When it comes to cloud, Cisco just shifted from acting as an "arms dealer" to becoming a cloud services provider in its own right, according to analysts at Technology Business Research (TBR).
My colleague Jeffrey Schwartz covered Cisco's announcement earlier this week at the networking giant's Las Vegas partner conference. Here's how Jeff described the news:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 27, 20140 comments
Hewlett-Packard President and CEO Meg Whitman is calling for a change in the way HP and its partners relate.
"The New Style of IT requires a new style of partnering," Whitman said in a statement this week from the HP Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas. "Together HP and our partners have become the go-to technology provider for the New Style of IT with industry-leading technology solutions, programs and incentives that help partners drive growth."
What does the new style of IT mean to Whitman?
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 27, 20140 comments
In a week, Microsoft is going to release Office for iPad. Or it won't. It's rumor at this point.
One of the themes for now, however, is the "controversy" that Microsoft would be releasing a touch-first iPad version of Office before releasing a touch-first version of Office for the Surface.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 20, 20140 comments
As part of the Microsoft Hosting Summit, Microsoft released a wealth of detail from a massive customer survey it commissioned about cloud and hosting adoption trends.
The global survey, "Hosting and Cloud Go Mainstream," by 451 Research drew responses from more than 2,000 companies and organizations of all sizes from 11 countries, with more than a third of respondents coming from the United States.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 19, 20140 comments
Microsoft unleashed three major enhancements to OneNote on Monday, most of which are aimed at making the synchronized note-taking platform easier and free to use from more device types.
OneNote for Mac made its debut Monday. While OneNote was originally available as a desktop application for Windows PCs and came with several Office bundles, it never made its way to the Office for Mac side.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 17, 20140 comments
With a month to go to the April 8 support deadline, is Windows XP fading away or hanging on? Depends whose data you look at.
Net Applications reported its data this week, and it shows that through February, Windows XP not only stuck around but gained a little share for the second month in a row. According to Net Applications, Windows XP went from 28.98 percent share of desktop operating systems worldwide in December up to 29.3 percent in January and then 29.53 percent in February. The figures show Windows XP dropping in a stair-step pattern from the high 30 percent range through July, then settling around 31 percent in September and October before dropping into the 29 percent range, where it's stayed the last three months. Despite the impending deadline, there's no evidence of a precipitous drop due to late movers.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 06, 20140 comments
As part of Microsoft Convergence this week in Atlanta, Anya Ciecierski of the ERP Software Blog asked a Microsoft spokesperson for an update on the number of Dynamics customers worldwide by product.
According to the blog, it's a NAV world when it comes to Microsoft's customer base.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 05, 20140 comments
Jon Roskill, former Microsoft worldwide channel chief, is joining SMB-focused cloud ERP vendor Acumatica as CEO.
Acumatica is a fast-growing, channel-focused, 7-year-old company with about 100 employees. It has its headquarters in Kirkland, Wash., with other offices in Washington, D.C., Russia, Mexico and Singapore. Its major products are organized into four suites: Financial Management, Distribution Management, Project Accounting and Customer Management.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 05, 20140 comments
After doing the math on Microsoft's late-January announcement about the new $475 price of the Action Pack (it's a 44 percent increase for solution provider subscribers), I hadn't been back to Diane Golshan's original blog post.
When I posted yesterday that the new Action Pack went live this week, a reader responded to ask if it's too late to renew under the old price. To find the answer (yes, it's too late), I revisited the post by Golshan, who blogs for the U.S. Partner team.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 27, 20140 comments
The latest era in the Action Pack saga began this week.
Microsoft formally changed to one Action Pack in this generation from the previous version, which had been split into two offerings: Action Pack Solution Provider (APSP) and Action Pack Developer & Design (APD&D).
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 26, 20140 comments
As Parallels opens its annual conference on Monday, the company is releasing a new version of its survey about how businesses are using the cloud.
Parallels' user base gives it a remarkably broad, insider view of cloud service usage. While the company itself isn't a household name, its customers are the major telcos and hosting providers of all sizes who use the Parallels platform to provision the cloud services offerings that they resell to businesses worldwide.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 24, 20140 comments
Continuum, the Boston-based vendor of solutions for managed service providers, is taking another run at MSPs who are using backup and recovery solutions from troubled rival Zenith Infotech.
This week, Continuum reiterated a free conversion offer for MSPs using Zenith's backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions to switch to Continuum's competing Vault.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 14, 20140 comments