Well, we'll bet
this
put a damper on a lot of Patch Tuesday parties.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 17, 20080 comments
For most of the last 12 years, Alt-N Technologies, based down in Grapevine,
Texas, has been a Microsoft competitor -- a role not easy for any smaller company
to play. Alt-N's bread and butter has been an e-mail product, a competitor to
Microsoft's mighty Exchange. As such, Alt-N isn't a Microsoft partner and has
fairly limited experience working with folks in the Microsoft channel.
Now, however, Alt-N is looking to work with Microsoft partners. It's got a
new product out, SecurityGateway,
which is (to quote the product description directly) an "e-mail spam firewall
for Exchange and SMTP servers."
Marketing Director Kevin Beatty spoke with RCPU not long ago and said that
he'd like to tap into the network of Exchange partners; he's looking for folks
who might want a nifty add-on to the basic product.
"We've really set it up with the interface being very administrator-friendly,"
the affable Beatty told RCPU in a bid to talk up the product. "We've put
a lot of mechanisms in place that allow for domain-level settings down to the
end user level."
Not only that, Beatty said, but it's pretty easy to become an Alt-N partner:
"We don't put a lot of people through big certification processes. We get
them on through a Webinar," he said.
So, there you go, Exchange folks. Check out your editor's fellow Texans at
www.altn.com if you're interested.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 12, 20080 comments
Symantec's new
Veritas
Virtual Infrastructure combines storage management and virtualization...but
just for Citrix, and not for VMware (or, uh, Hyper-V).
Posted by Lee Pender on June 12, 20080 comments
While it has absolutely nothing on
RCP the magazine's
annual
salary survey, we'll admit that Glassdoor, a new startup, sounds pretty
cool. It's all about tracking salaries and levels of employee satisfaction in
companies such as Google and Microsoft.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger
John Cook has the lowdown
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 12, 20080 comments
Just a quick note before we get started: We're giving you a break from reader
feedback this week, even though we've had some great stuff come through recently.
This week's
entry
on social networking has drawn some especially interesting feedback, so
we're actually going to blow that out a bit and come back to the subject in
future RCPUs. In the meantime, keep the good stuff coming to
[email protected].
We'll run your e-mails again soon, probably next week.
Anyway, for many people, the title of this entry comes as no surprise (heh
heh). But seriously, folks, the Vista debacle -- and that's really what it is
now -- is starting to bite Microsoft in the...well, in the stock price, among
other sensitive places.
Before we get to that, though, let's go ahead and get one thing out of the
way: We were wrong, apparently, about Vista. Many are the times we've said right
here in this newsletter that Vista would be the next XP eventually, that we'd
all use it and come to love it and miss it when it gracefully bowed off the
stage. We even said
something similar in the more formal confines of RCP the magazine.
And it appears that we -- along with a few analysts, although we should've known
better than to agree with them -- were wrong. Sorry about that.
The enterprise hates Vista, almost in the same way that people "hate"
a food they've never tried or a city they've never visited. That is to say that
most people we know who have Vista actually kind of like it -- maybe it's an
acquired taste -- but those who don't have it absolutely, completely, definitely
don't want it. And despite Microsoft's many claims of Vista success, the avoiders,
as far as we can tell, still greatly outnumber the accepters.
That's probably why we're hearing so much about Windows 7, the next version
of the operating system, which Microsoft seems to be rushing to market in an
effort to make up for Vista. We've already had limited
demos of the new OS, even as Microsoft is still ostensibly trying to move
us to Vista. Let's just say that the emergence of Windows 7 hype relatively
early (perhaps very early) in Vista's intended lifecycle isn't exactly a subtle
move on Redmond's part.
From a partner perspective, Vista's main cost has probably come in customer
confidence; after all, not many enterprise partners make serious money these
days by selling an OS. But they do sell Microsoft applications in an increasingly
competitive and dynamic (no pun intended) environment, and when Microsoft trots
out an Edsel like Vista as a long-planned, long-hyped major release, it doesn't
exactly inspire confidence that Microsoft's other big products -- such as this
year's batch of servers -- will be winners.
That might be (and probably is) unfair, as the new server team is mostly getting
rave reviews, and new-ish products such as SharePoint have taken off very well
indeed. Still, Vista's relative failure might make customers think twice about
trusting ol' MS, and that's not a good thing in today's competitive environment.
For Microsoft, though, the cost of Vista has been higher -- much higher. And
that's why we have an excuse to rag on it again today. BusinessWeek --
the best business magazine out there not named Redmond Channel Partner
-- documents this week the fairly
steep financial cost of Vista to Microsoft. The forlorn OS is taking a bite
out of Redmond's revenues and stock price, and big, big businesses (think GM)
are increasingly looking at passing it by altogether.
That's bad news for partners, too, as less money flowing into Fortress Microsoft
will mean less cash trickling down to partners. More than that, the pressure
is on Microsoft to execute now -- with Windows 7, with its critical SaaS efforts
and with generally adapting to a rapidly changing (more rapidly now, we'd say,
that in the last five years or so) software market.
Can Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, Kevin Turner -- and, critically, not Bill Gates
-- and their 80,000 or so colleagues pull it off? We'll see. Vista disaster
or otherwise, we still wouldn't bet against them.
How much has Vista cost you, if anything? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on June 12, 20080 comments
Mary Jo Foley suspects that Office 14 might just end up being called
Office
2009.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 11, 20080 comments
These days, Microsoft's Tech-Ed conference is an obnoxious two-week binge,
with one week devoted to developers and the second to IT folks. With a minimum
of product announcements on the slate, the more interesting (or at least somewhat
less nerdy) second week is all about agenda-setting for Redmond rather than
about product pumping. (And, no, RCPU is not there, in case you were wondering.)
So, what's on Microsoft's agenda? This week, anyway, it's our
old friend virtualization. Microsoft is touting
its architecture and applications as excellent candidates for the virtualized
environment, pushing the forthcoming Hyper-V and noting that the Forefront security
suite, if anybody wants it, will run in a virtualized environment.
The other big item on the agenda is SQL Server, a release candidate of which
is now
available. Short-timer Bill Gates pitched
SQL Server at the other Tech-Ed conference last week as being extremely
critical to the Microsoft data platform.
So, that's where we are right now on the Tech-Ed front. Really, it seems appropriate
that Microsoft it talking more about technology agendas than about pure product
releases (although the SQL news really falls into the latter category). After
all, the days of product-driven IT are ending, what with SaaS, virtualization
and other less physical (for lack of a better word) technologies piercing the
enterprise. Why it takes Microsoft two weeks to talk about this stuff is beyond
us, but at least it's recognition that we're not just living in an old-fashioned
software-and-servers world anymore.
What would you like to hear Microsoft say about virtualization? About other
new technologies? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on June 11, 20080 comments
Releasing an open source product
with
no source code? Tsk, tsk, Microsoft. The party does not tolerate that kind
of behavior, comrades.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 11, 20080 comments
Apparently too intimated to sit down and face the icy stare of RCPU, Bill Gates
and Steve Ballmer instead went running to the
Wall Street Journal (how
very old-media of them) to reminisce about old times and talk a bit about the
future. Actually,
this
is a really entertaining interview.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 11, 20080 comments
Here's one for all you health care partners out there, in case you missed it.
Kaiser Permanente (as opposed to Kaiser Temporalis, we suppose) and Microsoft
have an initiative to
digitize
health records and safely store and transfer them online.
Safely? Well, that might be a bit of a sticking point, we suspect, with a lot
of patents and doctors. Still, there could be money to be made here for enterprising
health care channel players.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 10, 20080 comments
Like RCPU, it sort of hits you with unrelenting regularity. This month,
seven
patches. Enjoy.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 10, 20080 comments