As Microsoft shifts its revenue mix from on-premise to cloud, you might expect the transition to change the company's calendar emphasis on closing deals from the end of the fiscal year -- June for Microsoft -- to the beginning of the year a month later.
After all, an Office 365 contract signed on July 1 means 12 months of revenues for Microsoft, while a deal closed in May is only worth two months of subscriptions.
That makes the fourth-quarter campaigns to get the partner sales teams out on the streets a bit anachronistic, but here they come anyway.
Microsoft this month highlighted a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Power Up Reseller Incentive good through June 30. The deal offers U.S. CSP partners incremental incentives up to $50,000 for selling Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), Dynamics 365 and Azure. Partners interested in participating must register before June 1, and managed resellers could be eligible for an additional incentive.
Despite the changing dynamics of its business, Microsoft has a few logical reasons for keeping the Q4 promotions going aside from the inertia of always doing it that way. It's still got annual numbers to hit and, after all, a deal closed in Q4 will bring revenues for the next year (and the year after that, et cetera). The fiscal year close also creates that artificial sense of urgency that's so important to driving action among buyers.
In this specific instance, the CSP promotion gives Microsoft something positive to talk about (free money!) in a blog post that soft-pedals the transition from the Advisor model -- which used to be the mainstay of partner cloud sales but is being sunsetted in favor of CSP.
Those factors aside, it will be interesting to see how long Microsoft continues with the Q4 promotion treadmill as more and more of the business is built on recurring revenues through the cloud.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 17, 20170 comments
LAS VEGAS -- In its ongoing quest to provide more components of the managed service provider (MSP) tool stack and broaden the definition of that stack, Kaseya acquired Unigma, a maker of cloud management tools.
One of the pioneers of the remote management and monitoring (RMM) toolsets for MSPs, Kaseya has lately branched out into the professional services automation (PSA) tools market. While CEO Fred Voccola argues the traditional market of managing endpoints for SMBs remains a very strong business, he contends that the far greater opportunity lies in providing managed services to those customers around emerging technology areas.
The Unigma acquisition, completed on March 31 and unveiled during the KaseyaConnect 2017 conference in Las Vegas this week, represents one of those emerging technology areas. Kaseya is making the functionality available immediately as the Unigma Cloud Management Suite and as a cloud complement to the Traverse network management tools in the Kaseya IT Complete Platform.
"Unigma is about managing public clouds from Amazon, Microsoft and Google," said Mike Puglia, Kaseya's chief product officer, from the keynote stage.
A core component of Unigma is a Cloud Manager, which provides a single dashboard for monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud instances, and for performing and automating public cloud tasks in the Unigma interface rather than by logging in to the individual clouds.
One example of the way Cloud Manager could be used would be turning off a quality assurance lab in a public cloud for a customer over the weekend when it's not in use and would merely be costing a customer money, Puglia said.
Other components include a Unigma Billing Manager, which will help MSPs invoice customers based on each customer's utilization, and a Unigma Cloud Cost Optimizer, which performs cloud cost savings analysis to help customers right-size their public cloud spending to match their business needs.
In his keynote, Voccola called Unigma the leader in a burgeoning market of cloud market solutions. Kaseya, which is privately held, did not disclose the value of the deal. Kaseya executives say Unigma has about 75 MSP customers, in addition to enterprise customers. Unigma CEO Kirill Bensonoff stayed on and is now running the Unigma business unit for Kaseya.
Voccola says Unigma could help MSPs and their SMB customers overcome a common trap. "[Most] SMBs believe that public cloud providers manage their infrastructure -- monitoring, security, backup. We all know they don't," he said. Conducting a cost audit using the Unigma Cloud Cost Optimizer could start a productive conversation that ends with SMBs realizing what kinds of help they need with their cloud environments.
The process was eye-opening internally at Kaseya, he said. Kaseya was spending $4 million annually across AWS, Azure and Google for various services. Using Unigma, he said the company discovered "we only needed to be spending $3.4 million. There was about $600,000 that we were misappropriating."
Running similar proof of concepts would be a great managed service, he said. "This is game changing for our MSPs."
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 10, 20170 comments
Continuum's managed service provider partners will be able to manage customers' routers, switches and firewalls through a newly integrated third-party offering.
The Boston-based remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools provider first unveiled an agreement to bundle the networking technology from Auvik Networks during the Continuum Navigate 2016 conference last September.
On Thursday, the companies made the integration available as the Continuum Network Management by Auvik solution, accessible by Continuum partners through the Continuum ITSupport Portal.
The Auvik technology automatically identifies network infrastructure and provides visibility and control of those devices to allow MSPs to troubleshoot network problems faster and perform proactive maintenance.
The integration of the two companies' offerings includes the ability to manage Auvik tickets and alerts from the same pane of glass that provides control for the servers, desktops and mobile devices that are handled by Continuum's flagship RMM tool. Additionally, Continuum's Network Operations Center is now set up to handle the Auvik data and business cases with on-demand network experts and the ability remediate alerts from network devices.
The Continuum partnership is one of several for Waterloo, Ontario-based Auvik, which secured its first funding round four years ago and takes its name from Auviq, an Inuit word for a block of snow used to build an igloo. The company also has MSP industry partnerships with Autotask and with ConnectWise, both on the professional services automation side with ConnectWise Manage and on the RMM side with ConnectWise Automate (formerly LabTech).
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 04, 20170 comments
Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes is leaving the company on May 16 to become CEO of an unnamed smaller company, and President Jeff Cotten is stepping up as interim CEO while the board of directors seeks a long-term replacement to lead the privately held San Antonio, Texas-based hosting giant.
Calling it a tough decision in a blog post Wednesday, Rhodes said, "I'm going to become the CEO of a smaller private company. It's based in another city. It does not compete with Rackspace. I'll be able to talk more specifically about it in a couple of weeks, but for now let me just say that it's about the size Rackspace was when I started here 10 years ago -- and it's growing about as rapidly. It's using cloud technologies to disrupt what has been a very low-tech industry. The company is going through growing pains and needs a CEO who has been through those challenges before."
According to Rhodes, the board considers Cotten a strong candidate for the permanent CEO job.
Cotten was promoted to president on Feb. 1, after eight years at Rackspace that included three years running Rackspace's international business and most recently running Rackspace's fast-growing Fanatical Support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) business. The AWS program is patterned after a similar Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure program that is a slightly bigger operation for Rackspace, which is also an indirect provider in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program and a five-time Microsoft Partner of the Year Award winner.
Cotten said the company, which went private in a $4.3 billion deal that closed in November, will not "take any kind of timeout" during his interim CEO tenure.
"We're going to keep driving to expand Rackspace's leadership of the fast-growing market for managed cloud services," Cotten wrote in a blog post.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 04, 20170 comments
At least three buyout firms are in the running to buy Citrix Systems Inc., according to a report.
"Private equity firms Bain Capital, Carlyle Group LP and Thoma Bravo are among bidders for cloud-services company Citrix Systems Inc., people familiar with the matter said," reported Bloomberg Technology this week.
News emerged in March that Citrix had retained Goldman Sachs Group to see potential buyers, and rumors have since circulated about who might be interested in the company, which specializes in virtualization technologies that factor in many cloud and datacenter infrastructures. Citrix is one of the most common strategic vendors for many Microsoft partners, and Microsoft is one of the names frequently circulated as a potential strategic suitor.
The sources who spoke to Bloomberg Technology also said at least one corporate bidder was interested, but they didn't say what company or companies were sniffing around.
The sources also said Citrix may not pursue a sale.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 04, 20170 comments
Microsoft Dynamics hosting pioneer Linda Rose is retiring from day-to-day operations after the sale of San Diego-based RoseASP Inc. to ESW Capital LLC.
Founded in 2000, RoseASP provides hosted Dynamics services, including Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL and CRM.
Austin, Texas-based ESW specializes in acquiring and growing mature software companies. RoseASP is one of four companies ESW bought on April 17, according to ESW's Web site. Among the 54Â acquisitions ESW listed since 2006 are Kerio Technologies, Wave Systems and GFI.
Michael Bone will run RoseASP with the title of chief revenue officer, the company said this week. Bone was most recently CRO at CyberLinkASP, another ESW company, according to his LinkedIn profile. Rose is stepping down from her CEO job and moving into a management advisory role.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 03, 20170 comments
Docker, the fast-growing, 4-year-old, flagship company of the open source container trend, is replacing its CEO with the seasoned technology executive who was already serving as its chairman for the last six months.
Steve Singh was named Tuesday as the CEO, adding the title to the chairman role he assumed in November. Singh was the founder and CEO of Concur, and later served in senior management roles and as an executive board member at SAP after the business software giant acquired Concur in 2014 for $8.3 billion.
He replaces Docker CEO Ben Golub, who moves to a director role on the board. Golub noted in a blog post about the transition that he joined the company in April 2013 when it consisted of 15 employees and the project had 10 contributors. Now, he said, the company consists of 330 people, the project has 3,300 contributors, and Docker has developer and server counts in the millions and a "dockerized" app count of 900,000. Over the last 18 months, that app count has been increasingly including containers on Microsoft Azure and on Windows Server 2016 due to a deep partnership between Docker and Microsoft.
"I believe that Docker, backed by its platform and fueled by innovation from its collaborative ecosystem, is on track to be the next great enterprise software company."
Steve Singh, chairman and now CEO of Docker
Golub did not specifically say why he was stepping down, although the implication in his blog and in an official news release about the change was that Singh has the experience and skills to help the company strengthen its partner base, increase its enterprise footprint, drive revenues and build an enduring company.
"While there is always some uncertainty about changing roles, I am 100% certain that Steve is the right person for Docker," Golub wrote.
Docker Founder and CTO Solomon Hykes credited Golub for much of Docker's growth over the past four years. "Without Ben, Docker wouldn't be in such an incredible position as a platform and as a company," Hykes said in a statement. Of Singh, Hykes said, "With Steve's unique expertise, we will build an organization capable of delivering on that demand, and serving our customers across the globe."
Singh himself expressed bold ambitions for the company in a prepared comment: "I believe that Docker, backed by its platform and fueled by innovation from its collaborative ecosystem, is on track to be the next great enterprise software company."
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 02, 20170 comments
Several technology companies unveiled new hires and promotions associated with strategic moves on Tuesday.
AvePoint
AvePoint, which provides tools for migrating, managing and protecting Office 365 and SharePoint data, updated a raft of senior executive roles on Tuesday.
The Jersey City, N.J.-based company brought on a new chief revenue officer, Christopher Larsen, and a new chief financial officer, Anthony Branca. Larsen previously held a similar role at software company Model N and has also held senior positions at SAP, TIBCO and Infragistics. Branca came from AppNexus and has worked at ICON Investments Corp. and KPMG.
In other moves, AvePoint promoted Dux Raymond Sy to chief marketing officer and public sector chief technology officer Wei Chen to chief service delivery officer, Mario Carvajal to chief technology officer of North America, and Tom Lin to corporate vice president of sales.
Intermedia
Intermedia, which bundles cloud business applications and serves as an Indirect Provider for partners in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, is bringing on a marketing executive with 16 years of experience at Polycom Inc.
Jim Kruger will start as chief marketing officer and executive vice president overseeing Intermedia's global marketing on May 15. In addition to his experience running a marketing operation of 160 people and a $60 million budget, Intermedia is looking for Kruger's market sector expertise as it works to expand the Intermedia Cloud Voice business.
Datto
In a nod to the importance of open source projects to its business and the industry, data protection solution provider Datto Inc. hired Markus Rex as an open source industry expert.
Rex will help oversee Datto's open source initiatives, including the use of the open source ZFS operating system, which is part of Datto's Inverse Chain technology used by managed service providers for backup and restore capabilities.
Rex was most recently co-founder and CEO of ownCloud, an open source file sync and share platform. He is also a past CTO of the Linux Foundation and has held senior management positions at Novell and SUSE.
Teamatics
Jamison West, a high-profile Microsoft partner executive and managed service provider who founded Jamison West Consulting Services, renamed it Arterian and then sold the Seattle-based business last year to Houston-based Aldridge, now has a new venture.
After leaving both Aldridge and Seattle for Las Vegas, West on Tuesday launched an HR-focused software company called Teamatics LLC. The company bills itself as a platform for developing human capital and improving team performance.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 02, 20170 comments
Acquisitions and organic product development will both be part of the strategic mix as Riverbed Technology seeks to grow beyond its WAN optimization roots into a future in the software-defined era.
"We've done three acquisitions in the last 18 months, and we'll continue to do more," said Chairman and CEO Jerry M. Kennelly on Wednesday in a keynote at the Riverbed Partner Summit 2017 in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Kennelly's comments came as he and other senior executives were explaining the company's newly heavy emphasis on cloud and urging the 160 partners in attendance to commit to joining Riverbed in focusing on cloud networking, digital experience monitoring and service lifecycle management.
Riverbed used the conference to highlight its pivot from a business and partner model focused on fulfillment of Steelhead WAN optimization appliances to solutions that are more dependent on services leveraging newer products like SteelConnect for cloud networking and software-defined-WAN and SteelCentral for application and network performance monitoring.
"We are...a different company than we were two years ago, and so much of this comes from our commitment to the cloud," said Karl Meulema, senior vice president of Worldwide Channels at Riverbed, from the stage at a conference themed "Disrupt."
Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly (top) says to expect more acquisitions, while SVP of Channels Karl Meulema says the forthcoming Service Delivery Platform is Riverbed's biggest internal bet. (Source: Riverbed Technology.)
Kennelly did not indicate what technology sectors Riverbed is looking at for future acquisitions, but the three acquisitions he referred to -- Xirrus in April, Aternity last July and Ocedo last January -- all brought important components that are fitting into the San Francisco-based company's evolving strategy.
Last week, Riverbed unveiled its definitive agreement to acquire Xirrus, a provider of high-density Wi-Fi solutions that are known for serving up connectivity at high-profile sporting events and large-scale conferences. More important for Riverbed and its partners is Xirrus' technology for managing Wi-Fi networks from the cloud, which is critical for the company's cloud networking ambitions.
Several Riverbed executives described Xirrus on stage as a Cisco Meraki killer for Riverbed and its partners. Meulema spelled out the thinking in a one-on-one interview Wednesday. "Xirrus fills a hole for those customers who are looking to integrate LAN and WAN from the same point. Our SD-WAN offering was well accepted by our customers and our partners, but Meraki had an edge and we've taken that edge away," he said.
The Aternity acquisition from last July filled an important piece of Riverbed's digital experience monitoring puzzle, according to Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of the SteelCentral business unit at Riverbed.
"The CIO is more blind than ever. They have all the accountability and less and less of the control," Sargent said of the need for visibility across the network, applications code, servers and public cloud services for diagnosing and fixing problems with networks and mission-critical applications. "You can't manage what you can't see."
Aternity added to the solution by bringing end-user devices into the SteelCentral monitoring picture. "It gave us that broad net to really see what's going on," Sargent said.
The Ocedo acquisition, meanwhile, was "absolutely instrumental" to Riverbed's SD-WAN play, Meulema said. "We recognized that we were behind on the controller side. It just gave us that one year or more jump in time," he said.
At the same time, Riverbed has placed internal investment bets in several areas. The company launched SteelConnect into the SD-WAN market a year ago and revved it with a 2.0 version in September. Along the way, the product has brought what Riverbed calls "one-click" connectivity first for Amazon Web Services and later for Microsoft Azure.
According to Meulema, the company's biggest organic investment is a project under development called the Service Delivery Platform (SDP).
During the conference keynote, Phil Harris, who runs Riverbed's service provider business, described the SDP as an effort to help Riverbed partners bring the speed of the software industry and the service repeatability of the managed service provider (MSP) market to the business of spinning up infrastructure and application service lines through a platform that leverages Riverbed's existing technology and combines it with APIs, templates and consumption analysis tools. The platform is being designed to be multi-tenant and capable of orchestrating elements from multiple vendors and services, not just Riverbed gear and software.
"In the same metaphor that the software industry has moved to a DevOps model, which is all around those ideas of continuous integration, continuous development, continuous release, much more accelerated value for the cloud, why can't we bring that value to the overall IT market space?" Harris said. He said the first version of the platform will be available in the third quarter.
Amid all the product change, Riverbed has been whittling its channel down from about 2,700 partners a few years ago to under 1,000 today in an effort to engage more deeply with partners who can help with the partner-led service strategy.
"Their focus on services and enabling and motivating their partners to strengthen and develop their own partner-branded services is absolutely the right thing to be doing," said Kevin Rhone, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group who attended the conference. "It's not easy helping partners transform their business models. I think they'll end up with a somewhat smaller but stronger partner network because not all of their traditional reselling partners will be able to develop a deep consultative service business."
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 28, 20170 comments
The first of the Intel Optane memory modules designed to improve desktop PC performance are available Monday at computer component retailers.
The two add-in components are a 16GB memory module with an MSRP of $44 and a 32GB module with an MSRP of $77.
Optane memory works with 7th Generation Intel Core processors. Through an Intel Optane memory ready program launched in early 2017, more than 130 motherboards were Intel Optane memory-ready as of late March.
While gaming is a major focus of Optane memory, Intel touts business application benefits for the new memory modules. According to Intel, Optane memory can double computer power-on speed, speed the launch of Microsoft Outlook by six times and speed the launch of the Chrome browser by five times.
The add-in modules are one of the first steps in the rollout of Optane memory. According to Intel, OEM systems with Optane memory pre-installed will be available later this year.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 24, 20170 comments
Citrix Systems this week rolled out a Services Delivery Program based on converting the experience and intellectual property of Citrix Consulting into packaged, repeatable offerings for partners serving midmarket customers or those operating in developing or under-served markets.
The core of the program is a set of Services Delivery Kits to allow any partner to ramp up a services portfolio in areas including infrastructure assessments, design, core build, issue resolution and pilot development.
"Each kit is a one-stop shop that has everything you need to execute a specific customer engagement," said Hector Lima, Citrix vice president of worldwide professional services, in a video introducing the program.
Kits include project scope documents; tools, such as automation scripts; templates for things from sales slide decks to design matrices; and project-specific instructional videos. Each kit also includes two hours of remote assistance from Citrix Consulting Services. That consultant access is available 24 hours a day from Monday through Friday.
Unlike many elements of Citrix's programs for partners, even relatively elite tiers, the kits carry a price tag, and partners are required to buy a kit every time they use them with a customer.
A second tier of the program is a new set of e-learning training courses and certification exams leading to Services Delivery Certification for a partner. Once completed, Citrix partners with that certification will qualify for lower pricing on kits, preferential promotion and eligibility to join the Global Citrix Virtual Bench, in which the partner acts as Citrix Consulting staff.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 21, 20170 comments
Microsoft unveiled a new type of container this week at DockerCon 2017 -- a Linux container that runs on Windows Server 2016.
The move would break down a fundamental wall in deployment scenarios for containers to date. For now, Linux containers can only run on Linux host operating systems and Windows containers can only run on Windows host operating systems. While that's more of a problem for Windows, which is the newcomer to the container phenomenon, a key benefit of containers is portability. The easier it is to deploy a container regardless of the underlying infrastructure, the closer the ideal comes to being realized.
Microsoft is partially solving the issue for its user base with the funky Hyper-V containers that it released to some industry head-scratching with Windows Server 2016. (Why add the management and processing overhead of virtualization to containers?) The rest of the solution is coming from Docker and from Linux distributors, who are committing to building lightweight Linux kernels that will run inside the Hyper-V containers.
This diagram from a Docker blog post in late October, illustrates how Linux and Windows containers could co-exist on one Windows Server. CS Docker Engine stands for Commercially Supported Docker Engine, a version of which ships as part of the Windows Server 2016 license. (Image source: Docker.)
John Gossman, Microsoft Azure lead architect and Linux Foundation board member, took the stage at DockerCon in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday to demonstrate a Linux container running inside a Hyper-V container inside a Windows Server.
Mike Schutz, general manager of product marketing in the Cloud + Enterprise division at Microsoft, described the significance of the moment in a blog post Wednesday. "Yesterday we showed for the first time, a Linux container running natively on Windows Server using the Hyper-V isolation technology currently available only to Windows Server Containers," Schutz wrote Wednesday. (See here for a primer on how containers of different types work across the Microsoft stack.)
Now that the Linux-in-Hyper-V approach is formally unveiled, Gossman presented the Linux support as a logical next step in Hyper-V containers. "When we announced and launched Hyper-V Containers it was because some customers desired additional, hardware-based isolation for multi-tenant workloads, and to support cases where customers may want a different kernel than what the container host is using -- for example different versions. We are now extending this same Hyper-V isolation technology to deliver Linux containers on Windows Server. This will give the same isolation and management experience for Windows Server Containers and Linux containers on the same host, side by side," he said in a post.
The premier of the Linux container on Windows coincided with Docker's big reveal this week around the Moby Project and LinuxKit -- with an emphasis on creating lightweight and secure Linux kernels from Docker and others to run inside containers. One of the problems that approach solves is providing a Linux kernel inside containers on non-Linux platforms, such as Windows Servers, Windows clients or Apple Macs. Those Linux kernels, which themselves are built from swappable container parts, can take up as little as 35MB.
In an official blog post this week, Justin Cormack, a software engineer at Docker, mentioned the LinuxKit work in the context of the Docker-Microsoft relationship that dates to 2014: "The next step in that collaboration...is that all Windows Server and Windows 10 customers will get access to Linux containers and we will be working together on how to integrate LinuxKit with Hyper-V isolation."
Gossman's Microsoft post provides a hint at how excited the open source community is about the opportunity to spread Linux-based containers across the global installed base of Windows Servers. Senior executives at Canonical, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE all provided statements about how they will be working over the next few months with Microsoft's open source integration code to create Linux container OS images for Hyper-V containers.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 20, 20170 comments