If there's any constant with MSPs, it's change. Not that that's unusual in the technology industry, but MSPs seem to have changed models and strategies more in the last few years than most other companies in most categories. They even changed their name: remember Applications Service Providers?
Well, the change continues, as companies refine outsourcing strategies. The new thing, apparently, is great big companies using multiple MSPs rather than going with just one or two, and general flooding of competition in the MSP market. This article spells everything out in great detail, and although it's written by a Brit, old bean, from a UK perspective, it still makes for an interesting read. Or it will, anyway, until everything changes again.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20080 comments
There's probably something wrong when it's much, much easier to find Norris
Weese's career passing yardage total (1,887) than it is to find critical information
about your own company.
One survey suggest that enterprise
search is just lame, which, to us, sounds as though somebody should capitalize
on the opportunity to make it better.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments
It looks as though Microsoft is going to kill XP after all, despite flickers
of
hope
to the contrary. In fact, Microsoft officials were pretty adamant about
saying that
XP
isn't here to stay, although the famous "downgrade" option is
still on the table -- you know, until we're all "ready for Vista,"
which should be any time now.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments
In case you hadn't noticed, the first four letters in the word "hyper"
are H-Y-P-E. And, until today, a lot of what we knew about the core product
in Microsoft's virtualization strategy, the Hyper-V hypervisor, was just that:
hype. (Well, hype and the fact that,
as
we've maintained, Hyper-V sounds like an '80s break-dancing name.)
OK, so that's not entirely true -- the hype part, anyway; we stand by the breakdancing
thing. Hyper-V has been
in beta for a while, and some partners have customers running on it and
have for some time. Microsoft says that a million people have downloaded the
Hyper-V beta and are using the product. (Then again, Microsoft calls Vista a
success.) So, we do know something more about Hyper-V than just hype.
Still, Hyper-V has been mostly a series of press releases and a concept for
many customers and partners -- until today.
As of today, Hyper-V is out there. Microsoft officially
released its competitor to VMware ESX today, sending partners into a virtual(ization)
frenzy. In all seriousness, though, Microsoft partners are talking about the
opportunities that Hyper-V will provide -- and about its advantages over ESX,
the runaway market leader from VMware.
There's another four-letter word (other than "hype," that is) that's
important here: free. Hyper-V comes built into Windows Server 2008, meaning
that clients have already bought it when they pay for a Windows Server 2008
license. And that's a big selling point over VMware, one partner told RCPU.
"It's an easy sell because it's included and it's free," said Rand
Morimoto, president and CEO of Convergent Computing.
"If you compare Hyper-V to VMware, they're identical."
That's another thing. Functionality-wise, Morimoto said, customers won't lose
anything in transitioning from ESX to Hyper-V, or in just implementing Hyper-V,
period. But that transition might still prove to be a hard sell. VMware, after
all, produces a popular set of products and has a presence in nearly every big
company in the world -- and in a lot of smaller ones, too.
Morimoto, who also sells VMware as well as working with Microsoft, isn't out
to change that, necessarily: "The position that we have is that we have
a lot of customers that are running VMware," Morimoto said. "We're
providing customers the option. If a customer puts a foot down and says, 'We're
a VMware shop,' we're not going to try to change them."
However, he wants to consult his clients as to how they might save money down
the road by transitioning to Hyper-V. Morimoto suggests a hybrid environment
-- or possibly a slow transition from VMware to what he called the more cost-effective
(read: free with Windows Server 2008) Hyper-V.
"We're not asking you to throw [VMware] away, but we're saying think twice
about continuing to invest," he said. "Depreciate initial investment
[in VMware], and everything after that is free." And for shops with no
virtualization at present, Morimoto said that Hyper-V is an obvious choice.
For his part, Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization in the System Center
group at Microsoft, explained to RCPU that Hyper-V is just one part -- albeit
the core -- of Microsoft's overall virtualization strategy. "We have solutions
from the datacenter all the way to the desktop," Adam said.
Well, we're sure you do, and we'll get to all that -- along with VMware's side
of things -- one of these days. But for our purposes today, Hyper-V's release
represents Microsoft's first serious shot over VMware's bow. And despite the
(continued) hype it's sure to get now that it's out, we don't expect VMware
to shut its doors, nor do we anticipate that the extremely popular virtualization
vendor will stand still. After all, VMware is still the monster in the virtualization
space, and Microsoft is the minnow.
Still, the Windows Server-Hyper-V bundle could be powerful. We can see where
Morimoto and the Microsoft folks are coming from with that message. After all,
the whole "better together" thing has worked for Microsoft before
and is still at the core of the company's very successful enterprise strategy.
So, bring on Hyper-V, we say...and bring on even more hype.
Do you have any experience with Hyper-V? Tell us at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on June 26, 20080 comments
Apparently, Symantec's purchase of Altiris, now about a year old, is going
fairly well. The security giant released a mega-suite this week called
Endpoint
Management Suite 1.0.
It's got just about everything in it that a product of that name would seem
to have, and Kevin Murray, senior director of product marketing at Symantec
(and not the former Texas A&M quarterback) said that everything in the new
suite actually works together.
"These things are well-integrated," Murray said. "They're not
just a bundle of products that have separate installers."
At the heart of it all is Altiris Client Management Suite 6, which Symantec
bought when it snapped up the Utah-based vendor last year. "It helps customers
get hold of an IT lifecycle of an endpoint," Murray said. "It's really
the center of the product."
Posted by Lee Pender on June 25, 20080 comments
A couple of weeks ago,
we
pondered what, exactly, social networking in the office would be good for.
Well, Christine responded to our questions with great enthusiasm:
"Social networking for higher ed rocks! LinkedIn -- keeping up with
your students who have graduated! You know what they are doing, where they
are doing it, and what we missed in their education to correct class content
and keep up with the industry. It also helps us with our completer numbers
as most of my students change their e-mails and cell phone numbers as often
as they change their socks or add additional piercings and/or tattoos, and
we need to follow up with them six months after they graduate.
"MySpace -- post your calendar, let your students know when you are in
class, when you are gone, when your office hours are. They're looking here,
not on your campus Web page! Second Life -- get your administration to sponsor
an island...let the fun begin!"
Christine, we can understand the usefulness of social networking among the
college set, who seem to be the most into it -- although Second Life has always
struck us as being a tad freaky. Sure, we get LinkedIn, and we're on it -- but,
honestly, we almost never use it. So what's the use of social networking in
a boring, old office full of mostly non-pierced people?
Well, we're starting to see it, actually, thanks to Eivind Sandstrand, vice
president of product marketing U.S. at a New York-based company called SalesCentric.
The idea behind SalesCentric is simple -- and actually pretty cool. The company's
software allows users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to chart and define relationships
between individuals who work for the customers they serve.
Now, that sounds sort of confusing, but trust us, it's not. What SalesCentric's
application with the tiny 5MB installation file lets users do is build org charts
of their customers' operations. But more than just storing info on titles and
contact coordinates, SalesCentric also lets users chart things like how warm
particular people in a customer's company are to the user's company (in other
words, the CFO loves us, but the CEO is lukewarm -- you get the idea), and how
and why customers have relationships with each other and with the user's organization.
So, instead of just looking at a long list of names and titles, a user sees
and can manipulate -- in a simple, drag-and-drop interface -- an org chart with
all the basic data on who reports to whom and how to get in touch with everybody,
plus info on how individuals relate to and feel about each other. It's difficult-ish
to explain on paper (or in pixels) but comes through crystal-clear in a demo.
For SalesCentric, the idea is to get people to actually put enterprise software
to use.
"There's so much clunkiness inside any business application that people
don't use it for what it needs to be used for, which is relationship management,"
Sandstrand said, invoking the last two words of the acronym "CRM."
Using Microsoft as an example, Sandstrand said, "I can see how Bill Gates
is connected to Steve Ballmer and how Steve Ballmer is connected to some other
person. All that information is presented to me visually, and it's driven back
into the CRM system so you have the ability to mine that data."
Take our word for it -- it's cool and useful. But is it really social networking?
Meh, that's hard to say for now, but Sandstrand said that the app is definitely
moving in that direction. "We don't currently have the connection to LinkedIn
or Facebook, but that is the direction the product is moving in," he said.
And why would anybody need SalesCentric on top of those more traditional (if
we can use that word for such a relatively new concept) social networking models?
Because SalesCentric goes beyond names and e-mail addresses, Sandstrand said.
"If I need to get in touch with a person in an organization, the fact
that he sees that I have more than 200 connections in that business space makes
him more likely to talk to me," he said. "I have no idea how he's
connected, though. I have no idea how these networks extend beyond that. Eventually,
you'll be able to automatically start importing these external networks into
your [CRM] applications. When you know what these connections are, that's when
you have the ability to capitalize on it."
Now, that makes sense. And there are no piercings required.
Have any more stories of useful social networking apps? Get in touch at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on June 25, 20080 comments
Apparently Patch Tuesday isn't exactly a national holiday yet, as most users
choose to
ignore
it completely.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 25, 20080 comments
We intentionally gave, or tried to give, this entry a
New York Times-sounding
headline -- they always seem to start with a dependent clause -- because this
is one of those times when the big-name, mainstream, non-business media are
storming into our territory.
Oh, sure, the Newsweeks of the world write about technology a lot more
frequently than they used to, but they still mainly show up just for the big
events -- enormous product launches, executive departures and arrivals, earnings
disasters (or, less frequently, blockbusters), that sort of thing. Down here
in the trades, we grind out technology news every day. Only relatively rarely
are we visited by our friends in the big-time.
Metaphorically speaking, we trade hacks are there for NBA regular-season games
in Minnesota in January, while Newsweek only bothers to waltz in when the Finals
are on. And yet, because they are who they are, the big guys get the exclusive
interviews with Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, while we're stuck crowding around
Brian Scalabrine, trying to get a quote. (And, yes, this paragraph is brought
to you in honor of the World Champion Boston Celtics. We love you, Paul, KG...and
Scal.)
So, with Bill Gates, icon among icons, finally finishing the longest victory
lap in industry history, the big guns are all over the story. This week in particular,
Newsweek has unleashed a long
and, we're sure, interesting (we haven't read the whole thing yet) story
on the future of Microsoft without Gates...and of Gates without Microsoft.
The big N, whose little logo on the Firefox tab makes us think of the
Nebraska Cornhuskers, also offers
an update on the folks in the famous Microsoft photo from 1978. You know,
the photo that's made the rounds on the Internet thousands of times over the
last few years and has even turned up in an ad or two. There's even a 2008 (or,
at least, more recent) version of the photo.
Big ol' TV network ABC is in on the act, too -- albeit with an article written
by somebody at PC World; hooray for the hacks! -- with an article sorting
out the myths and realities of what Gates has and hasn't said over the years.
(Actually, we're pretty sure that tech mondo-publisher IDG has a deal with
some of the big news sources like The New York Times and ABC because
we see trade articles on those mega-sites all the time, so this doesn't really
count as the mainstream media invading our space. But we're trying to stick
with a theme here.)
And even a regular Computerworld blogger gets into the spirit of things
with an entry on Gates' five
dumbest decisions, which we find a little funny given that most executives
in any industry would give their left, um, eyes to have even been in the position
to make dumb decisions and still end up with more money than anybody else in
the world.
There are tons more of these Gates end-of-an-era things floating around, but
those were the ones that stood out to us. In case you were wondering, we at
RCP the magazine are planning our own story on this topic, but we're
focusing on Microsoft's current technological and leadership transition and
not so much on Gates himself. (By the way, if you have any thoughts on post-Gates,
Ray Ozzie, cloud-computing, virtual Microsoft, send them to [email protected]
ASAP. Thanks.)
Frankly, we'll be glad when all the glamour magazines and fancy Web sites clear
out of here and let us get back to the grind. And, as for RCPU's take on Gates
-- well, his legacy speaks for itself, as does Microsoft's success and current
position on top of the software mountain. There's not really a lot for us to
say that hasn't been said (or won't be said, over and over again), so, for once...we're
not saying anything at all.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 24, 20080 comments
Dell is giving XP one more week to live, and if we're to believe some
reports
from credible sources, Microsoft might be thinking of extending the stay
of execution for the popular operating system, too.
Well, it only makes sense, doesn't it? Look, Vista's
a dud, especially in the enterprise. We can pretty much state that as fact
now. So why not give customers what they want -- XP -- for now and hope that
Windows 7 will fare better than Vista? Why is Microsoft so afraid to do something
that might actually make customers (and, in turn, a lot of partners) happy?
Maybe it isn't. We'll see.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 24, 20080 comments