Microsoft Money: Earnings Report To Come This Week

Microsoft is announcing earnings in a market that we might call unstable if we were in a friendly mood. In an unfriendly mood, we'd call it a bear market, which it technically is -- or has been, at least, at times in recent days. So Microsoft's earnings report, due Thursday after the close of the stock market (and therefore not likely to appear in RCPU until Monday, although RCPmag.com will have coverage) is a big deal. Maybe a bigger deal than usual.

Analysts are bullish right now; Microsoft's stock price jumped a hair on Tuesday on news that the results for the company's fourth fiscal quarter should be pretty solid. But while the quarter-by-quarter mentality of Wall Street dictates that Q4 gets the headlines, Microsoft will also be announcing results for its whole fiscal year 2008. With that report, usually, comes plenty of news for partners and a checkup on how various business units in Redmond are doing.

With banks and mortgage lenders seemingly dropping like flies, the technology industry mostly just keeps rolling along. Of course, Microsoft is one of the major catalysts that keeps it rolling, so Redmond's financial health should be an indicator of just how stable or unstable the rest of calendar 2008 is going to be for propeller heads like us. It's not that we're necessarily cheering for Microsoft here (although we certainly don't cheer against it), but we are hoping for solid results, as any good news on the economy is welcome news, and anything that keeps the industry stable is positive, as well.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 16, 20080 comments

Windows Update Named Most Reliable Service

Earth shattering? No...but we figure that with last week's WPC news still relatively fresh, you don't need to much more to digest at this point. Goodness knows we don't.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 15, 20080 comments

Microsoft Buys Zoomix

Posted by Lee Pender on July 15, 20081 comments

Symantec: Attacks On Access Will Get Worse

Posted by Lee Pender on July 15, 20080 comments

Doug Kennedy's Dynamic Vision

The long-time Oracle veteran signed on to Redmond in March and is now vice president of Microsoft Dynamics Partners. He's got a vision to fine-tune -- there's no overhaul needed -- Dynamics and help the suites continue to eat away at the market share of SAP as well as that of Kennedy's former employer.

Kennedy is excited, first off, about Microsoft's plan to differentiate channel members in the partner program with good-better-best competency designations (see RCP's exclusive coverage here).

"The partners are all asking for some sort of delineation between them," Kennedy told RCPU this week at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. "They see this as a welcome change for them. The ones that are more excited about this are the ones saying, 'I want to grow; I want to be more important, tell me what to do.'" He's hoping that good-better-best, along with a few Dynamics-specific initiatives he's working on, will reduce channel conflict -- something many Dynamics partners would love to see happen.

Kennedy is listening to the "tell me what to do" part, too. For starters, Kennedy feels as though Microsoft could tighten up its Dynamics marketing quite a bit. Microsoft is, after all, telling partners to go vertical if they want to survive -- yet much of Microsoft's messaging on Dynamics is strikingly horizontal.

It's not just about marketing, though. Kennedy said that Microsoft needs to stop taking a homogenous approach to managing Dynamics partners and instead give them guidance that's more specific to their particular vertical industries and specializations.

"We've been managing them all pretty well the same," Kennedy said. "We haven't been pivoting around industries. We need to shift some of our spending into more industry-centric, vertical-centric awareness and demand generation."

Redmond also needs to take a more proactive role in guiding partners in the marketplace, he said: "Telling the partners how they should do things versus us stepping in and helping them do that -- that's what we need to do now," he said, noting that the latter course is the one Microsoft is looking to follow.

RCPU has long said that Dynamics is loaded with potential -- and, in fairness, it's doing very well already -- if Microsoft can just get its messaging straight around the suites and get partners mobilized. If he can put his words into action, Doug Kennedy should be the person to unlock Dynamics' potential.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 10, 20080 comments

Some Partners Are Up for S+S

This week's freak-out about the partner model for S+S isn't universal. RCPU spoke to one partner who was just fine with the notion of Microsoft competing with his business -- and, in fact, he welcomed it.

Eilert Giersten Hanoa -- who, in the tradition of great Norwegians such as Johan Olav Koss and Tore Andre Flo, does the three-name thing -- isn't just a doppelganger for a guy your editor went to high school with. No, he's much more: He's CEO and founder of Mamut, an Oslo-based SaaS provider...and he couldn't be happier about Microsoft getting serious about S+S.

Hanoa's company is a hosting provider and, as such, will soon be in competition with Microsoft for application hosting, specifically around Exchange. But that doesn't bother Hanoa because he's got a lot more than just hosting going on. Mamut provides a whole range of services on top of simple application hosting, and that's where the company's real revenue comes from. As such, Hanoa is just as happy to let Microsoft run the actual datacenter that do the hosting as he is to run them himself. Happier, in fact.

"If you put yourself in a hoster perspective, no customer will give you credit if you have 100 percent uptime, but they will give you a hard time if you don't have 100 percent uptime," Hanoa told RCPU at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston this week.

"The easier it is for us to provide premium uptime, the better," he said. "If you're a partner delivering your own IP on top of Microsoft offerings, the more Microsoft does to ensure quality of service, the better. Our customers are not giving us any added value for us hosting Exchange. They don't care who hosts. Basically, today, we are spending too much time from a resource and money and headcount perspective on doing plumbing that we shouldn't do instead of on something we can charge for. Instead of us having a hosted environment, let's be excited about delivering that IP that no one else is delivering for small business."

The cost savings is significant. Hanoa said that he's actually been able to double his revenues on customers that have moved from his hosting platform to Microsoft's. "I'm hoping that in 10 years my datacenter will be much smaller," he said.

But what about controlling access to the customer, the issue that has so many other partners worried? What about Microsoft potentially squeezing Mamut out of accounts? Hanoa isn't worried about that.

"For a generic Exchange hoster, it's obviously a big problem," Hanoa said. "Twenty years ago, you could sell PCs and get 40 percent margin. That stopped rapidly. The same is going to happen with commodity hosting services such as Exchange. Unless you can have a stickiness on top of that, you can't have a good business model. What will be very important for us is that we can continue to bill our customers on the unique IP that we can deliver. [Microsoft's S+S strategy] resonates with partners who are confident in their own additional value but not in partners who have not taken that transition yet."

So, there you go. If you want to succeed in S+S, make your business sticky. And if you can make it as sticky as Houston in July, you'll be doing very, very well.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 10, 20080 comments

Microsoft Tries To Defend Vista

They said that developers in their organizations loved Vista -- and developers do tend to love it. They talked about certification processes. They discussed driver compatibility problems a little bit. But, by design or otherwise, they stayed miles away from the real issue surrounding the beleaguered operating system: user acceptance.

And when a question about users' attitude toward Vista finally came up at the very end of the session -- asked by RCP columnist Josh Greenbaum, no less -- the one answer that came out was circumspect at best. Philip Lieberman, president of Lieberman Software, a Gold Certified Partner, said this: "We're seeing five years, seven-year deployments of XP. I'm sure there are people now getting XP machines that are replacing Windows 3.1."

Lieberman also said that Vista is becoming a "check-off item" -- in other words, something so common that nobody asks questions when it comes on a new PC.

In fairness to Lieberman and the other panelists, they didn't have much time to answer Josh's question. And Microsoft did promise to have the panelists answer further questions individually later on. But the fact that the panel didn't lead with the one issue -- user acceptance -- that really matters most in any IT deployment speaks volumes about how Microsoft is communicating on Vista.

Tuesday morning, Brad Brooks, Microsoft's corporate vice president for online services and Windows, gave a speech on Vista that was intended to be rousing but left the Toyota Center crowd a bit flat. Brooks talked about how much more secure Vista is than XP, and he reminded us that XP got a cool reception of its own back in 2002. He said that he was out to bust myths about Vista.

But Brooks didn't really say much about enterprise adoption of Vista -- there were no numbers bandied about on that front -- or user satisfaction with the OS. He did say that Windows 7 will build on Vista, a message that Microsoft might want to consider fine-tuning (or scrapping) if it wants users to ever quit XP.

Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise Vista and combat the damaging (and brilliant) Mac Guy ads that Apple unleashed a couple of years ago. We'll see where that campaign goes; we didn't really see much of an example of if this week.

But all the speeches and spending in the world can't make people like an OS that has its strong points but is frankly too big, too complicated and too clunky for a world in which everything is becoming smaller, simpler and more streamlined. Microsoft missed with Vista. Maybe it's time for Redmond to accept that and move on.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 09, 20082 comments

Microsoft Fuses Identity and Security

Before we continue, is anybody else thinking what I'm thinking? You got chocolate in my peanut butter! You got peanut butter in my chocolate! OK, maybe not. Sorry, it's been a long conference already. And we like Reese's. (The theme there was famous combinations, in case you were wondering.)

Anyway, the new group, officially minted July 1 to coincide with the beginning of Microsoft's fiscal 2009, is the Identity & Security Business Group -- which sounds like some sort of New Age work therapy session, but we digress. What it is, though, is a group that makes a lot of sense, in that it combines marketing and engineering efforts for products that complement each other.

For instance, the new group combines teams working on such identity products as Windows Rights Management Server and Active Directory Federation Services with those working on offerings such as the Forefront Suite.

"It is very clear in talking to customers that the key business drivers are converging into a single set of product requirements," Douglas Leland, general manager of the Identity and Security Business Group, told RCPU at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston this week. "It's a very natural move to bring these two businesses together."

Indeed -- we get it. And for partners, there are new opportunities. The rapidly growing Security Software Advisor program now pays referral fees for former Identity and Access Products, including Rights Management Server and Identity Lifecycle Manager. In order to attract partners who are focused on selling infrastructure, the program will pay a 50 percent bonus on a partner's first referral from now until the end of September, said Mark Hassall, director of Windows Product Marketing.

Leland added that Forefront is coming along nicely, thank you very much; he said that 72 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using Forefront in one way or another. For his part, Hassall cited some pretty impressive SSA numbers: The number of partners in the program increased 500 percent year over year from 2007 to 2008 (from 4,000 to 23,000), and the number of partners having achieved the Security Solutions Competency grew from 700 in mid-2007 to 2,700 in 2008. That's year-over-year growth of 350 percent, if you're scoring along at home.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 09, 20080 comments

Ballmer to Hosting Partners: We'll Beat You

Well, OK, that's an oversimplification, but Ballmer, in response to a question during Wednesday morning's Worldwide Partner Conference keynote, said that Microsoft has to host its own applications or surrender the market to its competitors.

And he said that Microsoft's hosting model will grow faster than those of partners: "Cloud services will grow faster than the hosting opportunity, but that doesn't mean hosting won't grow," Ballmer told a crowd at Houston's Toyota Center Wednesday. He fielded pre-screened questions from partners asked by Geoff Colvin, editor at large of Fortune magazine. Colvin and Fortune narrowly won the Q&A gig over RCPU. OK, we just made that last sentence up.

Ballmer, however, said that partners won't come up empty-handed in Microsoft's hosting plan. He said that Microsoft will continue to support partner-hosted applications, even if those partners compete with Microsoft's self-hosted offerings. And he said that Microsoft's hosting effort would benefit the entire channel -- not just hosting partners -- over time by diving innovation in Redmond's traditional server products.

"I would say as we start introducing more and more of these cloud service offerings, we're in the process of reengineering our server software," Ballmer said. "All of the innovations we'll make in cloud services, we will also repackage over time back into our server offerings."

Ballmer hit on a few other issues during the keynote Q&A:

• On a potential acquisition of Yahoo, Ballmer offered no specifics but said, "Watch this space for news on search."

• On Microsoft being "uncool" in comparison to Apple and Google, Ballmer contended that Microsoft doesn't get headlines because it has been consistently successful for a long time and isn't new like Google or "reborn" like Apple. He also said that forthcoming Microsoft products might change the trend: "What we need to do is have products that surprise people, that delight people, and particularly on the consumer side. We haven't surprised people quite as much as we need to, to surf the cool wave," he said.

• On the free phone support for Vista that Microsoft began advertising this week, Ballmer said the initiative isn't an effort to undercut partners: "Most small businesses have only two, three or four employees, and statistically you would say most of them buy their computers via mail or in a retail shop. They might work with partners but most of them don't. The message in the ad is targeted at people who wind up being largely self-sufficient," he said. Ballmer also pushed partners to drive Vista sales: "It's time. Vista's ready," he said.

• On open source, Ballmer said that while Microsoft will interoperate with open source software, and while Microsoft will encourage open source development on the Windows platform, Microsoft won't be going open source any time soon: "Are our products likely to be open source? No. Open source implies free. Free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference," he said.

• On unified communications and "coopetition" with Cisco, Ballmer said the relationship will be more competitive than cooperative, and that partners should push Office Communications Server: "That's why they call it coopetition, and I'm going to focus on the non-'coop' part. The 'tition.' We're going to get out there and thump and bump and sell to the best of our ability," he said.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 09, 20080 comments

Tellme Bucks Microsoft SaaS Trend

But if the mother ship's S+S model seems to wrest control of customers away from channel members, little Microsoft satellite Tellme's budding partner program leaves partners firmly in control of their accounts. Microsoft bought Tellme, a SaaS telephony company, last year, and the little principality of Microsoft's great nation still has a fair amount of independence. It's even headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., rather than in Redmond.

What Tellme didn't have until this week was a partner program. It sold its hosted phone systems directly and mainly to really large companies -- think American Express and FedEx. Enter the affable Bob Crissman, longtime Microsoft Partner Program veteran and now general manager of Tellme's partner program. Crissman's building a channel for Tellme, and he's keeping partners at the forefront of the effort.

"For partners to pay attention to Tellme, we want to make sure we have a compelling model for them," Crissman told RCPU at the WPC. "They own the customer relationship. They get the professional services revenue upfront."

Here's how it works: Microsoft wholesales phone minutes -- basically the commodity in this business -- to partners, who in turn mark them up and sell them to customers. Beyond that, partners have plenty of opportunities for customization and service. And, partners own their accounts -- they do the billing, the upselling, the bundling -- unlike in Microsoft's S+S partner strategy.

"[Partners] get the professional services revenue upfront," Crissman said. "The partner is going to realize a revenue stream from that over the life of the agreement."

The deal's great for systems integrators, Crissman said, as well as for companies that have expertise either in phone systems or in speech applications -- the latter category of partner could, for instance, speech-enable a CRM system so that salespeople could update their systems over the phone rather than via a keyboard.

Crissman said that Tellme has a lot of autonomy from Microsoft and that he never really talked with the mother ship's SaaS folks about their partner strategy. Maybe, though, Microsoft should pay attention to what Crissman and his folks are doing.

Sure, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison -- Tellme's looking for 30 or 40 partners and now has one (SpeechCycle), while the Microsoft SaaS effort will involve at least tens of thousands of partners -- but Crissman and his team seem to have found a model that will work well for everybody involved. And shouldn't that always be the goal?

Posted by Lee Pender on July 09, 20080 comments

Elop to Partners: Chill

That's probably why Elop made a point to hold partners' hands in Tuesday morning's keynote -- to tell them that while Microsoft, the industry and the channel have to change, Redmond wouldn't think of going it alone without its partners. He rattled off the numbers: more than 500,000 partners in the partner program, 96 percent of Microsoft's revenues generated by partners, $7 earned for a partner for every $1 earned for Microsoft, $5.4 billion in projected SharePoint sales for partners in the year ahead.

He also hammered home the quotes: "We each only succeed as the other succeeds," he said, calling the Microsoft-partner combo a deliberately dependent relationship. He went on: "In the history of Microsoft, we have only been successful when we have gone to market with you," he gushed.

Elop evangelized S+S, too. He mentioned an IDC estimate that says that the SaaS market will grow by 32 percent year over year through 2011, developing into a $21 billion market. He said that Gartner predicted that 25 percent of all new business application deployments would be in Web environments by 2011.

And then, he threw in the kicker: "Any partner can sign up for and participate in this S+S transformation."

Indeed. The "sign up for" part is relatively simple, and Microsoft is helping partners do that with a new Web site (accessible at some point this week at http://partner.microsoft.com) and other formal guidance. It's the "participate in" part that has partners concerned.

Nobody doubts that Microsoft has to have a SaaS strategy, and from the perspective of how beneficial it will likely be for the company, Redmond's S+S plan looks pretty good. It also won't hurt budding SaaS partners to have Microsoft spreading news of the model and building confidence in it. And, some partners will surely be happy to lead customers to Microsoft and then collect commissions for their troubles.

But, as we've said here before, the issue is control of customers, and Elop didn't really talk much about that, although Microsoft will be harping on S+S all week long. What partners worry about is what happens after they lead a customer to Microsoft -- specifically, Microsoft takes over. Billing, upselling, bundling new offerings -- they're all part of Microsoft's domain under this new strategy, and partners worry that losing control of the customer and those revenue streams will hurt their profitability. They also worry about getting squeezed out by Microsoft altogether.

S+S is a work in progress; Elop allowed today that he and his colleagues "don't really have it all figured out yet," so it might be too early for partners to panic. But today's keynote, while full of genuine affection for partners that seemed to reach beyond the typical WPC platitudes, isn't likely to calm partners' fears. As if Houston wasn't hot enough already...

Posted by Lee Pender on July 08, 20080 comments

Microsoft Gets Specific on S+S Offerings

Ravi Agarwal

We say "mostly" because indications are that even Microsoft folks aren't totally sure what's going on with the company's S+S partner strategy: "No one really seems to really have the big picture," Ravi Agarwal, senior executive officer of groupSPARK, told RCPU today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Houston. "A lot of people within Microsoft don't have all the details yet. This whole program got rushed through in 18 months. Normally, it takes about three years to put together a product."

What we already knew was that Microsoft, with its plans to host its own applications, was setting itself up to compete with members of its own channel. What we know now is more specific information about how those plans will work. This morning, at the WPC, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop (the new Jeff Raikes, if you're keeping score), announced some of the details of Microsoft's hosting offering.

RCPU got into specifics on Monday with Marie Huwe, general manager of partner strategy and programs at Microsoft. Here's what she told us, and what Elop announced this morning: Microsoft has created a couple of new offerings, including one for "deskless" workers, or those folks who don't use a computer very much but still need to get to applications now and then. The Deskless Worker Suite, which will include hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint, will be available for $3 a month.

The other offering is the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, which consists of hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications (for functions such as instant messaging) and Live Meeting. That suite will be available for $15 per month. At the time of this writing, Microsoft hadn't provided any dates of availability -- but Agarwal indicated that an October launch was on the cards.

There will also be some tools to help partners prepare for SaaS, including a Web site that Microsoft has developed with analyst mega-firm IDC intended to give partners of all stripes direction on how they might profit from a hosted model. All the relevant information will be on http://partner.microsoft.com as the week goes by.

"You answer some questions about who you are and what your business is," Huwe said of the new Web resource. "Then you talk about what opportunity you want to take advantage of and it gives you some guidance. You almost write up your own pro forma about how you want to move. The whole idea is that it's interactive, specific guidance for you."

So, there you go. That's what we know. What we don't know -- and this is the leftover haze we mentioned in the opening paragraph -- is specifics about feature sets, Agarwal mentioned. But we do know more about how partners will participate. And that's where things get sticky.

For starters, Agarwal said (although Huwe didn't mention this specifically), Microsoft won't sign customers directly -- as it does, for instance, for Dynamics CRM Online -- so customers will need to at least have a "reference partner." That partner, in turn, will get 12 percent of the subscription fee for the first year of the contract and 6 percent every year thereafter. Other than that, though, it's all Microsoft, Agarwal told us -- Microsoft bills customers, upsells other services and sets prices.

And partners get squeezed out. They won't be able to bundle applications they way they do now, and they'll no longer "own the customer" and be able to profit from lucrative upselling opportunities. They'll get their money -- and Microsoft will get their customers. It's Microsoft's first small step toward direct sales, and partners are not happy about it.

"It's a crack in the door, and [partners] are not sure what else Microsoft will do with that crack, what else MS will sell that will replace that VAR over time," Agarwal said. He's got worries of his own -- his company provides private-label hosting to partners, and he's about to be in direct competition with Microsoft.

Agarwal touts his company's flexibility; the resellers who use groupSPARK for hosting -- most of the time, those resellers' customers have never heard of groupSPARK -- will be able to bundle applications and upsell in a way that partners that work with Microsoft won't be able to do. Plus, Microsoft's offering won't support some older versions of Outlook, nor will it offer Linux or Mac support.

Beyond groupSPARK, though, partners should be worried, Agarwal said. Microsoft's quickly developed strategy -- Agarwal calls it a "knee-jerk reaction" to competition from Google and an increasing group of companies hosting Exchange -- will wrestle control of customers away from partners and into the hands of Microsoft, he said.

And that has a lot of ramifications. For instance, partners sometimes charge customers different fees based on certain factors; financial-services firms or larger companies, for instance, might pay more than other customers, Agarwal said. But Microsoft's pricing scheme will make it more difficult for partners to vary pricing, and, beyond that, partners will have to compete with aggressive Microsoft pricing for hosted applications.

The whole thing, Agarwal said, will start to feel to partners like a betrayal -- Microsoft, after all, built its business on the channel, and now it's apparently trying to take some of that business away: "Certain partners will feel betrayed," Agarwal said. "As details unfold, they will feel betrayed. Over the next few years, these VARs will start feeling it."

The concerns Agarwal expressed aren't the rantings of some disgruntled partner. His company was just named the 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions.

Agarwal sees several positives in the new structure. He estimates that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 percent of the market for hosted e-mail and office productivity applications is currently being reached. Having Microsoft's "air cover" of broad-market advertising will be a boost to the market. And the low-end solutions can give VARs an opportunity to make a sale at small companies that don't have the budget for an on-premise implementation of Exchange or SharePoint. The moves will require adjustments in VAR business models, Agarwal said.

Analyst Paul DeGroot with Directions on Microsoft agreed that VARs will need to change their business model over the next couple of years to adapt to Microsoft's moves and to the market, but he contended that Microsoft really has no choice but to act unless they want to watch the industry walk away from them. "They run the risk of being locked in a desktop ghetto," DeGroot said. Meanwhile, he's glad to see Microsoft put its cards on the table for the channel. "It's good to see the compensation model," he said. "It will be interesting to see how that develops."

Bill Gates, who was such a champion of the channel model, is gone. Microsoft is in transition. Will the company's new direction put it into more situations in which it competes with -- or takes business away from -- its partners? Stay tuned. For now, though, the haze is lifting, and partners don't necessarily like what they see.

How concerned are you about Microsoft taking business away from you? Sound off at [email protected].

Thanks to Scott Bekker for some additional reporting for this entry.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 08, 20080 comments