By Dan Kusnetzky | January 23, 2012, 3:22am PST

Summary: IBM has placed itself in a leadership role in the X86 virtual machine software market through its investment in KVM, OVA and oVirt.

I have to admit that I’ve been a bit remiss. IBM held an analyst briefing on the topic of open virtualization technology and KVM in the hopes of keeping the analyst community up to date. I was traveling to Ohio to speak at the Buckeye DAMA chapter meeting and wasn’t able to comment on the event until now.

Before IBM could ramp up and discuss what it is doing to take part in the promotion of the use of the Linux Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), it had to explain a number of different organizations; KVM, the Open Virtualization Alliance; and oVirt; and what they did.  READ ENTIRE ARTICLE FROM ZDNET

According to Webster, the term gray market rolled out around 1946.  They define it as:

: a market employing irregular but not illegal methods; especially : a market that legally circumvents authorized channels of distribution to sell goods at prices lower than those intended by the manufacturer

 (Merriam Webster, January 2012.  Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gray%20market)

Gray market trading is not illegal trading.  The good side of circumventing distribution is the great savings in purchase prices we can offer our customers.  However, because this market is not subject to the guidelines of distribution, it is also a market which can be subjected to potential abusive and counterfeit selling practices. 

This is why companies like ours, Alta Technologies, along with many others have partnered with the ASCDI/NATD (Association of Service and Computer Dealers and the North American Association of Telecom Dealers.)  Their Anti-Counterfeit Task Force works together with companies like ours in an effort to protect these good companies who are offering quality products at a discount from distribution’s pricing and to prevent them from procuring equipment from unproven or suspicious new companies attempting to enter the business.  

It is from alliances such as the ASCDI/NATD of brokers and resellers who are like-minded in their desire to offer quality products at a reduced price that gray maket  trading is so successful.  None of us benefit from counterfeit equipment entering the supply chain.  It not only costs our customers time and money, but it could cost all of us much more than that.

For more information on the efforts of the ASCDI/NATD, please feel free to visit their website at http://www.ascdi.com/asna/.

For more information on Alta Technologies Inc. and our products and services, visit us at http://www.altatechnologies.com.

This developerWorks forum will often have answers for such issues we are all facing.  Responses from IBM engineers are posted here with other tips. 

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/index.html

Good luck!

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.