The Microsoft Surface Book is the first covet-worthy laptop of the Windows 10 era.
Microsoft's inaugural first-party hardware entry in the crowded laptop market hit general availability on Monday. I spent an hour Monday morning at the Microsoft Store in Arlington, Va., getting a hands-on demo of the Surface Book and the new Surface Pro 4. (Click here for the Surface Pro 4 article.) More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 26, 20150 comments
The old truism that Microsoft gets a product right on its third try held for the Surface Pro 3. Not wanting to mess with a good thing, Microsoft limited itself to refinements for the new Surface Pro 4.
The fourth generation of Microsoft's category-creating productivity tablet become generally available on Monday. I spent an hour Monday morning at the Microsoft Store in Arlington, Va., getting a hands-on demo of the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book. (Read my Surface Book review here.) More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 26, 20150 comments
Paris-based Thales SA will pad its data protection capabilities with a $400 million acquisition of enterprise encryption company Vormetric.
Thales this week announced a definitive agreement to acquire San Jose, Calif.-based Vormetric in a deal expected to close in the first quarter of 2016. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 21, 20150 comments
Western Digital Corp. is acquiring SanDisk Corp. in a storage hardware megadeal worth $19 billion.
The companies entered into a definitive agreement, announced Wednesday, involving cash, new debt financing and Western Digital stock. The boards of directors for both companies have approved the deal, which is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2016. The deal still depends on SanDisk shareholder approval, and if a pending Unisplendor Corp. investment in Western Digital falls through, Western Digital shareholders will also have to give their blessing. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 21, 20150 comments
The surprising Surface Enterprise Initiative, which brought Dell and HP aboard as Surface Pro resellers for Microsoft, won't include the Surface Book yet for the two OEMs.
"You can expect HP and Dell to continue to evaluate new devices as part of the partnerships announced last month, but the product was just announced, so nothing more specific at this point," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 21, 20150 comments
Lenovo and Microsoft get close, Lenovo and Microsoft push each other away.
The strains of being an operating system vendor, reliant on your OEM partners one day and then simultaneously competing with them another day, came into full view this week in the Microsoft-Lenovo relationship. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 20, 20150 comments
Microsoft executives said Tuesday that nearly 5,000 resellers have signed up worldwide to sell Microsoft Surface business tablets, but that they expect growth of this new partner ecosystem to settle down after that initial rush.
"Today we're now at nearly 5,000 resellers across Surface markets. So the interest has been tremendous," said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, in a telephone interview Tuesday. "It really reflects the unprecedented response to Surface Pro 3 that we've seen from business customers." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 20, 20150 comments
The select group of 2-Tier distributors in Microsoft's growing Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) U.S. ecosystem grew by one this month, with the addition of SherWeb to the program.
Launched as a pilot last year and greatly expanded this year, the Microsoft CSP program is a cloud reseller program that sets up partners to directly manage their entire customer lifecycle, including direct billing and support. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 15, 20150 comments
Microsoft is making its Onboarding Center (OBC) more aggressive in its mission of converting cloud customers to active users, leaving partners for the second time in three months to figure out whether the new OBC will trample their existing business models or augment them.
Launched in 2014, OBC is an internal unit at Microsoft designed to provide free, personalized and remote services to customers to help them turn cloud licenses into active seats. Initially, the hundreds of employees worldwide in the unit provided Office 365 e-mail migrations for customers with more than 150 seats. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 07, 20150 comments
Symantec Corp., newly re-focused on IT security, on Monday launched a new partner program called Symantec Secure One.
The security vendor is in the process of selling the Veritas data-management arm of its business to private equity firm Carlyle Group and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC for $8 billion. That deal is expected to close by the end of the year, but Symantec and Veritas have been working out the details of a split on the same timetable since the October 2014 announcement of the separation plans. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 05, 20150 comments
Editor's Note: This entry has been updated throughout based on an interview with Gavriella Schuster, general manager of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group.
Microsoft has slashed the minimum number of Office 365 seats partners need to sell to earn a cloud competency by about three-quarters.
The move was one of several reduced competency requirements announced Monday in a blog post by Gavriella Schuster, general manager of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group. The blog post provides specifics for changes that Schuster outlined at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in July.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 28, 20150 comments