In a deal between two top U.S. Microsoft Dynamics partners, Socius on Friday announced the acquisition of the Dynamics GP practice of IBIS Inc.
The move expands Socius' national reach and bolsters the Columbus, Ohio-based company's GP practice, which has been around since 1984. With the sale, IBIS will concentrate on Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 25, 20150 comments
Citrix named Kimberly Martin to head its worldwide channel effort in the midst of a broader push to reinvigorate the channel and sales in general.
Martin is vice president of partner strategy and sales, with worldwide strategy responsibility for Citrix' diverse channel, which includes ISVs, OEMs, system integrators, service providers, resellers and distributors. She will report to Carlos Sartorius, senior vice president of worldwide sales and services. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 16, 20150 comments
Flexera Software is betting that software asset management (SAM) and software vulnerability management are a natural fit.
The Itasca, Ill.-based vendor of software licensing, compliance and installation solutions this week bought Secunia, a software vulnerability management solution provider well-known for its state-of-the-industry reports about vulnerabilities in different products. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 16, 20150 comments
LogicNow wants to bring big data analytics capabilities to even the smallest of MSPs.
At its MAX 2015 conference that started Wednesday near Washington, D.C., LogicNow announced a new core technology called LOGICcards. The "cards" are toast-like notifications that appear in an MSP's remote monitoring and management (RMM) dashboard, providing warnings of configuration problems, security issues and other pitfalls that could lead to downtime for the customer and reduced profitability for an MSP. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 10, 20150 comments
Dell will start selling Microsoft Surface Pro devices and Surface accessories bundled with the computer maker's own services and support offerings next month, and HP revealed similar but less concrete plans.
The companies on Tuesday jointly announced the partnerships, which mark a major advance from the adversarial response Microsoft initially got from many OEMs when it introduced the Surface tablets in 2012. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 09, 20150 comments
Windows 10 is off to a jackrabbit start in its first month of availability, according to two major market share tracking organizations.
Released on July 29, Windows 10 was a free upgrade for many Windows 7 and Windows 8 users and Microsoft has been rolling the download out in controlled waves to users who requested it in the subsequent weeks. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 01, 20150 comments
Dell is seeing a significant bounce in partner deal registration activity in its security product lineup, the company told attendees at its annual North American Dell Security Peak Performance conference this week.
"With security being a top priority for all organizations, we are delighted to see the success of our partner strategy," said Marvin Blough, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Dell Security, in a blog post from the Las Vegas conference, which drew 650 attendees from 22 countries. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 01, 20150 comments
The mid-year tech spending estimate revisions are in, and the board is lighting up red.
With the benefit of two quarters of earnings data from the tech majors, IDC now sees worldwide PC shipments falling by 8.7 percent in 2015 and falling again in 2016 before a "modest recovery" possibly starting in 2017. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 26, 20150 comments
A day into his job as the global channel leader for Intel Security, Richard Steranka says he sees the biggest opportunities for channel growth in the midmarket and SMB spaces, even as aggressive investment in datacenter solution-based enterprise partners will continue.
"Even as of yesterday, I had an opportunity to talk with all of the sales leaders across the globe and the current channel team," Steranka said in an interview Tuesday. "It's pretty clear that we've made great strides in the enterprise space. The midmarket and SMB have seen high growth but [we] feel there's still further potential there for our partner community." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 25, 20150 comments
SHI went public Thursday with a customer education program designed to position the Microsoft partner for a share of the Microsoft FastTrack Adoption Offer budget.
SHI, based in Somerset, N.J., is one of about a dozen U.S. Licensing Solution Providers (LSPs), the only Microsoft partners able to transact licensing agreements with enterprise customers. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 20, 20150 comments
Here at RCP, we've often covered the inflammatory things Microsoft executives have to say about VMware. (Mostly COO Kevin Turner in his annual Worldwide Partner Conference keynote.)
In the Satya Nadella era, Microsoft has turned down the temperature on such statements a bit, and even eliminated a blacklist of companies, including VMware, that were previously banned from attending WPC. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 20, 20150 comments
One of Microsoft's remaining handful of U.S.-based Licensing Solution Providers (LSPs), SoftwareONE, this week announced an infusion of growth capital from global investment firm KKR in exchange for a 25 percent minority stake. The amount was not disclosed.
SoftwareONE, which does business in 115 countries and is based in Stans, Switzerland, with U.S. headquarters in Waukesha, Wis., provides software licensing and procurement services for more than 9,000 software publishers. The privately owned company has been a longstanding Microsoft LSP, a category of partners formerly known as Large Account Resellers or LARs, and listed Microsoft first among the software publishers it works with in a statement about the deal. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 19, 20150 comments