The public cloud is a predominantly Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market, with the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) elements gaining steadily in SaaS' rear view.
Oh, and that SaaS market is still wide-open, even as the IaaS/PaaS sector becomes more consolidated by the year. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 18, 20200 comments
Microsoft revenues were up 13% in the fourth quarter as the company continued its growth amid the pandemic and associated economic headwinds.
Revenues for the quarter, ended June 30, hit $38 billion. Diluted earnings per share decreased 15%, to $1.46, in part because the company took a $450 million charge in the quarter for its late-June move to permanently shutter the Microsoft Store physical locations. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 20200 comments
Satya Nadella has been shopping around the term "tech intensity" for a year-and-a-half as a sort of refinement of, or at least a related concept to, "digital transformation."
But at the Microsoft Inspire partner conference on Wednesday, the Microsoft CEO elevated "tech intensity" to an organizing principle that can help companies both weather the current historic global challenges and perhaps grow after those challenges have started to recede. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 20200 comments
In the opening sessions of the Microsoft Inspire partner conference Tuesday, Microsoft executives urged partners to pivot their efforts to remote work, business continuity, security and cloud migration over the next year in a work world that the pandemic has "changed forever."
Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's worldwide channel chief, detailed the four priorities for partners as the next steps for Microsoft's fiscal 2021, which started July 1. Microsoft is holding the Inspire conference virtually on Tuesday and Wednesday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 21, 20200 comments
The 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards are filled with stories of Microsoft partners rapidly retooling their offerings or crafting bespoke solutions to meet the urgent pandemic-related needs of customers -- from companies to nonprofits to government agencies.
Microsoft on Monday released the list of winners of the 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards, which included winners in 49 categories, finalists and country-level winners. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 20200 comments
A new survey-based security research report suggests that seven in 10 organizations have experienced public cloud security incidents in the last year.
U.K.-based security company Sophos released its report, "The State of Cloud Security 2020," this week. The findings are significant due to the substantial sample size of the survey, with responses from more than 3,500 IT managers in 26 countries. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20200 comments
With the help of federal courts, Microsoft is seizing domains to try to slow a "sophisticated, new phishing scheme" that is employing pandemic-related messaging against customers in 62 countries.
Microsoft published a blog about the effort on Tuesday, the same day that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed documents from Microsoft's lawsuit. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 07, 20200 comments
Researchers at Menlo Security on Tuesday documented newly discovered attacks in the wild leveraging an old flaw in Microsoft Office -- underscoring once again the importance of applying older patches.
Microsoft first patched the vulnerability, CVE-2017-11182, in late 2017. The flaw is in the Equation Editor of Microsoft Office, which allows users to embed mathematical equations or formulas inside Office documents. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 30, 20200 comments
As part of a broad racial justice initiative involving several hundred million dollars, Microsoft is committing $73 million to support Black and African American-owned partners in the United States.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared details of the initiative this week in a blog entry called "Addressing Racial Injustice," and said senior Microsoft executives and board members have been evaluating options over the last few weeks. The blog is Nadella's second on racial justice since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked mass protests against police violence. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 24, 20200 comments
A major new survey of managed service providers (MSPs) finds that revenues are down, customers are struggling to pay their bills and interest in mergers and acquisitions is flagging in the midst of COVID-19's twin health and economic crises.
IT Glue, an IT documentation provider for IT professionals and MSPs, released results of the survey on Monday. Originally fielded in February with 1,500 participants, IT Glue conducted a follow-up survey in May to gauge sentiment after the effects of the pandemic had begun to hit the United States, which is home to about three-quarters of the respondents. That follow-up survey had about 500 respondents. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 15, 20200 comments
Microsoft President Brad Smith said Thursday that the artificial intelligence platform powerhouse won't be selling facial recognition technology to U.S. police departments until there is a national law in place that is "grounded in human rights."
Smith's statement comes after IBM and Amazon both took similar positions in the wake of worldwide protests against police brutality and racism in policing sparked by the death of George Floyd. Those moves by Microsoft's AI peers led critics to call on Microsoft this week to take public steps, as well. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 11, 20200 comments
Vectra AI, a surging security company applying artificial intelligence to network-based intrusion detection, on Tuesday unveiled strategic integrations with Microsoft's core security technologies.
The eight-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based Vectra attracted $100 million in a Series E funding round last June in part due to growing interest in its approach to network threat detection and response (NDR).
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 09, 20200 comments