Ingram Micro, a key distribution partner in Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) business model, on Thursday revealed upgrades to its platforms for both 1-Tier and 2-Tier Microsoft CSPs.
The CSP-related upgrades are part of a raft of platform upgrades being rolled out at the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit in Phoenix this week. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 20, 20170 comments
Microsoft on Wednesday released a production-ready community technical preview (CTP) 2.0 of SQL Server v.Next, which the company also confirmed will officially be called SQL Server 2017.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft, revealed the SQL version and naming news, along with a raft of data platform announcements during a new online event called Microsoft Data Amp. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 19, 20170 comments
We're putting the wraps on our second annual RCP 200 list of the top U.S. Microsoft partners, but we wanted to give loyal RCPmag.com readers one more chance to throw their hats into the ring.
This is a qualitative list of the Microsoft solution provider companies that demonstrate a laser focus on Microsoft technology and a strong commitment to providing great value for their customers. There are a few requirements -- companies that get listed must belong to the Microsoft Partner Network, must have major end-user service operations in the United States and should have at least one Microsoft Gold Competency. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 17, 20170 comments
BitTitan is taking another big step in offering prescriptive guidance for Microsoft partners and other IT service providers with the release this week of an overhauled MSPComplete.
The Seattle-area company's suite is shifting from suggesting potential upselling opportunities to offering a full set of more than 100 customizable playbooks. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 06, 20170 comments
A year after unveiling its first software release, Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup Uila Inc. on Tuesday connected the application-aware infrastructure performance monitoring dots by bringing end users into the process.
Designed for datacenters running mission-critical applications, Uila (pronounced wee-la) relies on small virtual machines on physical hosts to listen to network traffic and send metadata to a controller on-premises or in the cloud. With intelligence allowing it to auto-discover more than 4,000 applications, the company's tool aims to create a performance dashboard for the entire stack, including application response times for compute, storage and the network. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 04, 20170 comments
When it comes to overall Internet access across all device types worldwide, Microsoft's long reign as the dominant operating system has come to an end, according to researchers at StatCounter.
The independent Web analytics company, which tracks OS usage, on Monday reported that Android overtook Windows in March for the first time as the world's most popular operating system.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 03, 20170 comments
Dell refreshed its Wyse thin client line on Tuesday with a new device that sports the first quad-core processor in one of its entry-level devices for virtual workspace environments.
The Wyse 3040 has a lot of the specs you'd expect in a refreshed line -- lower weight at just over half a pound, about a quarter less power usage than previous models and a smaller overall size. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 28, 20170 comments
A refrain among channel advocates musing about IT's future in the cloud is that even for customers interested in assembling best-of-breed collections of cloud services, they still want a trusted adviser to put it all together for them.
The other way of looking at it is that customers want a single throat to choke when things don't work. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 27, 20170 comments
Cloud-focused distributor Pax8 on Monday unveiled new processes, organizational enhancements, roles and a key executive all aimed at streamlining its operations.
The 5-year-old Denver-based company offers a curated line card of cloud offerings to its 1,100 partners. Products offered from Pax8 come from BAE Systems, BitTitan, CloudJumper, DataMAPt, Double-Take, IBM MaaS360, Infrascale, Microsoft, ProfitBricks, Symantec and Veritas. Office 365 is one of the distributor's anchor products, and a new relationship announced last month with BitTitan centering on the MigrationWiz technology and MSPComplete deepened Pax8's focus on Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 27, 20170 comments
While the technical integration of Microsoft and LinkedIn awaits significant movement, the cultural integration took another step forward with the naming of LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman to the board of Microsoft this week.
A member of the "PayPal Mafia" alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the 49-year-old Hoffman brings a Silicon Valley insider's perspective to the Microsoft boardroom. He is currently a partner with Greylock Partners, and his other board positions include Edmodo, Convoy, Blockstream, Wrapp and Kiva.org. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20170 comments
A new survey by one of Microsoft's largest cloud solution providers (CSPs) takes a crack at quantifying the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Office 365 for organizations of different sizes.
In a report posted Monday, Champion Solutions Group of Boca Raton, Fla., detailed the results of a survey of 101 Office 365 administrators from organizations ranging in size from 1-50 users to more than 500 users. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 13, 20170 comments
The massive WikiLeaks dump on Tuesday of alleged U.S. Central Intelligence Agency documents purports to reveal elements of the CIA's tactics and tools for exploiting Windows-based computers.
The flashiest revelations in the 8,761 documents, dubbed "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, had to do with non-Windows operating systems: platform exploits against Apple's iOS that could theoretically make application-level encryption and secure communications tools like Signal and WhatsApp moot on iPhones, a catalog of two dozen Android zero-day exploits, and details of how the agency could turn Samsung smart TVs into listening devices. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 08, 20170 comments