VMware is doubling down on the data center in response to growing competition from cloud providers, namely Amazon, and the increasing popularity of OpenStack in the enterprise. The channel is playing an important role in this agenda.

This week, Avaya announced the launch of the Collaboration Pod, a converged infrastructure solutions that the firm pegs as a plug and play communications and collaboration stack. The offering, which is targeted primarily at enterprises and service providers, combines Avaya unified communications technology, VMware’s vSphere ESXi 5.0 and VNX 5300 storage from EMC.

“Avaya Collaboration Pods are already proving their value to enterprises and cloud service providers who are accelerating time to service, reducing data center complexity and improving application availability.  Working with EMC and VMware, this turnkey deployment model for  Avaya Aura continues Avaya’s strategy to provide high performance communications and collaboration applications that are easy to deploy, use and manage from data center to desktop and mobile devices.”

VMware’s push into the software-led data center is a complex operation:  the virtualization giant is strengthening its presence in core segments at the expense of everything that won’t help it sell licenses to traditional IT shops. The company spun off most of its low-growth cloud and Big Data assets a while ago, and this week it managed to get rid of yet another investment that wasn’t paying off.

LANDesk Software, a Salt Lake City-based developer of admin tools, bought Shavlik Technologies  for an undisclosed sum. VMware had snapped up the IT management specialist in 2011 for its SMB network and server patch management tools.  Per the terms of the acquisition, LANDesk is getting the rights for Shavlik’s entire portfolio. The Register cited unnamed tipsters as saying that the 40 employees who worked on the lineup are joining the company.