We don't want to give anything away or anything, but let's just say that the November issue of Redmond might just reveal the massive popularity of the Microsoft System Center product line, which the company updated late last week.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20090 comments
Is this the end? Really? Are the bad times over? PC sales were down again in calendar Q2 2009, but there's -- gasp! -- optimism on the horizon. Well, at RCPU, we'll believe it when we see it (we're still pretty pessimistic about the economy as a whole), but we're cheering for that recovery.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20090 comments
And it's goodbye to ISC's flagship product, Star-P, but hello to a bunch of ISC technology finding its way into Redmond's wares. And, in case you were wondering, ISC is (or was) based in Waltham, Mass., your editor's current residence and an all-around fine city.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 23, 20091 comments
Oh, this ERP business is complicated, and with Microsoft, it's really, really complicated. Sure, Microsoft Dynamics might be cheaper and easier to use and implement than most -- probably all -- of its competitors, but Redmond's insistence on offering four different ERP suites under the Dynamics name leads to a marketing alphabet soup that even the biggest enterprise software fan might have trouble keeping straight.
For the purpose of this post, though, forget about NAV, SL and GP. We're going to talk here about AX, the suite with by far the most violent name in the bunch and, if we're honest, the mothership of Dynamics that Microsoft hopes will lead the product line up market and into serious competition with SAP, Oracle and the other ERP titans.
Dynamics folks in Redmond classify AX as the suite for the "upper-midmarket," or companies with a few thousand employees and dozens or possibly hundreds of ERP users, said Crispin Read, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics ERP, on a recent trip to RCPU's sunlit headquarters in Framingham, Mass. Those kinds of companies tend to play in specific vertical industries (more so than, say, a huge, global corporation would), meaning they need a lot of customization to actually make their ERP systems work for them, their customers and their suppliers.
"Customers are looking to acquire vertical solutions," Read said. "Right now, what companies are looking for is apps that are designed for their verticals. There's little appetite for customization. It's difficult to keep up to date."
So, Microsoft's not going to try -- not on its own, at least -- to keep AX up to date. Redmond today announced three acquisitions of intellectual property aimed at creating vertical versions of AX and moving the suite into targeted industries. Buying vertical functionality and offering pre-customized versions of AX is an easier and more workable approach, said Kees Hertogh, director of product management for Microsoft Dynamics AX, than trying to bake a bunch of home-grown vertical capabilities into one giant AX pie.
"Try to capture too many verticals, you end up with spaghetti," Hertogh told RCPU in a brightly painted Framingham conference room. (By the way, is anybody else hungry?) "It's like concrete -- once it hardens, it's very hard to change."
So, in order to maintain a pasta-free diet, Microsoft is buying IP from Fullscope Inc. for process manufacturing, from Computer Generated Solutions Inc. for professional services, and from LS Retail EHF (talk about alphabet soup) and something called To-Increase Denmark A/S (your guess is as good as ours) for the retail industry.
It's worth noting that all four companies that are selling IP to Microsoft are Gold Certified Partners, and Read and Hertogh stressed during their visit with RCPU that Redmond will continue to rely on partners to customize AX for customers. The opportunities are immense, they say.
"Creating a vertical solution for an upper-midmarket company, there's a lot of work to do," Read said. "We don't want to provide all these vertical solutions. We want our partners to develop them, and it's a lot of work."
It's a lot of work that AX partners surely wouldn't mind having right now. Read said that Microsoft is focusing on selling AX into retail, distribution, manufacturing, professional services and the public sector, and today's announcements reflect the goals the company has for targeting some of those industries.
So, Dynamics partners, there you go -- you have your marching orders. Focus on AX for vertical industries, and the only way is up. Maybe next time, Microsoft will want to stir some of your IP into its Dynamics alphabet soup.
What's your take on how Microsoft is running its Dynamics business? Have you had success in specific verticals, and if so, which ones? Tell all at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20092 comments
It's just a little exchange of bills among Texans. No big deal, really. With the PC market slumping, Dell has decided to get into the services business, quickly, by forking over nearly $4 billion to buy Perot Systems. So, HP and IBM (and some really large Microsoft partners), there's a new services competitor on the horizon, and it's ridin' straight out of Texas.
Speaking of Texas, how about Dallas's own Ross Perot, huh? He might have abandoned his presidential ambitions long ago, but dig this paragraph in this AP story:
"Former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot Sr., now 79, serves as chairman emeritus of Perot Systems, which he founded in 1988. He earlier had made a fortune from founding Electronic Data Systems Corp. in 1962 and selling the company to General Motors Corp. in a 1984 deal worth $2.5 billion. Hewlett-Packard bought EDS last year for $13.9 billion."
Now that's a guy who knows how to scare up some business.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20090 comments
You might want to get this quick fix installed before somebody actually does attack Vista or Windows Server 2008. Then again, how much harm could anybody really do to Vista that Microsoft hasn't done already? Oh, we're just kidding...mostly. (The Vista jokes will cease when Windows 7 makes its grand debut. Maybe.)
Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20090 comments
Mary Jo Foley, Redmond magazine columnist and Microsoft follower par excellence, says it could be...along with some sort of Microsoft-branded phone.
So, are we really going to go through this whole tablet thing again? Apple's headed down that road, as well. I guess Microsoft and Apple are just determined to make us like tablet computing. Here at RCPU, we don't really see the appeal. But the whole tablet notion goes well with the touch-computing elements of Windows 7 (also not appealing to us), we suppose. For now, we'll stick with the netbook. It'll take some convincing to get us to do otherwise.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 22, 20091 comments
We're looking for stories of migration to Windows 7 for a story we're putting together for Redmond, our sister magazine. These don't have to be enterprise migrations, since we figure there aren't many of those yet. They can simply be your tales of upgrading your own computer from XP or Vista to the new OS.
Share your triumphs and tragedies at [email protected] or leave a comment below. And remember that we'll never, ever publish your full name without contacting you and getting your permission first. Thanks.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 21, 200912 comments
Those who would sound the death knell for Microsoft got another shot of false hope this week when the U.S. federal government revealed that it would embark on an ambitious cloud computing effort.
Already, the feds have an app store up and running at Apps.gov, and national CIO Vivek Kundra is talking about moving government IT out of the '80s (if we're generous) and into the cloud. Reports the San Francisco Chronicle (from the link in the first paragraph of this entry):
The goal of the broader cloud project, which could take 10 years to complete, is to overhaul a system in which each agency assembles its own system of underutilized hardware and weaves together patchworks of software that are expensive to maintain and upgrade.
"We've been building data center after data center, acquiring application after application, and frankly what it's done is drive up the cost of technology immensely across the board," Kundra said. "What we need to be able to do is find a more innovative path in addressing these problems."
Already, the Chronicle and a host of other sources we've checked out have identified the government's cloudy forecast as a (potential) big win for Salesforce.com and Google -- which, for now, it might be, given that both companies have a bunch of apps in the feds' app store.
And, of course, that means that the vultures are circling around Microsoft again, talking about how the lumbering old software elephant is behind its competitors in the cloud and how this new federal cloud initiative could be another step toward the end of Microsoft's industry dominance. Quoth the Chronicle once more:
Traditional software companies are also getting into cloud computing, if slowly, but the mere fact that a customer the size of the federal government is rethinking its approach to technology could pose serious risks for leading software companies, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
"They could end up doing most of their business with Google and not doing it through Oracle or Microsoft," he said.
Now, we respect Rob Enderle immensely, and we don't consider him a Microsoft-hater at all. It's also important to note that he qualifies his statement with the word "could." But let's back up a second here. Aren't folks jumping the gun a bit on declaring Microsoft dead in the cloud? Sure, Microsoft is behind Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com (in online CRM, anyway) and maybe a few others right now in terms of cloud computing. But Redmond isn't ignoring the cloud, as we know from Microsoft's work on the Azure platform and the fact that Ray Ozzie holds a top executive position within the company.
Besides, the Chronicle article mentioned that the project could take 10 years to complete. Ten years? That's an absolute eternity in this industry. (Seriously, think about 1999 for a minute.) Does anybody really think that Microsoft will be completely shut out of a decade-long government project (which, given that it's a government project, will probably end up taking 15 years to finish and will go way over budget)? We don't, and Microsoft partners shouldn't, either.
We at RCPU are believers in the cloud, and we know that it's here today and isn't going away. We like it that way, and the feds' project, including the new app store, actually sounds really worthwhile. But even we recognize that cloud computing is still in the relatively early stages of evolution and that nobody has yet become to cloud computing what Microsoft is to the desktop operating system.
Microsoft-haters, don't crow too loudly just yet. We're not saying that Google and Salesforce.com (or a combination thereof) won't end up dominating cloud computing. We're just saying that Microsoft's not out of this game yet, regardless of who's stocking the federal app store right now.
How competitive do you think Microsoft will be in the cloud? What's your take on the government's cloud initiative? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20092 comments
It's not just XP that Microsoft wants to put to bed. Mary Jo Foley reports that Redmond is also putting out notices that support for Windows Server 2000 and 2003 will change (and end, in the case of 2000) relatively soon, as well. More details straight from Microsoft are here.
Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20090 comments
This might not seem like big news at first glance, but it's important to your editor. So, indulge us. Dr. James Cash, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, will end his tenure as a Microsoft board member (on friendly terms; no controversy here) on Nov. 19.
Dr. Cash is a remarkably accomplished man, who still sits on the boards of lots of big companies and carries a lot of influence in the business world. What most folks might not realize, though, is that he's part of the Boston Celtics' ownership group. But well beyond that, James Cash was the first African-American to play basketball in the old Southwest Conference and one of the conference's first African-American athletes, period.
And where did he play ball? At Texas Christian University, your editor's alma mater. In fact, he led TCU's traditionally (and sadly, still) mediocre basketball program to the Southwest Conference championship in 1967-'68 and to a first-round upset win over Kansas State in that year's NCAA tournament.
So, from one Horned Frog to another, congratulations, Dr. Cash, on a successful stay on Microsoft's board, and best wishes in your continued endeavors. You are an inspiring figure. (Also, if you want to throw some Celtics tickets a fellow Horned Frog's way, your editor wouldn't say no. Go Frogs!)
Posted by Lee Pender on September 17, 20090 comments
Well, who knew? All those Windows Update patches and operating system fixes haven't been all that useful after all. Applications are where the real security risk is. It's apps, I tell ya! Apps are what the hoodlums are lookin' to rub out! Why, I oughta...
Sorry, we slipped into '30s gangster mode for a second there. But speaking of bad guys, apparently they're not attacking the OS (read: Windows) the way they used to. More and more, they're going after desktop apps, which tend to remain largely unprotected in enterprises.
Or so says the SANS Institute, anyway, in a new report. By the way, literally translated, "sans" institute in French would mean "without" institute. But this new report is not without (see how we did that there?) some pretty interesting observations. Check out this bit from the New York Times blog entry (linked above) on the Without Institute's report:
"[O]n the rise are quiet attacks on desktop programs, such as Microsoft's Office, Adobe's Flash Player and Acrobat programs, Java applications, and Apple's QuickTime program. Attacks on these programs currently account for about 10 percent of attack volume, up from zero three or four years ago. And they are likely to be far more successful, since more than 90 percent of corporate computers are using old, unsecure versions of these programs."
Partners, do we smell opportunity here? It might be time to go bursting through your clients' doors and ask them how often they're updating the security of their desktop apps -- and whether they need any help doing it, for a small fee, of course. IT folks, sheesh...this can't be particularly good news. Sure, Microsoft's updates and general improvements in Windows security have made locking down the OS easier, but now hackers are going after a much broader range of software. That stinks. Really, it does.
But if apps are going to be the new security battleground, that's where ISVs, partners and IT pros will need to fight. Of course, it's hard to say that the consequences of these app attacks are or will be, but it's better not to find out. In any case, the battle to keep the bad guys at bay has become a much broader war.
How secure are your desktop applications? Have you had problems with apps being hacked? Share at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on September 16, 20091 comments