How many partners will be affected when Microsoft rolls out the Microsoft Partner Network (the replacement for the Microsoft Partner Program) next month? All of them, presumably, and that's quite a lot. Despite a recession that's been deepening through the United States and much of the world since late 2007, the number of companies in the Microsoft Partner Program has remained fairly steady.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 17, 20090 comments
A year ago Microsoft promised major changes to its partner program. This year, many of those changes will be unveiled at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans (July 13-16). The highest-profile change? A new name for the 5-plus-year-old Microsoft Partner Program. Get ready for the "Microsoft Partner Network."
In an e-mail to RCP, Allison Watson, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, said, "The Microsoft Partner Program is evolving. At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July we're launching the Microsoft Partner Network, a community borne from our continued commitment to serve the needs of our partners and help them reach their full business potential."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 16, 20090 comments
The Action Pack, formally the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS), is a quarterly bundle of trial software for internal use by Registered Members of the Microsoft Partner Program. Since Nov. 30, 2007, partners have also had to pass an exam to receive the Action Pack, a move instituted to reduce abuse of the popular deal.
Roughly half of Registered Members subscribe to the Action Pack. Microsoft Certified Partners and Microsoft Gold Certified Partners have access to a different kit.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 03, 20096 comments
One of the standard pieces of advice in helping partners weather this deep recession, from Redmond Channel Partner magazine and from around the industry, has been to encourage the channel to take advantage of vendor financing programs. Microsoft Financing had been among the most generous and attractive of those programs.
In dispensing this bit of wisdom, we've been sensitive to the fact that like credit card terms, the rules could change at any moment or the company backing Microsoft could make its credit requirements much tighter.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 02, 20093 comments
One of the hardest problems in the channel right now is figuring out the right approach to cloud-based computing. Do you ignore it, continue with business as usual and risk getting left behind? Or do you embrace the cloud and risk getting too far out in front of your customers' demand? The real-world answer, of course, is probably somewhere in the middle.
A Toronto-based storage vendor, Asigra Inc., has been wrestling with this problem, as well, from the angle of trying to figure out how to attract and enable solution providers. It rolled out a fairly interesting partner program this week that could be a solid model for other vendors. Asigra makes backup and recovery software and relies on a mix of traditional VARs doing on-premise software deployments and managed service providers hosting the solution. The company's new channel program is called the Asigra Hybrid Partner Program.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 16, 20090 comments
Microsoft released the public beta of Exchange 2010 this week. Kurt Mackie
covered the release
for us, and also covered the
new branding and timetable
for the rest of the Microsoft Office releases -- Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010. The upshot: Exchange is out in beta now, and will be generally available in the second half of this year. The other products are slated to be released as technical previews in Q3, with release to manufacturing dates some time in the first half of 2010.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 16, 20090 comments
VMware Inc., a
Redmond Channel Partner Platinum Partner Program
, is taking its channel efforts to a new level of maturity with the announcement this week of the next-generation VMware Partner Network, which will launch later in the second quarter.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization powerhouse announced the new partner program Tuesday at its Partner Exchange 2009 conference in Orlando, Fla.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 15, 20090 comments
Symantec Corp. this week released the 14th edition of its Internet Security Threat Report. The security vendor found some interesting things in the report covering the period from January 2008 to December 2008:
- Symantec created more malicious code signatures in 2008 than ever before -- the 1.6 new signatures is 60 percent of all the signatures the venerable (in Internet years) security company has ever created.
- Most new infections, once again, occurred while users were Web surfing.
- 90 percent of the threats were of the type trying to collect confidential information, such as bank account credentials.
- As an example of the resiliency of Internet attackers, Symantec pointed to the takedown of two U.S.-based botnet hosters in 2008. Botnet activity decreased in September and November 2008, but quickly bounced back to pre-shutdown levels. (We profiled Symantec's separate, interesting report on the underground economy in the February issue of RCP.)
- Symantec also reported that 1 million individual computers were infected by the Conficker worm by the end of 2008, and that number had risen to 3 million during the first quarter of 2009.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 15, 20090 comments
If you haven't heard, Tuesday was one of those big-deal Microsoft Patch Tuesdays. Altogether there were eight patches for 23 vulnerabilities. Five of those patches were rated "critical" in Microsoft's vulnerability ranking system. Proof-of-concept code exists for one of the vulnerabilities, making time of the essence for getting systems patched. Do your customers a favor and make sure they're up to date fast on this batch of patches. More information is available
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 15, 20090 comments
Even for the most committed Microsoft partners, Microsoft's software is just a portion of the revenue equation.
Whenever Microsoft boasts about the opportunities for partners in the Microsoft ecosystem, it's never just about the Microsoft products. The pitch also includes all the margin partners can rack up reselling a whole solution with Microsoft software at its center. The solution could carry hardware in the form of PCs, laptops, servers, storage, printers and networking gear. There's additional software for security, backup and recovery, systems management or virtualization. Then, of course, there's the price tag for the services you render to stitch it all together.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 31, 20090 comments