Recent technology spending (and economic forecasts in general) for 2020 have been bleak.
But couched in IDC's latest forecast for smartphone spending is an interesting side effect, the current pandemic-induced economic crisis could mean 5G technology arrives faster than previous forecast models indicated.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 03, 20200 comments
A new study puts the hourly cost of downtime for high-priority applications at $67,651 per hour.
The survey of 1,550 business leaders and IT decision makers in 22 countries was conducted earlier this year on behalf of data management specialist Veeam Software.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 02, 20200 comments
It's time to let the security machine learning (ML) models punch it out.
Microsoft on Monday unveiled an ML contest to run later this summer that will pit security defenders against attackers. With the "Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition," Microsoft is hoping to engage both ML researchers and security professionals to develop cutting edge machine learning models related to security.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 01, 20200 comments
Successful Microsoft products tend to follow a certain path. There's the splashy introduction, followed by a rapid adoption gold rush, where Microsoft and its partners work flat out to enable deployments at unparalleled scale.
In the middle stages of that gold rush, even as most of the focus is on onboarding new seats, second-order problems start to emerge. One of the biggest of those second-order problems is that some early adopter customers need to migrate their deployment for various reasons, such as mergers and acquisition.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on May 29, 20200 comments
Azure Lighthouse, Microsoft's most ambitious managed service provider tooling effort in years, is now sporting important new features and integrations with Microsoft's main partner portal.
Microsoft released Azure Lighthouse last July during the Microsoft Inspire partner conference. It represents a way for MSPs to manage Microsoft Azure tenants for many customers using technology that provides visibility and control to both the partner and the customer. Azure Lighthouse is free for partners to use on top of their existing Azure subscriptions. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 27, 20200 comments
The Microsoft Build conference was virtual this year, but many of the product and platform revelations coming out of the show were concrete.
Let's look at 10 interesting technologies that hit general availability (or at least got GA timeframes) at the developer-centric event that kicked off on Tuesday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 19, 20200 comments
Longtime senior Microsoft partner and sales executive Phil Sorgen has moved to RingCentral Inc.
Sorgen took on the role of Chief Revenue Officer at Belmont, Calif.-based RingCentral earlier this month.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on May 13, 20200 comments
Microsoft on Wednesday launched two new advanced specializations that allow partners to highlight their capabilities around remote work with Microsoft Teams and related teamwork platforms.
A specialization focused on using the Office 365 platform for distributed collaborative work is called Teamwork Deployment. The other specialization, Calling for Microsoft Teams, is for partners who can deploy and support voice calling capabilities within Teams. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 06, 20200 comments
Microsoft's annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, will be packed into two online-only days this July with registration opening next month.
Microsoft Channel Chief Gavriella Schuster provided a video and blog update on Friday about Inspire, which Microsoft had already announced in late March would be changed to a virtual event due to COVID-19. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 01, 20200 comments
Microsoft Teams usage has surged more than 70 percent in a little over a month as the massive shift to remote work makes online collaboration and video conferencing platforms essential.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed an updated figure for daily active users (DAU) on Wednesday of 75 million. Nadella announced the daily active users number during a call on Microsoft's quarterly earnings, which grew double digits in revenues and earnings per share even as business activity worldwide has plummeted. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 30, 20200 comments
Before Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings on Wednesday, analysts weren't sure how COVID-19 would affect different parts of its diverse portfolio of businesses.
But as CFO Amy Hood told investors during the Wednesday afternoon earnings call, there was a minimal net impact to the total company. A slide presented during the call broke down the impact of the coronavirus at length for Microsoft's third quarter, which ended March 31: More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 29, 20200 comments
If you thought you blew the deadline for the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards amid the chaos of applying with banks for Paycheck Protection Program loans, pivoting the business, setting up your workforce and customers for remote work, et cetera...think again.
The original deadline was this week -- April 21, to be exact. But Microsoft earlier this month extended the deadline until May 12. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 23, 20200 comments