Ron Huddleston, corporate vice president of the Microsoft One Commercial Partner (OCP) worldwide organization, is going on an indefinite family leave a little less than a year into the job, and Gavriella Schuster will step into the role.
Schuster previously reported to Huddleston as corporate vice president for worldwide channels and programs, and was also considered Microsoft's "worldwide channel chief," a semi-official designation that she had also held prior to Huddleston's arrival in OCP when she was CVP of the now-discontinued Worldwide Partner Group (WPG). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 11, 20170 comments
A year after unveiling a Microsoft-Qualcomm partnership to bring Windows 10 to the Snapdragon platform and create a new class of Windows on ARM devices, ASUS and HP are showing off systems with shipments set to begin next year.
The ASUS NovaGo, a 2-in-1 convertible, will be available in early 2018. The HP Envy x2 Windows on Snapdragon Mobile PC is supposed to ship in the spring. Both devices were on display for hands-on use at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii this week. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 06, 20170 comments
During an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session this week aimed at new partners, Microsoft gave the hard sell for its Cloud Enablement Desk benefit.
Microsoft hosted the AMA session, called "Partnering with Microsoft," on its Microsoft Partner Community page on Wednesday after taking questions for eight days. Fielding questions for the session was John Mighell, Global Breadth Partner Enablement Lead at Microsoft, who is also responsible for the MPC Partnership 101 discussion board. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 30, 20170 comments
Global technology companies like Microsoft and SAP SE of course often double as marquee clients for one other.
Taking advantage of their scale, prominence and ongoing strategic partnership, SAP and Microsoft this week announced a new dogfooding arrangement. The companies will each put their joint engineering efforts to get the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud running on Microsoft Azure to work internally on running parts of their actual businesses. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 29, 20170 comments
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) unveiled five packaged workload solutions that will be billed like cloud services but reside on-premises.
The pay-per-use offerings are called HPE GreenLake, and the initial set will include Big Data, backup, open database, SAP HANA and edge computing. HPE announced them Monday during its Discover conference in Madrid.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 27, 20170 comments
SkyKick and Ingram Micro now offer a bundle of Office 365, SkyKick Cloud Backup and the SkyKick Migration Suite that Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Indirect Resellers can buy from Ingram and sell to customers on a monthly billing basis.
The companies launched the bundle at the IT Nation show in Orlando, Fla., this month. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 17, 20170 comments
A new survey of 500 U.S. organizations shows IT decision-makers are worried about the effectiveness and frequency of their data backups.
Data management and protection specialist StorageCraft commissioned the study with a third-party research organization.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 16, 20170 comments
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services/Team Foundation Server (VSTS/TFS) isn't just a toolset for DevOps; the large team at Microsoft behind the products is a long-running experiment in doing DevOps.
During the main keynote at the Live! 360 conference in Orlando, Fla., this week, Buck Hodges shared DevOps lessons learned at Microsoft scale. While Microsoft has tens of thousands of developers engaged to varying degrees in DevOps throughout the company, Hodges, director of engineering for Microsoft VSTS, focused on the 430-person team developing VSTS/TFS. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 16, 20170 comments
Partners pitching business intelligence (BI) solutions to business users rather than database administrators (DBAs) appear to have a committed new ally in Microsoft.
When looking at Microsoft's recent enhancements to its BI platforms, the lack of rows, columns and even traditional data management terminology makes it evident that the changes aren't aimed at DBAs. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 15, 20170 comments
When the ConnectWise Control team told him they were playing around with integrating smartphone cameras into their remote support offering, ConnectWise Chief Product Officer Craig Fulton wasn't sure at first that the idea added enough value to pursue.
After all, end users or field engineers could use products like Apple FaceTime for show and tell with subject-matter experts or senior support staff back at the main office. But the team quickly sold him on the idea, and his demo of the technology with ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini was an audience favorite during the main keynote at the company's IT Nation show last week in Orlando. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 13, 20170 comments
ConnectWise, which is touting its many integrations and industry openness as a differentiator in an increasingly competitive market, previewed a new developer kit that will make it faster and easier for partners to build on its platform.
CEO Arnie Bellini unveiled the ConnectWise Developer Kit on Thursday in the opening keynote of the company's IT Nation conference in Orlando, Fla. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 09, 20170 comments
While DevOps is a key trend for IT departments, Microsoft hopes to seed a new partner ecosystem within the Azure Marketplace around a related idea that it's calling "Ap/Ops."
The immediate evidence of the effort is general availability this month of Managed Applications in the Azure Marketplace, which is Microsoft's 3-year-old catalog of third-party applications that have been certified or optimized to run on the Azure public cloud platform. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 06, 20170 comments