Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, David Smith, vice president of Worldwide SMB at Microsoft, explores the partner opportunities in the SMB market.
With the rapid advancements in new technologies, 2016 will be an exciting year for business of all sizes. Modern technologies that utilize cloud and mobile are becoming increasingly important in helping our small and medium business (SMB) customers compete and be more productive. However, many SMBs struggle with determining what technology is right for their business and how to take the first step.
In 2016, our partners have a huge opportunity to position themselves as trusted advisers that can not only help solve SMBs' business challenges and remain competitive, but also allow them realize the greatest return on their technology investments. More
Posted on January 21, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, Gavriella Schuster, general manager of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, weighs in on paths to success in the cloud.
Over the past year, we have seen more and more customers move to the cloud and partners adapt their business models to take advantage of the many opportunities the cloud has to offer. IDC helped illustrate the potential, citing cloud partners realized 1.6 times the recurring revenue as a portion of total revenue versus other partners.
With this business transformation, we spent last year focused on helping partners grow their cloud business and find their path to profitability. For example, we announced major changes to make our cloud competencies more valuable for our partners. We also expanded our Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, which gives partners expanded capability to directly manage the entire lifecycle of their customers' cloud subscription, to 131 markets. More
Posted on January 20, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, we invited Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, to share his top advice for Microsoft partners this year.
Over the last year, we've made some significant investments in our channel -- in tools, resources, program updates and product offerings -- to enable partners to take advantage of the vast customer opportunities across cloud and mobile technologies. And the opportunity is huge. In fact, IDC forecasts spending on public IT cloud services to reach $127 billion in 2018.
In previous years, we've focused on moving partners and customers to the cloud. But the truth is, many have already made this transition and are already realizing many of the benefits of cloud computing. This year, we're focusing on partner and customer success in the cloud -- enabling our partners and mutual customers to harness the full value of cloud and the associated devices, data and applications to truly transform their businesses. More
Posted on January 20, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, RCP blogger and columnist Barb Levisay addresses a major marketing trend.
While cloud has gotten all the press the past couple of years, there has been an even more profound shift affecting your business. Business strategy and technology have become inseparable. Today's strategic objectives are executed through technology -- from product engineering to customer interactions. That fundamentally changes the role that you, as IT service provider, play.
In your client's leadership meetings, the conversations about IT have changed. Regardless of how big the company, business leaders are trying to figure out how to use technology to disrupt, augment and extend their services and operations. Your clients need you at the table to participate in those conversations...and then they need the rest of your team to deliver. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on January 14, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, we invited Keith Lubner, managing partner of Channel Consulting Corp. and a former RCP columnist, to share some channel management tips.
Our company made great strides in 2015, especially toward the later part of the year. In all honesty, the beginning part of the year was difficult for us because of the mass amount of potential opportunities and directions we could have taken our business. We made a conscious decision to focus as summer ended and fall began, and it made all the difference in our business.
We also started making recommendations to clients based on what we did internally, and believe this will be a mantra moving forward for everyone in the market in 2016.
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Posted by Keith Lubner on January 13, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, we invited Michael Desmond, editor in chief of MSDN Magazine, to provide insight on what to watch for in development this year.
Keeping tabs on JavaScript frameworks is like keeping track of your teenage daughter's musical tastes. Every other week there seems to be a new framework that is, like, the best...ever.
JQuery, Dojo, Angular, Backbone, Knockout, Ember, React -- the list of frameworks literally goes on and on. Which is great if you are a Web developer looking for just the right resource to streamline your code effort and provide nifty capabilities like two-way data binding, dependency injection and sleek UIs. It may not be so good, though, when you have to actually manage and maintain code. More
Posted by Michael Desmond on January 08, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, we invited Keith Ward, founding editor of RCP sister publication Virtualization Review magazine, to weigh in on top trends in virtualization.
When I helped found Virtualization Review magazine in 2008, server virtualization still had that new-car smell. Many companies were dipping a toe into the technology, but few had jumped into the deep end of the pool. Caution was the word of the day; virtualization was so disruptive that companies were wise to take it slow.
Today, of course, server virtualization is standard in almost any company of any size. It's now just plumbing: Leave it alone and only take a peek when something goes wrong. More
Posted by Keith Ward on January 07, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, we invited Chris Paoli, who covers security for the 1105 Media Enterprise Computing Group, to provide his view of the most important security issue for 2016.
The topic of surveillance, specifically U.S. government-operated surveillance operations, will be a dominating talking point among presidential hopefuls ahead of Election Day this November. In the first presidential election since the Snowden leaks began in 2013, and in the wake of mass terrorist shootings in Paris, France and San Bernardino, Calif., national security and the related privacy debate are poised to become daily mainstays for news outlets.
With the December passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 -- which, in part, could allow for some warrantless surveillance actions by the federal government in the name of national security, while opening information-sharing channels between private IT companies and the government -- the respective main party front-runners provided their stances on balancing security and user privacy. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has called for an increase in surveillance, and called on tech companies to take a larger role in national defense.
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Posted by Chris Paoli on January 07, 20160 comments
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For today's entry, we invited Jeff Schwartz, an RCP columnist and editor in chief of RCP's sister publication Redmond magazine, to provide his insights on the most important trends in cloud.
As Microsoft's Azure cloud service turns 6 years old on Feb. 1, the company has entered 2016 gunning to overtake Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud supremacy. That's far from a sure thing, but it's the first time the mere suggestion of Azure closing in on AWS isn't preposterous.
Various surveys conducted last year suggest both cloud service businesses grew considerably. Thanks to Amazon's decision to break out its revenues for AWS for the first time, we got a clear picture of how robust the business has become. Based on the third quarter earnings report in October, AWS was on a run rate to conclude the year as an $8 billion business. AWS posted revenues of $2.09 billion, a 78 percent year-over-year increase. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 06, 20160 comments
This guest blog was written by Lafe Low, an editor for the 1105 Enterprise Computing Group and a former contributing editor to Redmond Channel Partner magazine.
Microsoft partners are intimately familiar with most of the major Microsoft shows. There's the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), where partners come together to network and share strategies. Depending on your unique offerings and business proposition, perhaps you've also traveled to Microsoft's Build or TechEd events. Build can certainly help get you up to speed on what's happening in the Microsoft development community. And TechEd, now combined with a number of other IT shows as Ignite, will give you the Microsoft view of how its technology stack fits into current enterprise business models.
There are myriad opportunities throughout the year to expand your professional knowledge and network. If you're ever looking for some higher-level, targeted education on specific development or technology tools, Visual Studio Live! and TechMentor have got you covered. (Full disclosure: These events are produced by the 1105 Media Enterprise Computing Group, which also brings you Redmond Channel Partner magazine and RCPmag.com.) More
Posted by Lafe Low on April 22, 20150 comments
This guest blog was written by Dave Sobel, director of community for GFI MAX.
The services evolution has driven change in the IT channel for years. Many solution providers started as resellers, where the opportunity for profit came from markup on physical equipment. As the market in physical equipment matured, margins shrank and many discarded their reseller roots and began to focus on providing the services that their customers needed.
In time, those new service providers began exploring ways to make their organizations more efficient and more profitable, and managed services emerged as the leading business model to meet those goals. Managed services transformed the way solution providers did business by combining alignment with customer needs, productivity and efficiency gains, increased margins and business stability.
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Posted on March 17, 20140 comments
As part of our 2014 "Marching Orders" feature, Ross Brown, senior principal with The Spur Group, gives his take on what partners need to do to succeed in the new year.
In the coming year, two trends will combine to create a perfect storm for partners. First, there's the increasing focus on virtualizing everything (storage, network, compute, memory, sessions and so on). Second is the increasing need for integration and federation between on-premises virtualized workloads and cloud services.
The ubiquity of virtualization is a bonanza for partners because of two compelling and unstoppable forces:
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Posted on January 03, 20140 comments