliance Consulting's president and CEO, said that the company also would partner with Logicalis "in areas where our two companies complement one another."

Alliance Consulting has a strong presence in the Northeast, including offices in Bridgewater, N.J., New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.

The Alliance Consulting acquisition adds new solutions to Logicalis' services portfolio, including SAP and Oracle ERP services, business intelligence and data-management services, onshore-offshore outsourcing, and testing and quality assurance, Reed said.

The Alliance Southwest division will become part of Logicalis CCSG and will be led by Chris Rafter, currently vice president of consulting services of Alliance, and Marney Edwards, currently Alliance's vice president of sales for the Western region. Both men will report to Reed.

WILKINS OUT AS EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AT PC CONNECTION
Robert Wilkins has resigned as executive vice president of PC Connection, according to an SEC filing by the solution provider.

The highly respected Wilkins, who resigned effective March 30, was the second-highest ranking executive, reporting to Patricia Gallup, president, CEO and chairman. Wilkins has worked at PC Connection since December 1995 and was executive vice president since January 2000.

Wilkins was in the midst of a massive push to transform PC Connection into a more robust provider of IT services. In fact, Wilkins engineered the acquisition last year of 22-year-old $200 million solution provider Amherst Technologies.

Executives at PC Connection could not be reached for comment. The company did not say in the filing who would replace Wilkins, who will receive $430,000, payable in biweekly amounts over a 52-week period, according to the SEC filing.

D&H DISTRIBUTING ADDS THREE VENDORS TO SECURITY LINECARD
D&H Distributing has enhanced its security line card, picking up new products from WatchGuard, TrustELI and Anthology Solutions that target the SMB market, according to the distributor.

D&H will carry WatchGuard's Firebox Unified Threat Management appliance, TrustELI's plug-and-play broadband security appliance and Anthology Solutions' Yellow Machine terabyte storage appliance with built-in firewall.

"WatchGuard appliances are specifically focused around threat management and firewall," said Dan Schwab, vice president of marketing at D&H. "Anthology Solutions is really a NAS device that has all the security technology on the NAS device instead of on the network. TrustELI is truly engineered for the S in SMB. It is plug and play and incorporates all the key elements of securityprivacy [and] firewall."