Service Pack 2 and development kits for SharePoint Server and SharePoint Services
came out late last week (just in case you missed them). SharePoint is massively popular, but it's not alone in the collaboration market. Oracle is at least trying to ramp up a competitor with
Beehive. We'll see how that goes.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 05, 20090 comments
It's a possibility, apparently, as
another round of previously announced cuts begins.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 05, 20090 comments
This week, lots of folks celebrated Cinco de Mayo, which is as good an excuse as we can think of to down some cervezas and devour some Mexican food, not that we ever need an excuse to do that.
Of course, Cinco de Mayo isn't Mexican Independence Day, as many Americans think it is. Cinco de Mayo celebrates a Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862; Mexican Independence Day actually occurred about a half century before that battle. (A kid who grows up in Texas as the son of a Spanish teacher just knows this stuff.)
Confused? Well, that's normal -- Mexican history is actually fairly complicated, not unlike (segue...here it comes...) the five announcements Citrix released on the first day of its Citrix Synergy conference, which happened to be on May 5. That's right; Citrix put out cinco press releases for Cinco de Mayo. Unfortunately, that's where the "cinco" similarities end, and Citrix has, thus far, provided neither cerveza nor Mexican food. Alas.
For the record, five press releases is way too many for one editor's feeble mind, so we're just going to focus on a couple that seem like the most interesting. They go together like cerveza and Mexican food. The first announcement concerns Citrix Dazzle, which is a "self-service app store for corporate employees," or so said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Citrix, on a conference call with the press this week.
The idea behind Dazzle is that applications such as Microsoft Office sit in a corporate datacenter rather than being installed on individual clients. Users just go out and use them when they need them; the apps and the information within them rest on a server. Wasson described Dazzle as a "lightweight storefront that sits in front of existing XenApp and other delivery products" and allows IT folks to expose [applications] in a much more elegant way." Lovely!
Partnering with Dazzle is Citrix Receiver, which, despite the disappointment of not having been chosen in the recent NFL draft, still manages to be useful. Receiver is a free software client that "makes accessing virtual desktops for virtual apps as easy as turning on your TV set," Wasson said, and pushes out application updates automatically so IT folks don't have to.
The Dazzle-Receiver combo doesn't just work on PCs, either. It works on the Mac OS and, yes, even on the iPhone. Download Citrix Receiver on any compatible device (and there are lots of them, with more to come), and you're a URL away from using any app in your company's arsenal without downloading the app at all. The app is running in the company's datacenter using Citrix's XenApp infrastructure; only Receiver resides on the client.
This sounds for all the world to us like the "internal clouds" we keep hearing about. Instead of having applications and data reside in some third party's datacenter, they sit in an on-premises, corporate datacenter, but users still use applications as a service rather than running them on the client. It's kind of a do-it-yourself Software as a Service model, and the idea is to reduce the burden on IT of having to constantly update and manage applications on users' computers. It's also easier, in theory, to track which users are running which applications and how often, and purchase virtual licenses accordingly.
We're guessing that VMware and probably even Microsoft can offer a similar experience (although, to be honest, we don't know for sure -- but we're sure they'll tell us at some point), but the Citrix offering is nicely branded and packaged and seems to present to partners a pretty good opportunity for implementation revenues. After that, if this thing works the way it's supposed to, the system should mostly take care of itself, but we're guessing that partners might be able to pick up some maintenance revenue along the way.
We like the cloud here at RCPU. We like it almost as much as we like cerveza and Mexican food. OK, that's not true, but we are fans of the cloud model. What Citrix is offering is intriguing because it doesn't require outsourcing but still offers and easy-to-manage (supposedly), service-oriented model. That's why we chose those two press releases from Citrix's Cinco de Mayo selection. The others, plus some that came out after Cinco de Mayo, are here if you really want to get into the spirit of the holiday.
Have you set up an internal cloud for a customer? Are you hearing a lot of buzz about this model? What did you do for Cinco de Mayo? Reveal all at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on May 05, 20090 comments
In the midst of Windows 7 hype (which we're happily contributing to), poor old Vista's second service pack
is finished. So, uh, be on the lookout for that...if you or your customers are unfortunate enough to actually be running Vista.
As for Office 2007, SP2 for the product that sports the ever-popular ribbon interface is out there now.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 30, 20090 comments
Oracle, here's what you're getting yourself into. These are
dark times at Sun, financially speaking.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 30, 20090 comments
First off, a note totally unrelated to anything else in this entry: It has been a long time -- way too long -- since we've run reader e-mails here at RCPU. So we're going to get back to that next week. But despite having received some great responses thus far, we still need your input on all sorts of issues: Microsoft downgrades, Oracle buying Sun, the power of netbooks or whatever else crosses your mind. Send your thoughts to
[email protected].
This hasn't been the most exciting news week of all time, but we do, at least, have some channel news to offer. Distribution giant Tech Data revealed this week that it has made some acquisitions in Europe, including buying part of a company with the ominous name Man and Machine.
Man and Machine sounds to us like the title of some '50s documentary or sci-fi film about the impending perils of technology, or maybe about how robots will completely enslave humans by the year 1975. (Has that actually happened, by the way? How often do you break away from your laptop or smartphone? Anyway...) We can hear the trailer now: "Man and Machine...a duo bound for conflict." Of course, our (very few) female readers would probably like the company better if it were called Person and Machine, and we don't blame them -- but that sounds a lot less scary.
Also in Tech Data news, the company is giving ISVs a hand by helping them navigate the Microsoft ISV Royalty Licensing Program. Presumably, this has nothing to do with teaching the crowned heads of Europe how to drive.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 30, 20090 comments
After a break, just because we felt like it, we're back to offering profiles of the third-party partner programs that work best for Microsoft partners according to a reader survey in
RCP the magazine. Today's profile:
Seagate.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 29, 20090 comments
Microsoft has
signed up a slew of partners to host its Business Productivity Online Suite, despite the fact that Azure is still in beta. It's a sign -- we hope and think -- that Microsoft is serious about keeping partners in the loop despite having plans to host some services itself. And it's a potential opportunity for partners to follow Redmond into the cloud.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 29, 20090 comments
Here in Greater Boston, today is a real anomaly. As your editor sits and types this on Tuesday afternoon (cue the
Moody Blues, even though you'll be reading this on Wednesday), it's 93 degrees outside. Around here, that's hot for this time of year. In fact, this is record-breaking heat. But it's going away tonight, and tomorrow we'll be back to showers and temperatures in the 50s. So, since the weather is giving us an unusual day, we at RCPU thought we'd come up with an unusual topic for the newsletter. We also want to get outside before the rain comes and the temperature drops 40 degrees, but don't tell our bosses that, please.
Anyway, your editor just ordered a netbook (running XP), one of those nifty little low-cost computers that's helping put a dent in Microsoft's earnings. And then today, we noticed that HP is introducing a low-cost ($529 -- not netbook-cheap, but not a wallet-buster) computer for small businesses, which will, if you want it to, come pre-installed with Linux.
On a personal level, it was hard to justify spending the money to buy a full-fledged notebook, but XP was more attractive than Linux for a lot of reasons. On an enterprise level, we know that low-cost options -- thin client computing comes to mind -- have existed for a long time. But we're wondering: Why shouldn't small businesses adopt netbooks, at least for those employees who don't do much more than use Office and a browser? And if compatibility with Office is good enough, why shouldn't those people use OpenOffice.org 3 running on Linux? Or maybe Google Docs? You see where we're going with this.
Microsoft always says that the cost of running Linux is more expensive than the cost of running Windows...eventually. And it probably is. It probably doesn't make much sense, either, to try to get everyday office workers to switch away from using the software they've known forever and to type on keyboards that are 92 percent of regular size.
Then again, people seem to like netbooks for home use, so it's not unreasonable to think that they could get used to them in the office. And while, as far as we've read, only a small percentage of netbooks sold runs Linux, it's a much cheaper option than Windows, at least at the outset. The fact that it's selling on netbooks at all shows that at least some consumers must be warming to it.
So as we sit in the air conditioning on an unusual day, we wrap up this unusual post by asking whether you, partners, are running into any interest in netbooks or desktop Linux in your accounts and how you're dealing with it if you are. And we're asking whether it makes any sense at all to even talk about netbooks and Linux in a business setting.
Send your opinions to [email protected]. Hey, it could be a good point for discussion, or it could be just a silly detour from more rational thinking on a hot day.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 29, 20094 comments
Microsoft
already has Pinpoint, a directory that lets customers find partners. Now, it has (fairly quietly, once again)
launched Matchmaker, which helps partners find each other. Why Microsoft doesn't make a bigger deal out of these things -- most of the potential customers your editor talks to for
Redmond magazine have never heard of Pinpoint -- we don't know, but we're getting the word out now.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 28, 20090 comments