A few teams at last weekend's NFL draft needed arms. Microsoft, though, needs a shot in the arm. Hopefully not a flu shot...but we digress. It's no secret that Redmond is struggling in this recession the way many of us are, and if anybody needed any more proof of Microsoft's woes, it came last week with an historic earnings report.
That report was historic for unfortunate reasons, of course. By now, you know that Microsoft experienced its first year-over-year earnings shortfall ever, or at least since it became a public company more than two decades ago. That means, of course, that Microsoft made less money in the first three months of this calendar year than it made in the first three months of 2008. Microsoft's funky fiscal calendar makes the first three months of the year the third quarter, but it's still January-March on the calendar.
The news for enterprise partners wasn't actually that bad. Microsoft's server and tools division -- the one that rakes in so much cash for the channel, with products such as Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 -- actually managed to grow 7 percent year over year.
But nothing else did. In fact, all of Microsoft's other divisions experienced revenue shortfalls, including the business division, home of Dynamics. Windows, the heavy-hitter of the company's client division, was the big loser as PC sales dropped and netbooks continued to eat away at traditional PC revenues. And while Windows sales don't make that much of a difference to the enterprise channel, a stable Microsoft is always a steadying force for partners.
It is, then, perhaps appropriate that the NFL draft was held last weekend, as rarely does an event pile expectations on the back of the young and mostly untested the way the draft does. Matthew Stafford, this year's can't-miss quarterback prospect from Georgia, now steps into an unenviable situation in Detroit. For those of you who don't follow football, the Lions lost every game they played last season, a rare occurrence indeed.
Windows 7 doesn't have it quite so bad. Microsoft is more like, say, the Dallas Cowboys than the Detroit Lions -- a historically successful entity that has hit a bit of a rough patch recently. But with Vista now pretty much officially the Ryan Leaf of operating systems, and with Microsoft's earnings reports bearing its scars, Windows 7 needs to be a superstar, and fairly quickly.
That's why Redmond has been rushing the young star onto the field, preparing a release candidate for launch on April 30 for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The RC launch for everybody else will happen on May 5. (Of course, some early scouts got an unauthorized sneak preview of the new kid last week.)
Windows 7 will need to be most things to most people -- compatible with existing applications and drivers (a virtual "XP mode" should help that), nimble enough to run on netbooks but powerful enough to satisfy power users. Of course, with multiple editions, the idea is that there will be something for everybody.
About a decade ago, there was a great debate among football fans at draft time regarding two quarterbacks, Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf. None of them would admit it now, but the aforementioned Leaf had plenty of supporters. Well, as any fan knows, Peyton Manning became a Super Bowl winner, and Ryan Leaf -- well, his career didn't go so well. Microsoft needs a Peyton Manning with Windows 7. The new operating system will even wear a quarterback's number. But will it be a legend or a flop? For Redmond's sake, it had better be a legend.
What's your take on the importance of Windows 7 to Microsoft...or on the NFL draft? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 28, 20092 comments
Have you ever wanted to know how Microsoft Services does things, like how it develops best practices and consults with customers? Well, if you're a Gold Certified Partner, you can buy that knowledge from Microsoft in a
nifty little package that covers a bunch of different categories. There's more info on the program
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20090 comments
Nobody gives the "shift" key a better workout than VMware. This week, the virtualization market leader drove journalists and bloggers a few strokes closer to carpal tunnel syndrome with the unveiling of vSphere.
To be specific, it's vSphere 4 that VMware is talking about this week. You might remember it as VMware Infrastructure, its former name. It's basically the company's platform for the datacenter, or, as one VMware executive says in Keith Ward's excellent story on vSphere, "We're calling vSphere a cloud operating system."
There are a lot of those floating around these days, of course. But the experts in Keith's story say that VMware remains way ahead of everybody else in this game, and we're more than willing to defer to them on this topic. It seems as though VMware has beefed up features significantly and has expanded its tiered pricing model so that vSphere is more affordable on the low end.
The VMware folks say that they want to let companies build private clouds that will connect with public clouds (and with all these clouds around, no wonder Sun is disappearing -- heh heh). The idea is that everything will be virtual and services-based rather than application-based. That makes sense to us...we think. Exactly what should go into which cloud seems to be the question that IT professionals will have to answer. Partners should help them answer it (for a reasonable consulting fee, of course).
And that's where we'll leave the discussion of vSphere, because your editor's hands are starting to cramp from all this shifting.
What's your take on vSphere, cloud computing, private clouds and public clouds? Do you have this stuff figured out? Are you selling or using anything like this now? If so, explain everything to us at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20090 comments
In our continuing series on the best complementary partner programs for Microsoft partners, we come to
APC. Who? It's a power and cooling specialist, apparently, and its partner program is worth checking out.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 20090 comments
Oracle's corporate org chart is starting to look like one of those
maps of the Roman Empire or of
Alexander the Great's conquests or something. It already covers great swaths of the technology industry, and it just keeps spreading in every direction.
Consider for a second this paragraph, courtesy of Bloomberg:
"Oracle is entering new markets as it seeks to reach $50 billion in revenue by 2012. The purchase is Oracle's third-largest after its $10.3 billion takeover of PeopleSoft Inc. in 2005 and the $8.5 billion purchase of BEA Systems Inc. last year. Oracle has spent almost $34.5 billion on purchases since 2005 to buy 52 companies, making it the most acquisitive software company in the world."
"The purchase" mentioned in that paragraph, of course, is Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, revealed yesterday. Oracle, once mostly a database vendor, is all over the enterprise technology map now, so to speak. Enterprise applications (ERP and CRM), business intelligence, storage, database technologies, severs -- you name it, and Oracle's probably trying to sell it to corporate customers, or will be soon enough.
Yes, the Sun purchase would make Oracle a hardware company by delivering to Larry Ellison's empire Sun's server lines, which are already home to lots of Oracle databases in enterprises worldwide. (Intriguingly, there is some speculation that Oracle didn't want the hardware business and won't keep it. The talk is that Oracle just wanted Sun's software business but had to take the hardware as part of the deal. For now, though, Oracle appears to be soaking in the entirety of Sun's operations, and Ellison is talking about keeping everything for himself.)
The acquisition announcement had jaws dropping all over the industry. Steve Ballmer said he was "very surprised" and needed to think about the whole thing, a rare moment in which the Microsoft CEO seems to have been caught off guard. Some analysts expressed shock, while others took an approach that might be described, if we want to be cliché (and we do), as "cautiously optimistic."
For Microsoft partners, it's hard to say exactly how an Oracle-Sun marriage will play out. HP and IBM will more likely be concerned by the massive shift in the competitive landscape at the outset of the deal than will Redmond.
But a stronger Oracle with a more diverse product offering (to say the least) could speed the spread of Linux-based servers in the enterprise, given that Oracle as a company is kind of a Linux fan and definitely not so much a fan of Microsoft. Of course, buying Sun would make Oracle a major factor in the Unix operating system game. Everything considered, an Oracle-Sun combo probably doesn't offer many positives for Microsoft partners, unless the two companies stumble over each other in the integration process.
Which, if history is any indicator, they probably won't. Ellison and his troops have been amazingly adept at swallowing companies and making them productive parts of the Oracle empire. Despite an economic downturn and loads of purchases in recent years, Oracle has just kept rolling along earnings-wise, beating the Street again with its latest quarterly report.
Oracle-Sun is another mega-deal that signals that the age of city-states is long over in the technology industry, and the age of empires has well set in. The thing about empires is that they usually end up collapsing under their own weight (right, Wall Street?). Thus far, Oracle has avoided that fate. It probably will with the Sun buyout, too. The question now is: Where will Larry Ellison go next?
What's your take on Oracle buying Sun? Will you do business with OraSun? Send a shout out to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20095 comments
There's some stir this week about Microsoft's
"starter edition" of Windows 7, a low-functionality version apparently aimed at the growing netbook sector that helped clobber Windows revenue in Microsoft's last earnings report Windows 7 starter would, for instance, limit users to running three applications at a time and require an upgrade for users who want more juice.
But, as Mary Jo Foley explains, the hubbub over Windows 7 starter is probably overblown (imagine that); Microsoft is more likely to offer a Home Premium version of 7 for netbooks, which will behave more in the way we expect from an operating system.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20092 comments
Everything considered, this week's
IBM earnings report isn't too bad. Revenue came in a little below what analysts would have liked, but earnings per share beat the Street. And with this news, we take the opportunity to offer another profile of an
RCP Platinum Partner Program. That's right --
it's IBM!
Posted by Lee Pender on April 21, 20090 comments
For almost as long as they've existed, security applications have been a little like guards at the wall of a medieval city: very important, but just kind of sitting out there all day, not really living with everybody else.
There's been a movement for a while to change that, and two vendors introduced products this week that show progress toward the goal of merging security and systems management. One of those vendors is Microsoft, which bulked up the Forefront security line. The other is Trend Micro, which aims to offer more manageable endpoint security. Both new offerings have cloud components, and both demonstrate the trend toward bringing security into better harmony with the rest of an enterprise's infrastructure in order to improve management and access while not sacrificing protection.
Microsoft might have delayed its security magnum opus, Forefront "Stirling," but it gave us some idea of what Stirling will offer this week with the unveiling of Forefront Online Security for Exchange (and there's more here). Forefront Online Security for Exchange -- not yet called FOSE, as far as we know, but it probably should be -- is a hosted anti-spam and anti-malware service for in-house Exchange implementations. That's hosted by Microsoft, by the way, in Microsoft datacenters. As in not hosted by partners. So how do partners get in on this new offering?
"Right now, the partner sells the service, and they get the margin on the service," Doug Leland, general manager for Microsoft's Identity and Security business group, told RCPU in our palatial headquarters in Framingham, Mass. this week. "It actually operates similar to the traditional ways with which partners sell boxes."
OK, then. That sounds less than super-exciting from a partner perspective, but it's important to remember that there's more to Forefront than just this one service, and there will be even more to come with Stirling, the second beta of which was released today, and which Microsoft expects to have fully completed by the first half of 2010.
Leland emphasizes that Microsoft, which is bringing together identity (primarily via Active Directory) and security (via Forefront), wants to make both elements part of a greater Microsoft stack and consolidate management of everything in the Microsoft infrastructure.
"As we move forward, we will light up new convergence scenarios," Leland said. "This is a built-in versus a bolt-on approach. Active Directory is a canonical example. It speaks very directly to the role that we want to play in the industry."
To date, Microsoft's role has mostly been one of underdog in the security market. Another much smaller underdog is also talking about the convergence of security and management this week. Trend Micro thinks your endpoint security is lousy, and maybe it is.
Trend, which touts itself as a "100 percent channel" company, wants to fix that with one of two new products: an updated version of the OfficeScan Client-Server suite or the Trend Micro Endpoint Security Platform. For both, Trend uses what it calls a cloud-client architecture (hmm, Software plus Services, anyone?), which means that a hosted service updates threat information in the cloud, but an on-premises server -- which the cloud service is constantly updating -- actually processes user requests to open files. The idea is that using a cloud service to update information takes a lot of heat off of the internal server, which is freed up to process user requests. At the same time, "you can update from the cloud to that server every minute, every five minutes, every 10 minutes," Dan Glessner, vice president of enterprise marketing at Trend Micro, told RCPU this week.
Trend is also talking about companies merging security and management, ideally (for Trend) by employing Trend's endpoint products exclusively and dumping the idea of multiple-vendor "depth" in security. Using multiple security applications "has presented huge complexity challenges in terms of management," Glessner said. "The complexity of management has become a bigger problem than the challenge of keeping out the bad stuff."
So Trend, via its alliance with patching vendor BigFix, proposes a single security management console that goes beyond managing security and forges into systems management.
"More and more enterprises are merging endpoint security with endpoint operations management," Glessner said. "We're bringing to market a single management structure that combines security with systems management capability."
You're not alone. In fact, we might even call the merging of security and systems management a...trend.
How would you like to see security and systems management come together? Do you have any experience with the Forefront beta or with Trend's products? Dump everything at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 16, 20090 comments
One of the more infamous worms in recent memory is
still doing damage, in part by installing a form of "scareware" on computers -- fake anti-virus malware that promises to clean users' machines if they'll just fork over $50 or so.
Redmond magazine covered scareware in depth a couple of months ago. Read more about it
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 14, 20090 comments
We continue our series on the best "other" partner programs for Microsoft partners with a look at Microsoft's old buddy and partner in the famous "Wintel" alliance,
Intel.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 14, 20090 comments
There's a very brief scene in an
old episode of "The Simpsons" in which a couple of guys, presumably brothers, are fuming at each other over the impending demise of their restaurant, dubbed Two Guys from Kabul. At one point, one brother looks at the other and barks, "Sometimes, I think you want to fail!"
We thought of that little moment this week when reports started to surface that IT managers wouldn't be lined up to deploy Windows 7 like tweens camping out outside the ticket booth for Jonas Brothers concert. Presumably, we're supposed to be aghast that a survey by KACE shows that 83 percent of IT professionals don't plan to implement Windows 7 in the operating system's first year of release.
This is dire, dire news, apparently, if we're to believe the pundits, some of whom have already begun to equate Windows 7 with Vista before the new OS has even had the chance to appear in release-candidate form. Here's where that "Simpsons" bit comes in, with a little twist: Sometimes, we think these people want Microsoft to fail.
Microsoft partners, of course, don't want Microsoft to fail. IT professionals probably don't, either, given that most of them have major investments in Microsoft technology. So it's up to a few journalists, some bloggers and some fringe Linux and Mac types to cheer for Redmond's demise. And news that only 17 percent of IT professionals plan to adopt Windows 7 in its first year sure sounds like a Vista-style debacle.
Or does it? According to some measurements, Vista had only about 10 percent enterprise market share more than two years after its release. Even those organizations that place Vista's market share at closer to an almost unfathomable 30 percent admit that most of that number comes from consumers and that the enterprise has never warmed to the forlorn follow-up to XP.
So, if Windows 7 really does achieve even 15 percent in enterprise adoption in its first year after release, it will, by at least some measures, be more or less blowing Vista's two-year numbers out of the water. But wait; there's more: the KACE survey said that 42 percent of IT pros plan to implement Windows 7 from 12 to 24 months after its release. That's "only" 42 percent, according to some pundits.
"Only" 42 percent? Seriously? If Windows 7 has anywhere close to 40 percent enterprise market share two years after its release, it will have already made customers and partners (and Microsoft, maybe) forget about Vista. A further 24 percent said of IT folks said they would deploy Windows 7 within two to three years if its release. If all those numbers pan out, that could give Windows 7 60-plus percent market share within three years.
Of course, that's not likely to happen. For one thing, Linux adoption is growing in the enterprise, as is adoption of the Mac OS. Microsoft isn't just competing with itself, so 42 percent of IT pros saying that they'll implement Windows 7 doesn't necessarily translate to 42 percent market share. And for another, it's hard to say whether these surveys will even come close to panning out numbers-wise. Our guess is that the percentages in this one will end up being a little high when the corporate money actually starts to roll out in the next few years.
Microsoft's market dominance with Windows might not last forever. But we've had a lot of positive feedback on Windows 7, and the dire predictions coming out of some quarter based on survey numbers that just don't look that bad to us seem premature at best. Or maybe wishful, depending on who, exactly, wants Microsoft to fail.
What's your timeframe for adopting Windows 7? Do you already feel better about it than you felt about Vista? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 14, 20098 comments
We're continuing our series on the best third-party partner programs for Microsoft partners as chosen by
RCP the magazine readers. Today, it's Microsoft's old friend, and sometimes foe,
Symantec.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 09, 20090 comments