Longtime Microsoft channel executive Josh Waldo has joined Nintex as vice president of channel strategy and channel programs.
Nintex is a Bellevue, Wash.-based workflow automation platform provider. "With his passion for partners and extensive management and technology industry expertise, Josh is well-qualified to drive our channel marketing strategy and programs and help our channel partners experience success within the new cloud environment," Nintex CEO John Burton said in a statement.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 12, 20140 comments
The drumbeat over the end of support for Windows Server 2003 is getting louder and more insistent.
On Monday, US-CERT issued an alert titled "Microsoft Ending Support for Windows Server 2003 Operating System" to warn subscribers about the risk that the deadline next summer represents for organizations' security postures. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 10, 20140 comments
Six months after the end of support for Windows XP, the user base is finally responding.
Operating system market share figures released over the weekend by Net Applications show the kind of dramatic month-over-month drop in Windows XP's share that seemed like it should have come right around the end of support on April 8, 2014. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 03, 20140 comments
Microsoft's elite hosting program quadrupled to 100 partners in the year since its launch, with new partners fueling a 40 percent expansion in the number of service provider datacenters and contributing to a 20 percent boost in customers.
Microsoft unveiled the new enrollment number for the Cloud OS Program as part of its TechEd Europe 2014 event in Barcelona. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 29, 20140 comments
Fresh off a recent round of investment, channel-focused Office 365 migration project automation specialist SkyKick is expanding its management team to accelerate North American growth and drive into new markets internationally.
The Seattle-based startup and a 2013 Microsoft Partner of the Year winner is adding three senior executives -- Steve Bonilla as COO, Peter Labes as vice president of business development and Eric Jewett as vice president of international operations. The executive additions, being announced Monday, follow a $3 million round of private equity and angel investor funding announced in late July. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 20, 20140 comments
Wireless standard upgrades often meet with a collective yawn by customers. If the wireless network is getting the job done, a speed increase often won't do enough to improve performance to justify the cost.
But Jamie Stark, senior product manager with Microsoft Lync, is evangelizing a recent wireless standard as a big opportunity to dramatically improve unified communications performance on mobile networks. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 07, 20140 comments
The rumors over the weekend were correct, and Hewlett-Packard revealed Monday morning that it will split into two roughly equal-sized entities -- Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc.
The move creates two massive new, if familiar, players in the tech industry -- Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's annual revenues for a recently concluded period would have been $58 billion, HP Inc.'s $57 billion. The new arrangement has implications across the IT industry, including for the many Microsoft partners who are also HP partners. Here are a few of the main takeaways that are visible at first blush. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 06, 20140 comments
The security professional's toolbox is fairly mature, with ethical hackers commonly using familiar and powerful tools such as Metasploit, Nmap, Wireshark and dozens of others, many of them conveniently wrapped up for free in the security-focused Kali Linux distribution.
Still, in the fast-moving field of IT security, new threats and tools are constantly emerging. In a standing-room-only session at Interop New York this week, David Rhoades of Maven Security Consulting recommended five up-and-coming tools that can help penetration testers do their jobs better. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 02, 20140 comments
Kaseya this week issued another core platform release and this month will open a beta program for some additional functionality.
"With 8, we have shifted the focus to security," said Yogesh Gupta, CEO of Kaseya, in a telephone interview. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20140 comments
Hitting a delivery date promised in July, Microsoft on Monday launched three new cloud competencies for partners.
At the same time, Microsoft drastically reduced the number of customers a partner is required to have to achieve the SMB competency's silver tier, and announced improvements to Pinpoint, the partner directory for customers. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 29, 20140 comments
Details are starting to emerge about Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), a promising partner program that Microsoft previewed at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in July.
The CSP program is designed to accommodate the requests by partners to be able to bundle Microsoft services and own the customer billing, a requirement that was partly but not fully addressed with the Office 365 Open program. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 24, 20140 comments
Although it's gotten far less attention than the recent Windows XP deadline, the retirement of support for Windows Server 2003 will be one of the most important of the predictable security issues of 2015.
Microsoft officially ends support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, 2015. The deadline has some of the same ramifications that the Windows XP deadline had: Microsoft will no longer patch Windows Server 2003 for new security vulnerabilities. Presumably, Microsoft will offer expensive Custom Support Agreements for enterprises to continue getting patch support after that date, but there's been no official announcement yet. In the meantime, new security vulnerabilities keep cropping up for the aging OS. During the last full year, 2013, Microsoft released 37 critical updates for Windows Server 2003. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 17, 20140 comments