Partners can expect less blue-sky transformation and more down-to-earth optimization when it comes to the programs and incentives Microsoft presents for fiscal 2021.
When Microsoft unofficially kicks off its 2021 fiscal year in July with the Inspire partner conference, the message will be shaped by COVID-19. On a surface level, that's because the live event in Las Vegas was canceled due to the novel coronavirus and replaced with a virtual event.
On a deeper level, all the programs, products and incentives are re-ordered, re-oriented and re-prioritized by the public health and economic changes forced by COVID-19.
"We're completely adjusting what our fiscal year '21 plans were to focus on what we see [for the] recovery," said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of the Microsoft One Commercial Partner program, in an interview with RCP.
For anyone who has tracked Microsoft's communication to partners over the last few years, the messaging will be a notable shift. Out, or at least sharply de-emphasized, will be the talk of digital transformation and the charts about nearly $2 trillion in market opportunity. In will be discussions of short-term opportunities around remote work and longer-term focuses on operations optimization.
Schuster provided the detail on 2021 priorities as she was providing her "State of the Channel" update. Normally that discussion about the calendar year ahead is delivered in late January. The significant public health and business disruptions caused by the global pandemic pushed that annual update back by two months.
"Customers are going to be focused on cost savings. They're going to have to tighten up and figure out what's really important and how they drive cost savings and operations optimization in their business."
Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft One Commercial Partner
As Microsoft has monitored the effect of global events on business and the channel and tried to forecast what businesses will need in the aftermath, digital transformation-related initiatives will take a back seat.
"Some of the things like long-term application modernization, which was on our roadmap, is probably not the thing customers are going to be spending their time on," Schuster said.
Spending now and for the first few months of Microsoft's fiscal year are all about getting through the current moment.
"The good news is that, directionally, a lot of the things that we had been investing in with our partners over the last two years around worker productivity, remote work, around security, around business continuity -- a lot of those things have been very helpful right now, and so our partners have been able to jump in with a lot of offers and a lot of things that they'd already been doing and just do more of them," she said.
With worldwide economies facing a severe recession and many questions about how long it will last, Microsoft expects partners to be selling into a very different reality in the second half of calendar 2020 and into next year.
"Customers are going to be focused on cost savings," Schuster said flatly. "They're going to have to tighten up and figure out what's really important and how they drive cost savings and operations optimization in their business. So we're prioritizing for our fiscal year '21 things that we believe will deliver cost optimization for customers."
What that means for specific initiatives will depend in the nuances of markets. While application modernization will get less emphasis, for example, a related initiative around eliminating datacenters may continue.
"We were already working with many customers on getting out of their own datacenters. I actually think that may be something that accelerates, because the cost of real estate is a real drain on their P&L," she said.
One area Microsoft is watching especially closely is the health of its partners focused on small and medium-sized businesses. The SMB customer sector is struggling the most, is near the back of the line for government assistance programs worldwide, and is 100 percent partner-served in the Microsoft channel.
"We're looking at how do we fortify those partners that service our SMB customers," Schuster said. "Co-op funds generally go 70 percent to events, and they're not going to be able to run events. What would they do? And how would you structurally change the programs to support them to do the things that they're going to need to do now? It's things like assessments. Many of our SMB partners had run those assessments on-site. We converted several of those to be virtual assessments, and we're looking at how we convert all customer assessments to virtual."
Across the Microsoft Partner Network, Microsoft is working on several changes to programs and tools in the run-up to FY '21. The company provided a few hints in a blog post, including new options to differentiate skills and expertise through new competencies and advanced specializations, new reward models that emphasize customer results, on-demand support, broader access to the co-selling programs, and continuing enhancements to the new Partner Center.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 14, 20200 comments
As partners scramble to meet urgent priorities in the face of the public health and economic crisis of the coronavirus, Microsoft took steps this month to remove its Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) program requirements from their growing to-do lists.
"We've heard from many partners that it's challenging to meet requirements and renew existing competencies in the current climate," Microsoft One Commercial Partner Corporate Vice President Gavriella Schuster said in a blog post.
In her second major post on COVID-19, Schuster outlined new extended deadlines for Microsoft competencies, Azure Expert MSP, Azure advanced specializations, Cloud Business Applications scoring and Microsoft Partner Agreement enforcement. Schuster also announced a Teams-related incentive and a major effort to move training, exams and certifications online.
The earlier blog post focused on resources for partners and their customers related to remote work.
The change that should remove a headache for the largest number of Microsoft partners is the competency extension. "To help you focus on supporting your customers, if your competency anniversary date is between January 1 and June 30, 2020, we are extending your existing competency or competencies through your next anniversary date in 2021," Schuster said. Partners will need to go to the Partner Center to qualify for the extension. Information on what exactly partners will need to do was not immediately available.
Azure Expert MSP, an elite set of partners who must meet a more involved set of requirements than competency partners, will also see a relaxing of requirements that is already extended through the end of the calendar year. A scheduled increase in the Azure Consumed Revenue (ACR) requirement has also been extended.
Similarly, partners with Azure advanced specializations with renewal dates before Dec. 31 of this year will have a program anniversary date extension until June 30, 2021. Those specializations include Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure, Linux and Open Source Database Migration to Microsoft Azure, Data Warehouse Migration to Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure, Modernization of Web Applications to Microsoft Azure and SAP on Microsoft Azure.
On one specific competency, the Dynamics 365 solutions-focused Cloud Business Applications, Microsoft is delaying a major new change in the way partners earn the silver or gold badge. With Cloud Business Applications, Microsoft is introducing a comprehensive partner scoring mechanism called the Partner Contribution Indicators (PCI) score. It takes into account things like new customer revenue, new customer additions, new large-scale deployments, growth in monthly active users and employee certifications. Under PCI, partners scoring 60 to 79 meet requirements for silver, and those scoring 80 to 100 earn gold. The PCI score had been scheduled to go into effect on Oct. 1. Now, Microsoft has pushed it back six months to April 1, 2021.
Microsoft is also postponing enforcement of the Microsoft Partner Agreement, which had been scheduled to take effect this month. Under the enforcement phase, partners who had not accepted the agreement would no longer be able to transact. Microsoft has not provided a new date for enforcement to begin.
In the midst of an explosion in Teams usage for all the newly remote workers, a Teams incentive is being expanded for partners. From now through Sept. 30, new or expanded incentives are available to non-FastTrack partners and the lowest qualified entitlement level for FastTrack partners.
In an acknowledgment that partners can no longer do in-person training, visit test sites for exams or visit customers online, Schuster detailed a number of expansions of virtual resources. "We're increasing the number of digital testing centers so certification exams can be done at home, waiving rescheduling fees and extending exam voucher expiration dates," Schuster said. "We are moving hundreds of in-person technical training sessions to virtual platforms so that partners can continue to receive specialized training from local subject matter experts and trainers."
Additionally, partners with advisory hours through competencies or Action Pack can get remote help closing deals from Partner Technical Services, Schuster noted.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 07, 20200 comments
Bill Gates has waded into the ongoing discussion over how the United States can curb the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic without sacrificing the health of its citizens.
On one side are those urging a massive public health response to save millions of people from death; on the other are those looking for less extreme measures to soften the unprecedented economic hardship that the shutdowns, self-isolation and social distancing are causing.
Gates occupies a unique vantage point in this debate. At Microsoft, Gates built a fortune that has ranked him as the first or second wealthiest person in the world for decades, and saw him move in the most elite financial circles. And since 2000, he and his wife have operated the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charity. Through the foundation, Gates has made himself one of the foremost experts on global health issues and has been raising concerns about pandemics for years.
Thursday marked something of a flashpoint in the debate. The number of cases of COVID-19 in the United States surpassed the total in China, making the United States the country with the most cases of the disease in the world. On the same day, nearly 3.28 million workers sought unemployment benefits, smashing previous weekly records.
Pushing hard to relax even the patchwork shutdowns enacted by various state and local governments so far, President Trump on Wednesday said he hoped to see America "roaring" back to business around Easter, April 12. A Trump letter to governors on Thursday also promised a plan to classify individual counties into three risk levels and set response levels accordingly.
In a lengthy town hall-style interview on CNN Thursday night, Gates came down squarely on the side of the "tough medicine" of a robust public health response to what he termed a "terrible pandemic." Gates called for a national shutdown and argued that it needed to last six to 10 weeks.
"What's going on here is mind-blowing. Never in my lifetime have we had to change our behavior and had this drastic effect on the economy in order to save lives," Gates told CNN town hall hosts Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
"There are people who wish we didn't have to do that. That is fully understandable. This is some very tough medicine. But it's better to take the economic problem, where the economy can come back, than to allow it to spread throughout the country and take millions of deaths as the price that we have to pay here," Gates said.
The math doesn't add up for partial shutdowns, different measures for different counties or ending the shutdown before late May or early June, Gates argued.
"Having states go with different things or thinking you can do it county by county, that will not work. Cases will be exponentially growing anywhere you don't have a serious shutdown," he said. With inconsistent testing, porous county borders and a coronavirus that spreads by 33 percent per day, a seemingly low-risk county can jump quickly from 100 cases to thousands then tens of thousands.
Asked how long he expected to be at home with his family, Gates said, "There is some uncertainty about this, but my view has been that through May, unfortunately, the schools are not likely to come back for this...school year. That's about the range, late May, early June, that we'll probably have to be like this."
One of the challenges of a complete shutdown is that its effectiveness will keep cases down, and create temptation to lift the restrictions. Aside from the lives saved, however, a major upside of a six- to 10-week shutdown is the ability to do it once.
"I do see it coming to an end, and if we do it properly we'll only be shut down, in the U.S., for that one period of time," Gates said.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 27, 20200 comments
Due to concerns over COVID-19, Microsoft canceled the in-person portion of its massive annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, which had been scheduled for Las Vegas from July 19-23.
Early registration had been scheduled to open Tuesday.
"The safety of our community is a top priority. In light of health safety recommendations from public health authorities, we will not be holding Microsoft Inspire 2020 as an in-person event. We are exploring alternative ways to bring our partner community together to connect and learn. Stay tuned for more details to come," Microsoft said in a statement posted Monday night. The statement was attached to the top of Channel Chief Gavriella Schuster's Feb. 20 blog post previewing the conference.
Inspire is a massive conference. The show regularly draws 10,000 to 15,000 attendees with roughly half of them traveling from all around the world to be there. Microsoft executives giving keynote speeches in 2019 included CEO Satya Nadella, President Brad Smith, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Business Judson Althoff and Schuster, whose formal title is corporate vice president for One Commercial Partner.
While Microsoft has canceled live portions of other conferences, such as Microsoft Build, the Inspire move is doubly significant. With a start time in the second half of July, it's one of the later technology conferences to be canceled so far.
Additionally, Inspire's emphasis on helping partners to network with each other, with vendors and with Microsoft, is one of the most valuable aspects of the show. Due to the networking focus, it will be a difficult experience to replicate virtually.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 24, 20200 comments
Way more people are kicking the tires of Microsoft Teams worldwide as the coronavirus forces people to work from the isolation of their homes as a public health measure.
"We have seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users, a figure that has grown by 12 million in just the last seven days," reported Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, in a blog post Thursday.
Microsoft defines daily active usage as users doing something on purpose on a desktop, mobile or Web client in a 24-hour period. The definition doesn't include auto boots, minimizing a screen or closing the app.
The daily active usage figure is up from 20 million daily active users in November.
The recent increase is hardly surprising for an application that's included as the default collaboration software in many of the Office 365 SKUs that customers are already paying for. The global spike in remote workers and their employers' initiatives to use a tool they have on hand for presence, chat and meetings is converting a "shelfware" component of Office 365 into a vital tool for staying in touch.
Many of Teams' collaboration competitors like Slack, Zoom, Cisco WebEx and RingCentral are reporting increased demand, although Microsoft's unique scale with Office 365, and Teams' inclusion as part of the package, gives it a huge base to build on.
"We believe that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work will be a turning point in how we work and learn," said Spataro, who also noted that users generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes each day this week on Teams.
Scott Paul, senior director for the Microsoft Alliance at AppRiver, a major Microsoft cloud solution provider (CSP) partner company, said earlier this week that Teams would probably be a rare bright spot for Microsoft's business in the next few months. "Microsoft's investments in teamwork and collaboration technologies like Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, and Surface Hub could potentially mean some incremental volume as businesses get serious about fewer meetings and less travel," Paul said. "On the other hand, global economic weakness will likely translate to less hiring and sluggish PC and server sales."
Similarly, RCP columnist Per Werngren encouraged partners to leverage their Teams subscriptions internally as one of a few key steps in confronting the business challenges of the coronavirus. "By leading by example, you will probably also seal some new business related to Teams," Werngren wrote.
Also this week, Microsoft channel chief Gavriella Schuster highlighted Teams in a blog post detailing partner resources around COVID-19. "We recommend that partners lead with the CSP Trial, as this is the only experience that partners can initiate and manage," Schuster wrote. She also noted that Microsoft FastTrack is available to help organizations get set up for remote work.
The large bump in usage for Teams has not been without its problems. The @MSFT365Status Twitter account reported problems with Teams chat on Monday and Tuesday of this week. "We investigated and resolved an issue with the Teams chat service that affected some of our users in the Europe region. We determined this to be a caching issue within a component of our infrastructure," the company said on the Twitter account Tuesday morning.
Amid the increasing interest in Teams, Spataro's blog touted several features that are coming later this year, including real-time noise suppression, a "raise hand" feature for getting attention in a large group video meeting, offline/low-bandwidth support and new devices.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 19, 20200 comments
Microsoft followed Apple and many other retailers in shutting down all Microsoft Store locations until further notice in an attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus.
"With today's recommendation from the United States government to not socially gather in groups of more than 10 people, we will be temporarily closing Microsoft Store locations -- effective immediately," wrote David Porter, corporate vice president, Microsoft Store, in a letter to customers and the community e-mailed Monday night.
"We are closing all Microsoft Store locations to help protect the health and safety of our customers and our employees. During this unprecedented time, the best way we can serve you is to do everything we can to help minimize the risk of the virus spreading," Porter wrote.
According to the Microsoft Store locations homepage, Microsoft operates 73 stores in the United States, seven in Canada and one each in Australia, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom.
The digital version of the Microsoft Store remains open and employees are staffing the support.microsoft.com site, as well.
The move follows Microsoft's decision March 4 to encourage employees in the Seattle and San Francisco areas to work from home.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 17, 20200 comments
One provider of a key component of remote work is offering temporary free licenses for new customers as employers throughout the United States encourage their employees to stay home in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Axcient, a provider of availability and security solutions sold through managed service providers, is making Anchor licenses free for new customers through June, meaning the offer could last for up to three months.
Anchor is Axcient's business-oriented cloud file storage solution. Data in the Anchor system is accessible without a VPN connection and includes continuous backup and support for point-in-time restore.
"Due to the coronavirus pandemic, businesses around the country are implementing a remote workforce, and MSPs are helping enable that transition," Axcient CEO David Bennett said in a statement Monday. "At Axcient, we want to do everything we can to support our partner community, especially during this time of crisis."
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 16, 20200 comments
To address public safety concerns over the coronavirus, Microsoft is turning its biggest developer conference of the year into an online event.
The company this week announced it is cancelling the in-person portion of Microsoft Build, which had been scheduled for May 19-21 in Seattle. There were about 6,000 attendees at the show in 2019, and Microsoft regularly uses the event to launch major products, services, features and initiatives.
By holding the event online, Microsoft is likely to still treat the event as a major venue for news.
"The safety of our community is a top priority. In light of the health safety recommendations for Washington State, we will deliver our annual Microsoft Build event for developers as a digital event, in lieu of an in-person event," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
"We look forward to bringing together our community of developers in this new virtual format to learn, connect and code together. Stay tuned for more details to come."
The conference is one of dozens of technology events and countless other public events from parades to meetings to sports tournaments and professional sports seasons to be cancelled as cases of COVID-19 mount worldwide.
Keep up to date on all the Microsoft-related technology conferences with RCP's conference calendar.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 13, 20200 comments
Microsoft and an international consortium of partners this week launched a counterstrike against Necurs, a massive botnet that Microsoft had been observing and analyzing for nearly eight years.
Botnets are packs of hundreds, thousands or millions of PCs, sometimes called zombies, that have been infected with malware and are under the command and control of malicious actors. Think of your parents' under-patched and out-of-support Windows 7 computer infected with a Trojan that enlists that computer in various nefarious schemes. The zombie PC's owner may notice nothing at all, or sometimes suspect a decline in performance. According to Microsoft, Necurs has had a role in a lot of those nefarious schemes.
Believed to be controlled by criminals in Russia, the botnet is also thought to have been used directly by its owners, as well as rented out as a botnet-as-a-service for various online skullduggery. One of its highest-profile roles was aiding in distribution of the GameOver Zeus banking trojan.
In the years since it first came to the attention of security researchers in 2012, the network has infected as many as 9 million computers globally. It has left its nasty digital fingerprints on pump-and-dump stock scams, fake pharmaceutical spam, Russian dating scams, Internet-based computer attacks, credential theft schemes, data theft attempts, cryptomining and, of course, ransomware. While botnets can be a key component of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and Necurs has DDoS capabilities, Microsoft says that particular use for the botnet has not been documented.
Detailing what a big deal Necurs represents is a blog post from BitSight, a cyber risk management platform provider that worked closely with Microsoft on the Necurs problem. "From 2016 to 2019, it was the most prominent method to deliver spam and malware by criminals and was responsible for 90% of the malware spread by email worldwide," BitSight alleged.
In a sign of the complexity and length of the effort against Necurs, BitSight and Microsoft have been collaborating since 2017 to understand technical aspects of the botnet. That effort included techniques such as reverse engineering, malware analysis, module updates, infection telemetry, command and control updates, and forensic analysis, BitSight said.
In parallel with the technical work, Microsoft coordinated an international campaign involving the courts, other tech companies, ISPs, domain registries, government computer emergency response teams and law enforcement.
To prepare for the operational phase, Microsoft on March 5 got an order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. That order allowed Microsoft to take over the systems inside the United States that are used by Necurs for malware distribution and computer infections.
Microsoft and its partners crafted a sophisticated response built on the technical specifics of the Necurs botnet. Having studied the algorithm that Necurs uses to generate new domains, Microsoft used its considerable technical resources to jump ahead of the botnet. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months," wrote Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president for customer security and trust, in a blog post.
The response then leveraged Microsoft's web of global relationships with partner companies worldwide. "Microsoft reported these domains to their respective registries in countries around the world so the websites can be blocked and thus prevented from becoming part of the Necurs infrastructure," Burt said.
The main counterstrike was launched Tuesday from what a detailed New York Times account described as an "eerily empty Microsoft campus" due to most workers having been ordered home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
"By taking control of existing websites and inhibiting the ability to register new ones, we have significantly disrupted the botnet," Burt said. "Microsoft is also taking the additional step of partnering with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and others around the world to rid their customers' computers of malware associated with the Necurs botnet."
As a concrete step, Microsoft is pointing users to the Microsoft Safety Scanner to help wipe their computers of malware, including Necurs.
While the Necurs botnet was massive, and Microsoft's effort to attack it required substantial resources, Microsoft executives were resigned that any drops in spam, malware and cyberattacks would be temporary at best. In the NYT article, executives described the effort -- sadly and accurately -- as a game of whack-a-mole.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 11, 20200 comments
Microsoft has added a new office to the C-suite.
Eric Horvitz has been named Chief Scientific Officer, a new job title at Microsoft. The company has recently been expanding beyond its software legacy -- where artificial intelligence is a natural fit -- to more physical areas of science, such as quantum computing, health care and the new corporate initiative to become carbon negative.
"The focus of the chief scientist position is to provide cross-company leadership on advances and trends related to scientific matters and on important issues and opportunities rising at the intersection of science, technology and society," Horvitz said in a post on LinkedIn this week. "I'm looking forward to the chance to more deeply shape our company's activities, focus of attention, investments, and understandings of how today's efforts and near-term plans relate to trends -- and potential surprises -- on the horizon."
Horvitz said his office will focus on AI principles, applications and directions, as well as biology, medical informatics, physics, sustainability, economics, social sciences and behavioral sciences. Horvitz, who joined Microsoft in a research role in 1993, was most recently in charge of Microsoft Research Labs.
Peter Lee will take over the lab role in addition to his work as corporate vice president for Microsoft Healthcare, which may hint at more collaboration between Microsoft Research and the company's health care initiatives.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 11, 20200 comments
Fears over the coronavirus and its effect on global supply chains will result in a leaner-than-expected year for the PC and smartphone markets, according to IDC.
The Framingham, Mass.-based research firm slashed forecasts last week for both PC shipments and smartphones. It now projects a 9 percent decline for the PC market in 2020, with total shipments reaching 374.2 million for the full year.
The big drops in shipments are expected in the first half of the year, with a decline of a little over 8 percent in Q1 and nearly 13 percent in Q2.
"We have already forgone nearly a month of production given the two-week extension to the Lunar New Year break and we expect the road to recovery for China's supply chain to be long with a slow trickle of labor back to factories in impacted provinces until May when the weather improves," said Linn Huang, an IDC research vice president, in a statement. "Many critical components such as panels, touch sensors, and printed circuit boards come out of these impacted regions, which will cause a supply crunch heading into Q2."
IDC's definition for PCs includes desktops, notebooks, workstations and tablets. Before the coronavirus appeared, IDC was already expecting a difficult year for PCs due to difficult comparisons against last year, when the Windows 7 replacement cycle boosted PC sales.
Also last week, IDC released revised forecasts for smartphone shipments in 2020. The firm had previously expected a better year for smartphones. Now, however, the supply chain issues along with potential drops in demand in the world's largest smartphone market of China due to prevalence of the coronavirus there are causing IDC to anticipate a decline of more than 2 percent in 2020. Shipment volumes are expected to reach around 1.3 billion units for the full year.
While IDC expects the PC market to work its way slowly out this slump, the firm is more bullish on the smartphone market, which should benefit from a 5G tailwind in 2021.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 02, 20200 comments
Microsoft's third-quarter results will likely take a hit from the global coronavirus emergency and its impact on the supply chain, Microsoft warned investors this week.
The warning comes less than one month after Microsoft's Q2 earnings results, in which surprisingly strong demand for Windows, partly driven by end-of-support deadlines, helped the company exceed Wall Street expectations.
Even in its Q2 earnings call, however, Microsoft was already priming investors for a potential effect from the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, which arose in Wuhan and has led to mass quarantines and industrial shutdowns in China. At the time, Microsoft provided what it called a wider-than-usual range of quarterly revenue guidance of $10.75 billion to $11.15 billion for the More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows and Surface.
"Although we see strong Windows demand in line with our expectations, the supply chain is returning to normal operations at a slower pace than anticipated at the time of our Q2 earnings call," Microsoft said in its statement Wednesday. "As a result, for the third quarter of fiscal year 2020, we do not expect to meet our More Personal Computing segment guidance as Windows OEM and Surface are more negatively impacted than previously anticipated."
Microsoft did not provide a new range for the current quarter, which runs through the end of March. Revenues for other business units are not expected to be affected.
In the large stock market losses earlier in the week, Microsoft shares declined, but at a slightly lower rate. In extended trading after the announcement, Microsoft shares dropped a further 2%. Also following Microsoft's announcement, chipmaker Intel's shares declined about 1% and PC maker Dell's shares fell by about the same amount.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 27, 20200 comments