Tech services giant Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), in the midst of splitting itself in two, just announced two "tuck-in" acquisitions.
One is Fruition Partners, which CSC describes as the largest ServiceNow-exclusive service management consulting firm. Fruition Partners is based in Chicago and does business in the United States, Canada, the U.K. and South America. The company brings 300 ServiceNow practitioners and 800 clients to CSC. Fruition Partners will become part of CSC's Global Enterprise Solutions Consulting Group, and beef up CSC's ServiceNow practice, while joining other practices, including SAP, Oracle, Workday and Salesforce.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on August 12, 20150 comments
Attempting to quantify what it's been preaching for the last few years, Microsoft published some internal research numbers on what partners spend on managed-services employees versus project-services employees.
Project-services employees cost about 17 percent more on average than managed-services employees, according to Microsoft. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 10, 20150 comments
Microsoft this week laid out some of its partner enablement efforts surrounding Windows 10, including the inclusion of Windows 10 Internal Use Rights into the Action Pack and competency license grants.
"We know that partners who exercise their Internal Use Rights (IURs) sell more because they're often more knowledgeable about and comfortable with the solutions they're selling. We want all our partners to feel comfortable with Windows 10, so we've made the Windows 10 Enterprise upgrade available to all Action Pack and Competency partners," said Gavriella Schuster, general manager of the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), in a blog post. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 06, 20150 comments
Microsoft on Monday acquired a company with a gamification platform for motivating sales teams through robust contests. It also disclosed plans to bring the platform first into Dynamics CRM and eventually into more Dynamics products.
Terms of the deal to acquire Incent Games Inc., the Austin, Texas-based maker of FantasySalesTeam, were not disclosed. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 03, 20150 comments
Microsoft gave partners a lot to chew on last week during its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). Here's a recap of the major themes of the show through 11 notable quotes by Microsoft executives that highlight implications and opportunities that will reverberate through the channel for Microsoft's fiscal 2016.
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"I hope you realize this is the single biggest investment we're making in expanding our channel for cloud, and we hope you participate with us."
--John Case, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office
It would be impossible to overstate what a big deal Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is going to be over the next year. Although it got a soft launch a year ago, CSP had its real debutante's ball at the Orlando WPC last week. The amount of support in the vendor community is impressive, with companies like Odin, AppDirect, Tech Data and Ingram Micro making serious pushes to enable broad partner participation in CSP. Many of the Office 365 syndication partners are all-in already, as well. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 23, 20150 comments
Microsoft partners focused on Dynamics have grown accustomed to seeing their product set play second fiddle to the flashier parts of Microsoft's product portfolio -- Office 365, Azure, Surface -- come earnings season.
This year was different. In the year-end earnings call on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood bragged on Dynamics so many times in their prepared comments that analysts' ears perked up and they started asking questions. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 20150 comments
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spent part of his earnings call this week explaining some of Microsoft's recent restructuring moves as a way to align the company with the biggest opportunities.
"We pushed forward in our transformation by focusing our investment in areas where we have differentiation and significant opportunity for future growth in large addressable markets," Nadella said during the call. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 20150 comments
After a three-month search, Microsoft this week named Oracle veteran Stephen Boyle to run the U.S. channel for Microsoft, replacing Jenni Flinders.
Boyle's formal title is vice president of U.S. Partner Strategy and Programs. He reports to David Willis, corporate vice president of Microsoft U.S. Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners (SMS&P), who announced the appointment in a blog post Tuesday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 16, 20150 comments
- Get more WPC 2015 news here.
Microsoft will accelerate the ongoing shift of its partner incentives to increase the focus on cloud-related business activity in fiscal year 2016, which started at the beginning of this month.
Partner incentives are one of Microsoft's biggest levers for aligning partner behavior with company goals. One of the company's biggest stated goals this year is getting more partners to do more business in the cloud. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20150 comments
- Get more WPC 2015 news here.
Microsoft will roll out a new premium Office 365 enterprise suite later this year called E5 that company executives are positioning as the new flagship offering of the cloud productivity suite.
E5 will bring several brand-new capabilities to the Office 365 suite, including Cloud PBX, analytics, Power BI and advanced security capabilities. John Case, corporate vice president of Office Marketing for Microsoft, introduced the suite in a Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) keynote speech Monday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 20150 comments
Every year, Redmond Channel Partner magazine and Revenue Rocket Consulting Group scour the Microsoft partner community for IT services companies that are doing it right. We look for companies with great business strategies that result in sustained growth.
Today we're pleased to announce the three winners of our third annual award: Pariveda Solutions, Uptime Legal Systems and Valorem Consulting. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 20150 comments
Fred Voccola admits that he's "drinking out of the firehose right now" in his first week as the new CEO of Kaseya, one of the prime mover companies in the remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools market for managed service providers (MSPs). But Voccola took a few minutes to speak with RCP about his plans for the company.
Here are some highlights of the conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20150 comments