am I missing something?

interesting article. I read it twice to make sure I didn't just overlook it, but I can't find the word "channel" or "VAR" anywhere in this article. In contrast, it sort of sounds like Dell is explicitly bypassing the channel and going straight to the end-user. Which is the same beef VARs have with Microsoft Live. Sounds like a trend to me. First we had proprietary SW lock-in that gobbled up all the profits and left nothing but services for the VAR, now we've got big-vendor SaaS "lock-out" stealing the services

Where's the open source platform for VARs to offer their own hosted services?