Microsoft Cloud Partner Community Reaches 68K

Six months after claiming to have more cloud partners than Amazon Web Services, Google and Salesforce combined, Microsoft says partners continue to join on to its cloud effort at a good clip.

Microsoft worldwide channel chief Gavriella Schuster shared some Microsoft Partner Network metrics during a State of the Channel briefing this month. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 29, 20180 comments


Ex-Microsoft Dynamics Chief Tatarinov Joins Acumatica

Kirill Tatarinov, a longtime Microsoft senior executive and the former CEO of Citrix, is now a part of Acumatica's board of directors.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Acumatica provides cloud ERP solutions. As part of its board, Tatarinov will be advising his former Microsoft colleague, Jon Roskill, who joined Acumatica as CEO in 2014 after capping a long Microsoft career with a stint as Microsoft's channel chief. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 25, 20180 comments


Partners Jumping Aboard Microsoft Co-Sell Program

The co-selling program that Microsoft publicly unveiled last July is booming, according to Microsoft's worldwide channel chief.

Gavriella Schuster provided details of the program on Wednesday during a State of the Channel briefing with reporters and industry analysts. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 24, 20180 comments


IT Cloud Solutions Named Microsoft CSP Indirect Provider in Canada

IT Cloud Solutions on Tuesday officially became the seventh Indirect Provider for the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program in Canada.

CSP is Microsoft's program allowing channel partners to resell Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and other mostly cloud products to customers, with partners able to handle the billing, provisioning and support for the customer. While some generally larger Microsoft partners, called Direct Providers, deal directly with Microsoft on the product subscriptions, about 90 percent of Microsoft's CSPs fall into a category called Indirect Resellers. The Indirect Resellers work with large intermediaries, called Indirect Providers, rather than working directly with Microsoft. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 23, 20180 comments


SonicWall Tops 21,000 Partners

Continuing its surge in partner signups since going independent from Dell, SonicWall on Tuesday declared a new channel milestone with 21,000 registered partners worldwide.

"The numbers speak for themselves," SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner said in a statement. "With the diligence of our committed channel community, SonicWall is building one of the most modern, engaging and rewarding partner programs in the industry." More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 23, 20180 comments


Kaseya Updates RMM with VSA 9.5

Kaseya's newest version of its remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution for managed service providers hit general availability on Tuesday.

Kaseya VSA 9.5 is primarily focused on user experience enhancements to the RMM platform, which serves as the flagship of the Kaseya IT Complete suite. Other elements of the IT Complete suite for MSPs include Traverse for network management, AuthAnvil for identity and access management, Cloud Backup for backup and disaster recovery, 365 Command for Office 365 management, Unigma for cloud management, BMS for professional services automation and MSP Insights for benchmarking. (VSA stands for Virtual System Administrator and BMS stands for Business Management Solution.) More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 23, 20180 comments


So Is Metalogix for Sale or Not?

There's a war of words brewing between two major SharePoint ISV partners.

AvePoint, a competitor of Metalogix in the SharePoint tools space, on Tuesday launched a Metalogix switch campaign with a blog post from Chief Revenue Officer Chris Larsen asserting that Metalogix was for sale. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 18, 20180 comments


Riverbed Upends Program To Make it More Flexible for Partners

As Riverbed Technology seeks to seize on the new market opportunities of its expanding product line, the company on Wednesday unveiled a more flexible partner program to enable partners to move more nimbly into the new business areas as well.

Riverbed, which made its reputation on the SteelHead line of wide area network (WAN) optimization appliances, has been both acquiring and organically developing other products for software-defined solutions and managing application performance.

More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 17, 20180 comments


Rough Start to 2018 for Microsoft Cortana

Given all that Microsoft has invested in creating the illusion that Cortana has a personality, it's not too weird to think she must be a little depressed.

It's certainly been a rough start to 2018 for Microsoft's virtual assistant. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 16, 20180 comments


SharePoint Online Deployments Surging, According to Survey

The rate of cloud-based Microsoft SharePoint deployments ballooned by triple digits in 2017, based on a recent industry poll.

SharePoint tools suppliers Sharegate, Hyperfish and Nintex this week released their "The SharePoint and Office 365 Industry Survey," which included responses from about 450 SharePoint administrators and IT professionals. The three companies also surveyed a random sample of their combined client pools in 2016, providing lots of data points for comparison. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 10, 20180 comments


Update: Intel Confirms Flaw, Big Patch Week Ahead

The next Patch Tuesday or some date around then is looking like a doozy.

Reports have been bubbling up this week that vendors and open source teams are hustling under embargo to fix a major security flaw affecting Intel processors over the last decade. The rumored software fix could seriously slow down both personal systems and public clouds. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 03, 20180 comments


Microsoft Dynamics Giants Combine in End-of-Year Merger

Two of the biggest partner companies in the Microsoft Dynamics channel merged in a deal announced Friday.

Edison, N.J.-based SBS Group and Columbus, Ohio-based Socius are combining to form Velosio, which will be led by the executive teams of both organizations. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on December 15, 20170 comments