How secure are those mobile apps that users bring into company networks via their own devices? Not very, according to researchers at Gartner. Nor is the situation likely to improve soon.
As part of the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit this week in Dubai, Gartner principal research analyst Dionisio Zumerle flagged mobile apps as an emerging route for attackers to get into enterprise networks and steal corporate data. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 17, 20140 comments
Microsoft just spent $2.5 billion on Mojang, the little Swedish company that created the wildly popular, blocky-graphic video game Minecraft.
This is an enormous amount of money by any standard. For a little context, this ranks as the fourth-largest dollar amount for an investment in Microsoft's history. It trails only what Microsoft paid for Skype ($8.5 billion), Nokia's phone business ($7.2 billion) and aQuantive ($6.3 billion). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 15, 20140 comments
A new program offering free Office 365 migrations performed remotely by Microsoft employees for customers with more than 150 seats went live this week. Partner reaction so far has ranged generally from extreme concern to wary acceptance.
Microsoft formally announced two new programs to customers in a blog post on Wednesday -- the Office 365 FastTrack Onboarding Center and the Office 365 Adoption Offer. Both programs officially launched Sept. 1. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 04, 20140 comments
Windows 8 finally overtook Windows XP in global Internet usage in August, more than four months after Microsoft stopped supporting the aging operating system, according to Web site analytics company StatCounter.
In figures released Tuesday, StatCounter Global Stats put the combined worldwide share for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 at 14 percent, compared with 12.9 percent for Windows XP (see Figure 1). Microsoft put a stop to paid support for Windows XP on April 8. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 02, 20140 comments
It looks like boardroom politics just got simplified for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
As we noted back in April, the Microsoft boardroom had the potential to become a very disharmonious place. For a long time, Bill Gates was revered in tech circles for exercising near total control over the Microsoft board. A key element of the most recent era of the Microsoft board was Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer seeing eye to eye on most things, and presenting a unified front of the two largest shareholders. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 21, 20140 comments
The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group's new No. 2 may be new to WPG and to most Microsoft partners, but it's not Gavriella Schuster's first time building programs for the Microsoft channel.
Microsoft global channel chief Phil Sorgen named Schuster in May to the newly created role of general manager of Worldwide Partner Programs. The job combines the titles held by two formerly high-ranking and long-serving Microsoft partner executives -- Julie Bennani, general manager of the Microsoft Partner Network, and Karl Noakes, senior director of Worldwide Partner Marketing and Communications. After a brief transition period, both Bennani and Noakes left Microsoft, according to their LinkedIn profiles. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 20, 20140 comments
Partners who depend on Microsoft field representatives to help close sales or to access Microsoft resources and benefits can often help themselves by knowing the Microsoft employees' incentives.
As explained in two recent Both Sides columns, "What Gaps Does Microsoft Want Partners To Fill?" and "How To Motivate Microsoft To Close Your Opportunities," the Microsoft field tends to be motivated by what's commonly known as the scorecard. More specifically, Microsoft refers to two specific targets -- Revenue-Based Incentives (RBI) and Commitment-Based Incentives (CBI). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 18, 20140 comments
Microsoft this week removed training from the requirements of gold and silver competencies for partners focused on certain Dynamics products.
The move is a major reversal for Microsoft's Dynamics organization, which spent the last few years ratcheting up training and other requirements in a way that strained the resources of smaller Dynamics partner organizations. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 14, 20140 comments
Four months after rebranding itself as an "IT management cloud company," Kaseya acquired a security company that will provide the foundation for a new identity management as a service (IDaaS) offering.
Kaseya on Tuesday announced the acquisition of Scorpion Software, a Chilliwack, British Columbia company that sells password solutions for two-factor authentication, single sign-on and password management. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 12, 20140 comments
The addition of the first three cloud competencies to the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) on Sept. 29 will come with a twist.
"When a customer achieves the gold competency level, we will provide them with account management. We've never made that commitment before," Gavriella Schuster, general manager of worldwide partner marketing and programs at Microsoft, said in an interview with RCP. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 25, 20140 comments
For the second year, Redmond Channel Partner magazine has teamed with Revenue Rocket Consulting Group to award IT services companies with unique business strategies that are resulting in sustained growth.
Today we're pleased to announce the three winners of our second annual award: Concurrency Inc., a multi-competency Microsoft infrastructure solution provider based in Milwaukee, Wis.; HMB Inc., a business technology services firm in Columbus, Ohio; and PowerObjects, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM specialist based in Minneapolis, Minn. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 11, 20140 comments