Microsoft has hired Accenture's Salesforce business lead for the United Kingdom and Ireland as its new U.K. channel chief.
Orla McGrath will run the Microsoft Partner organization as the One Commercial Partner lead for Microsoft UK. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 30, 20210 comments
It took 10 years of steady growth for enterprises to spend the same amount on cloud services as they did on their on-premises datacenter hardware and software.
But it happened in 2019. And then in 2020, cloud service spending left datacenter-related spending in the dust. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 26, 20210 comments
I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for data milestones.
They're simultaneously amazing and entirely expected.
After all, we're all doing more digitally, seemingly every day, with more and more of our output occurring with images and video. Over this last year, a lot of these remote work meetings happen on video. We're recording a lot of the meetings rather than picking up a pen since the fidelity of a recorded conversation is always better than what you happen to scribble down while the conversation is continuing in your ears. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 25, 20210 comments
There's a new hourly metric for the cost of downtime -- $84,650.
That hyper-specific average comes from the new "Veeam Data Protection Report 2021" released Thursday. The report is based on a survey of 3,000 IT decision makers around the world. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 18, 20210 comments
Sherweb is taking another step to support smaller managed service providers whose customers' security expectations sometimes outstrip their MSPs' in-house capabilities.
The Sherbrooke, Quebec-based cloud solution provider (CSP) this week rolled out Office Protect Alliance, a managed detection and response (MDR) solution. The new service gives Sherweb's partners access to a security operations center staffed by security analysts who monitor the partners' clients' activity. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 17, 20210 comments
A little more than a week after being revealed in on-premises Exchange Servers, some of the zero-day vulnerabilities are appearing in ransomware, adding further urgency to the associated patches.
Microsoft disclosed the existence on March 2 of four zero-day vulnerabilities in certain versions of Exchange that enabled access to e-mail accounts and allowed attackers to install leave-behind malware. The announcement included patches for the vulnerabilities in Exchange Server 2019 and Exchange Server 2016. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 12, 20210 comments
Editor's Note: This article is updated to correct the general availability date of Azure Communication Services. The service will be available in the next few weeks.
We like to think "general availability" still counts for something in this always-iterating development world, which is why we often take the opportunity at Microsoft events to separate the GA milestones from preview news.
At Microsoft Ignite on Tuesday, there were more than three dozen announcements of features, services and a few products at or near the GA stage, meaning the item is deemed stable and tested enough for a supported production deployment. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 02, 20210 comments
BitTitan is expanding its tools and capabilities around tenant-to-tenant migrations of Microsoft Teams.
The move comes as the managed services automation specialist, like the rest of the industry, is seeing booming interest and usage around the Teams component of Microsoft 365. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20210 comments
Microsoft and partners continue to rack up co-selling revenues, and the company is now looking to the small and medium business segment for further growth.
Because Microsoft reports the figure oddly, as a total of all co-selling since the beginning of the program around four years ago, it's difficult to tell exactly how much revenue partners are generating under the program annually. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20210 comments
Microsoft's advanced specialization catalog for partners is getting more extensive by the quarter. The company now boasts two new advanced specializations, bringing the total list to 16.
A relatively new addition to Microsoft's list of badges for partner organizations, the advanced specializations, are layered over a gold competency and demonstrate extra expertise in a particular area. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20210 comments
As the global pandemic drags on, partners facing Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) renewal deadlines for competencies and advanced specializations in the first half of this year are getting a one-year extension.
During a Microsoft "State of the Partner Ecosystem" session on Wednesday for channel media, Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president for Microsoft One Commercial Partner, detailed the ongoing adjustments that have been made to MPN deadlines since last March.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20210 comments
When a managed service provider installs agents or sets up other tools at a customer site, the customer is trusting them at a deep -- let's call it what it is, an administrative -- level.
That makes it incumbent upon the MSP to ensure the vendor tools they're using are highly secure. How can an MSP, often challenged with a small staff and many other priorities, be confident that their much larger vendor partners are operating in a secure fashion? More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 02, 20210 comments