With all due respect to the great nation of Poland and its people I find it hard to believe that a country best known for its kielbasa, pierogis, being the birth place of Pope John Paul II, the Solidarity movement and Lech Walesa is now at the forefront of cloud computing.
Over the years I have heard a lot of harebrained claims from executives of IT vendors from Eastern Europe. My all-time favourite claim came from a BitDefender executive who tried to convince me that his Romanian-trained security engineers were far superior to those of Symantec and McAfee who were trained at MIT.
In Poland it looks as if there is a real grass roots movement towards cloud services led by university students. IBM is supporting this movement of sorts by opening the first multipurpose cloud computing centre in Poland to help these university students design and adopt cloud technologies. Now when I learned of this I thought well why Poland, why not Canada or some place in Silicon Valley?
But IBM has offered to build this cloud centre to any institute of higher learning in a first come first service sort of scenario. The kids from Wroclaw University of Technology just wanted it more and formed a partnership with IBM Poland to develop a new academic curriculum, making cloud-focused courses available to more than 1,500 students.
I say good on them for taking the initiative. They deserve this kind of support. I have to ask: Where is the initiative of Canadian high tech students? Is Canada going to be left behind in this cloud computing juggernaut? We just might be.
Three quick hits before I go. The return of Frank Fuser. I was happy to see that Fuser, who became the first ever Canadian channel chief of Dell before a surprised retirement, was appointed by top solution provider Metafore Technologies Inc. to the position of vice president of services.
David Kelly, one of the three presidents running Metafore after the merger with Microserv is retiring after a long and distinguished career. CDN wishes him all the best in his future endeavours. Metafore announced his replacement in David Toms who is going to be its new vice president and GM for the central region.
Fuser’s former boss Michael Dell will have to battle not one but two labour unions. The unions are demanding that Dell shareholders to withhold their votes for Chairman and CEO Michael Dell to remain as a director on the company's board following a US$100 million accounting practices settlement the company made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
