The paper chase associated with becoming a Partner of Record (POR) for Microsoft's Online Services Advisor Deploy incentives will end next week.
For the last few years, in order to be eligible for Online Services Advisor (OSA) incentives, partners needed to track down such archaic details as a customer's Enterprise Agreement (EA) ID number, the date of the agreement and the type of agreement; put the data in a form; get an employee at the customer to sign it; and finally send the paper to Microsoft. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 25, 20150 comments
AVG Technologies is doubling down on its channel-centric SMB efforts by rebranding those parts of the company as AVG Business.
"AVG Business is a dedicated business unit within AVG with its own team and engineering, sales and marketing under the same roof," said Francois Daumard, vice president of global channel sales at AVG, in an interview. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 25, 20150 comments
The award ceremony at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) has always been primarily a celebration of the partners who go deepest with Microsoft's proprietary stack.
But this year, one of the partners called to the stage in July will be recognized for deploying an open source solution on the Microsoft Azure platform. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 20, 20150 comments
It was during a conversation with a VAR that Axcient CEO Justin Moore decided there had to be a better way for vendors to pay partners for selling their cloud services.
The VAR professed love for Axcient's Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) product, Business Recovery Cloud, Moore recalled. Yet the VAR had only sold Axcient to one customer during a period when the VAR had sold about 40 traditional software-hardware solutions that were twice as expensive, and took 10 times more time to recover. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 18, 20150 comments
When it comes to the baseline security of all those cloud services companies are using for every conceivable business function, there's good news and bad news in Skyhigh Networks' latest quarterly Cloud Adoption and Risk Report.
Campbell, Calif.-based Skyhigh helps enterprise customers manage their use of cloud services with appropriate levels of security, compliance and governance. Over the last year, Skyhigh has been releasing a quarterly report based on analysis of the usage patterns of millions of employees at hundreds of enterprise companies. Skyhigh released its Q4 2014 report on Wednesday (available here, but registration required). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20150 comments
CDW Corp. in its earnings call Tuesday provided a look at how the Windows Server 2003 refresh cycle is playing out for one of Microsoft's largest partners.
Microsoft is cutting off support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, and many Microsoft partners are focused on the server refresh business, including CDW, which spun up a Windows 2003 migration practice in the middle of 2014. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20150 comments
In a shrewd attempt to get the next runaway success Silicon Valley startup onto the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft is giving away bucketloads of Azure credits to Y Combinator's current class.
Positioning the move as part of Microsoft's long commitment to startups, Microsoft Chief Evangelist Steve Guggenheimer blogged this week, "In this pursuit, Microsoft will provide Y Combinator's current class access to Microsoft Azure and a broad suite of Microsoft technology, as well as support. This will include $500,000 in Microsoft Azure credit, three years of Office 365, as well as direct access to Microsoft's engineering teams -- for Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch of startups." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 10, 20150 comments
Enterprise collaboration vendor PGi bought a substantial Microsoft Lync practice with the acquisition last week of Modality Systems Limited.
PGi, an Atlanta-based publicly traded company with $527 million in 2013 revenues and 2,100 employees selling and supporting solutions in 25 countries, will maintain the acquired company as a wholly owned subsidiary doing business as Modality Systems, a PGi company. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 09, 20150 comments
Cloud security and compliance solution specialist Qualys Inc. is adding progressive scanning capabilities to its Web Application Scanning (WAS) product.
Making custom Web apps more secure has gotten increased attention recently as attackers have come to view Web app code as low-hanging fruit for intrusions. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 05, 20150 comments
Privately-held Veeam Software booked $389 million in revenues in 2014, a 40 percent increase compared to 2013, the company declared in a press release this week.
Veeam, which has been selling software since 2007, released the Veeam Availability Suite v8 during 2014 and upgraded more than a third of its customers within 60 days, CEO Ratmir Timashev said in a statement. Veeam positions itself as a datacenter availability vendor and helps users manage virtualization, cloud and storage technologies. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 05, 20150 comments
The cloud successes that peppered Microsoft's most recent financial earnings report are helping Microsoft rack up higher growth rates on cloud revenues than any of the other major cloud infrastructure vendors.
Yet new industrywide data released by Synergy Research Group this week show that market leader Amazon's own consistently high growth rate, despite its comparatively huge market share, make Amazon Web Services (AWS) a tough-to-catch target. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 05, 20150 comments
Salesforce.com this week unveiled a new partner program with an elaborate scoring system designed to evaluate the comprehensive value of each partner, but the online CRM giant also introduced an annual partner fee.
The Salesforce Partner Program now involves a Partner Value Score, or PVS, that determines the tier for consulting partners -- either Platinum, Gold, Silver or Registered. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 05, 20150 comments