Distributor Ingram Micro is broadening the hosted Microsoft offerings available to resellers within Ingram Micro Seismic, a portfolio of third-party cloud and outsourced services for managed service providers.
On Tuesday, hoster Intermedia announced it has joined the Seismic program. Intermedia currently hosts about 225,000 premium Exchange mailboxes, many of which are sold through a network of 4,000 resellers.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 27, 20090 comments
Everyone's seen the top line for Microsoft's first quarter, and, coming as it did a day after the Windows 7 launch, Wall Street was impressed.
The price of MSFT went up nicely in spite of revenue declines of 14 percent year-over-year and an earning-per-share decline of 17 percent. (To its credit, Microsoft didn't count $1.7 billion in revenues for Windows 7 deferrals and OEM pre-orders, meaning the company did slightly better than the official numbers indicated.)
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 26, 20090 comments
With a load of new products to promote, it looks like HP and Microsoft are funding the HP/Microsoft Frontline Partnership again. (Tip of the hat to Arlin Sorensen's Peer Power blog for finding this nugget.)
For those of you unfamiliar with this great program, it's for partner companies that belong to both the HP and Microsoft partner programs. Funding is available for events and there are marketing campaign materials available for Microsoft software packaged with HP hardware.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 26, 20090 comments
Last week, Lee posted a note about Gartner's revised IT spending figures for 2009 and their forecast for 2010.
He hit on the most important point -- that Gartner doesn't expect IT spending to recover to 2008 levels until 2012.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 26, 20090 comments
Intermedia, the New York-based hosting giant with a network of 3,500 private-label resellers, is planning to pass on Microsoft's brand-new Microsoft Communication Services marketing campaign to its reseller partners.
The move by Intermedia shows that at least one major hoster has overcome initial doubts about the Microsoft-centric branding of the program and moved to use the resources to generate sales momentum within its network of reseller partners.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20090 comments
Wondering what Microsoft's Azure platform has to do with you as a partner? One simple answer is you'll be an early adopter of Azure if you use the partner Demo Showcase.
The Demo Showcase is a tool that allows Microsoft partners to demonstrate Microsoft technologies to customers without setting up an expensive demonstration center at their offices and dragging customers there, or without needing a pricey portable assembly to take on sales calls.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20090 comments
Microsoft reports its financial results for the quarter on Thursday, and Wall Street analysts are looking for drops in earnings per share and revenues compared to the year-ago period.
An average of analyst forecasts calculated by Thomson Reuters shows an expectation that Microsoft will post earnings of 36 cents a share on $14.38 billion in revenue. During the same quarter last year, Microsoft earned 46 cents a share on $15.84 billion in revenue. Microsoft on Thursday will also report its results for the full fiscal year that ended June 30.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20090 comments
P2P pioneer Arlin Sorensen was at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last week and has a nice recap of the show on his blog, Peer Power.
As a key member of the Microsoft Small Business Specialist Community, Arlin had a pretty positive take on one particular aspect of the new Microsoft Partner Network. "They are putting Small Business where it belongs -- as a real competency -- and appear to be raising the bar a bit, as well, which is welcome," Sorensen writes.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20090 comments
Our readers had some thoughts about the changes to the Microsoft Partner Network. The initial response, at least among those motivated to post, is quite skeptical.
My favorite comment came from Peter Hohaus of Melbourne, Australia, who left this on one of the blog entries:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 16, 20092 comments
I've been watching Microsoft product demos and vision videos since 1998, and I have to admit I'm jaded because of the experience.
For example, I feel like I've been watching unified communications videos for a decade, and they're always promising that implementations are available now to allow you to see user presence, switch communication from IM straight into a voice call, take priority work calls in your car, etc.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 16, 20093 comments
Microsoft's channel investment will grow $400 million in fiscal year 2010 to $3.3 billion, COO Kevin Turner said at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). The figure is up from a stated amount of $2.9 billion in 2009, which was a big bump from a $2.3 billion figure for 2008. Turner made the point that while Microsoft was holding overall R&D investments flat at $9.5 billion, the channel investment was going up.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 16, 20090 comments
The headlines on the Windows Azure Platform out of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) focused on the pricing and the November release date. For thorough details on the pricing, which will be roughly comparable to those of Amazon Web Services, see Kurt Mackie's news piece.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20090 comments