Parts of the Microsoft Dynamics business are tilting overwhelmingly online.
Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood
discussed the company's progress with its business applications suite during a call with financial analysts on Wednesday. Overall the Dynamics business grew 17% in Microsoft's fiscal second quarter, which ran from Oct. 1, 2018 through Dec. 31, 2018.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 20190 comments
Microsoft's co-sell program that incentivizes the Microsoft field to sell partner solutions is on pace to exceed last year's total by a wide margin.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella provided an update on the program during an earnings call with investors. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 20190 comments
Investors weren't thrilled with Microsoft's second quarter financial results, but several partner observers mostly shrugged off the negative parts and applauded Microsoft's performance in strategic areas.
"An initial look at the numbers indicates the [failure to meet analyst expectations] was a miss on the personal computing side, though growth still looks to be strong in the productivity cloud and infrastructure cloud offerings," said Mark Sami, vice president of Microsoft and Cloud Solutions at SPR, a Chicago-based Microsoft managed partner specializing in digital transformation projects. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 20190 comments
The International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) on Wednesday identified its worldwide leadership team for 2019.
The IAMCP exists to foster business networking opportunities for Microsoft partners and boasts more than 100 chapters in 47 countries. The 2019 Board of Directors consists of 10 officers drawn from IAMCP's three regions -- Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia/Pacific (APAC) and Canada, Latin America and the United States (Americas). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 17, 20190 comments
The December 2018 market share numbers are in from Net Applications and they reveal a major milestone for the IT industry. Windows 10 has a larger market share than any other desktop operating system version, including the previous king of all desktop OS versions, Windows 7. It's a narrow but solid lead, with Windows 10 at 39.22% and Windows 7 at 36.9%. It brings Windows 10 on top for both of the most frequently cited platform trackers (Windows 10 took the lead with Statcounter in January 2018). Windows 10's now undisputed lead in both major trackers tells us several things about the state of IT infrastructure.
First, it tells us that Microsoft still has enough weight in the industry to dictate an operating system shift. That seems like a fairly obvious point, but Microsoft did ask a lot with Windows 10, especially with the new and confusing update model. Things Microsoft had going for it included the inertia of an industry accustomed to moving to the next Windows OS every few years and that limited-time free upgrade offer. Even with those advantages, success wasn't a foregone conclusion. Uptake of Windows 10 has been slower and at a smaller scale than Microsoft had publicly hoped for. Three-and-a-half years after launching, Windows 10 is on about 700 million machines. That falls short of the 1 billion systems Microsoft had predicted Windows 10 would power in slightly less time, but it's still impressive. What's also impressive is that Microsoft managed that progress at the same time that it has been distancing itself from its long-held identity as a Windows company. Of course, there's also the stick. Windows 7 hits the end of extended support one year from now. Look for Windows 10's share to ratchet up steadily as companies and consumers race to meet the support deadline, or at least convert as shortly after it passes as they can. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 07, 20190 comments
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When it comes to 2019 priorities, few are as important for Microsoft partners as fleshing out an Azure strategy.
Even for partners who have embraced the cloud on the Office 365 side, the margins have been tightening lately, and we seem to be on (or approaching) the backside of the adoption curve. To be sure, there's a lot of opportunity left in Office 365, but we may be starting to see the beginning of the end of the gold rush phase. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 14, 20180 comments
As 2018 draws to a close, it's been a year of milestones for a lot of the Microsoft channel executives who have appeared in the pages of Redmond Channel Partner magazine or in the browser on RCPmag.com since 2005.
Margo Day Retires
Margo Day was an early supporter of RCP, contributing a "Microsoft View" column for our inaugural July 2005 issue and regularly making herself available for interviews in her then-role as vice president of the U.S. Partner Group at Microsoft. She stopped writing the column in the summer of 2006 when a Microsoft reorganization shifted her to vice president of the U.S. West Region for Microsoft's Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners unit. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 14, 20180 comments
Server sales are booming, researchers at IDC reported Tuesday night, with the third quarter recording the highest total revenue in a single quarter for servers ever.
For those of you looking around at much emptier server rooms than you might remember from a decade ago -- before the financial crisis and other factors pushed the computer hardware market sideways -- it's clearly not the same. As they say, the cloud is just someone else's datacenter, and those someone elses are loading up on hardware. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 12, 20180 comments
Riding on Office 365's success, the Microsoft Teams collaborative chat application has raced ahead of the more entrenched Slack.
That's a key takeaway of a recent Spiceworks survey of its community of IT professionals. The firm saw Teams surge seven times in usage share over two years, with the 900 respondents in North America and EMEA projecting another doubling of usage over the next two years. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 10, 20180 comments
Satya Nadella rolled out a piece of Microsoft math that longtime Microsoft partners are accustomed to hearing, but it's a good message to hear repeated from the top.
Speaking to Forbes in an interview posted Monday, Microsoft's CEO talked about how Microsoft does best when other companies are making money off its products. The comments took the form of recounting conversations with Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 10, 20180 comments
If it seems like Microsoft provides two or three different Azure services to accomplish any task, that's probably because, in a lot of cases, it's true.
For the emerging area of Internet of Things (IoT), developers face a confusing array of choices in a few different areas within the Azure catalog of services. As part of a session at the Live! 360 conference in Orlando this week, Eric Boyd offered attendees some guidance on a couple of key architectural questions. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 06, 20180 comments
A Microsoft program manager this week gave some insight into the ways that artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are shaping the Microsoft stack -- sometimes in surprising ways.
Pranav Rastogi, who led Tuesday's keynote of the inaugural Artificial Intelligence Live! track at the Live! 360 conference, is one of the people inside Microsoft helping drive those capabilities and technologies across the company's vast array of products. Rastogi provided attendees with an overview of what those technologies are and where they're starting to emerge in products.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on December 05, 20180 comments