- Stay on top of changes to the Microsoft Partner Network with RCP's MPN Roadmap.
Microsoft is pushing back on the start date for the new country qualification requirements for partner competencies.
The basic idea is that partners with practices in more than one country will have to earn their competency in every country they want to claim the competency in.
So, for example, a partner who wants to claim a Small Business gold competency in both the United States and the United Kingdom must have the full complement of Microsoft Certified Professionals, customer case studies, and people passing the required sales and licensing exams in both countries.
When Microsoft Partner Network General Manager Julie Bennani originally announced the change in May, the plan was to roll out the country qualification requirements in October. A document distributed in July around the time of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference pushed the date back to January 2014.
Now a Microsoft spokesperson says the country qualifications won't take effect until the end of Microsoft's fiscal year 2014, which means the end of June 2014.
Companies on the RCP "Most Competent Partner" list, most of whom have a dozen or more competencies with operations in multiple countries, and other large partner organizations have to be breathing a sigh of relief at the extension.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 31, 20130 comments
A week after almost giving away Microsoft Surface RTs to partners at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Microsoft has formally dropped the price for all of its consumer-oriented productivity tablets running Windows RT by $150.
A price cut appeared for all four Surface RT models on Sunday:
- The 32GB model is now $349, down from $499 (a 30 percent cut).
- The 64GB model is now $449, down from $699 (a 21 percent cut).
- The 32GB model with the black Touch Cover is now $449, down from $599 (a 25 percent cut).
- The 64GB model with the black Touch Cover is now $549, down from $699 (a 21 percent cut).
The Microsoft Surface Pro, which runs a full version of Windows 8 Pro rather than the limited-functionality Windows RT OS, is not marked down for now. Prices for that tablet remain $899 for the 64GB model and $999 for the 128GB model.
At WPC, Microsoft offered partner attendees the chance to buy the 64GB Surface RT with the black Touch Cover for $100, the 128GB Surface Pro for $400 or both for $500. Microsoft offered a similar deal to attendees of its TechEd conference, and gave Surfaces away to developer attendees of Build.
During the WPC, Microsoft officials said more than 16,000 Surfaces had sold by Wednesday morning with two full days of the conference to go.
Analysts at IDC have said Surface has sold about 900,000 units in each of the last two quarters, which are relatively weak figures in the hyper-growth tablet market. The price cuts come just as Microsoft is releasing an aggressive series of commercials comparing Windows 8-based tablets and iPad.
The new Surface RT prices give Microsoft a much stronger story against the full-sized Apple iPad on price. The 16GB iPad starts at $499, which is the same price as Surface with a keyboard and double the storage, although Windows RT gobbles up much more of the internal storage than iOS.
Game on or just clearing inventory ahead of Surface 2/Surface Plus? Leave your thoughts below or drop me a line at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20130 comments
- Stay up-to-date on the latest news from WPC here.
Once again, Scott live-Tweeted his way through today's Worldwide Partner Conference keynote, which featured the always-entertaining Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO. Follow Scott @scottbekker and visit our WPC 2013 portal page here to stay on top of all the conference happenings.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 10, 20130 comments
Earlier this year, Redmond Channel Partner magazine teamed with Revenue Rocket Consulting Group to create an award for IT services companies with unique business strategies that are resulting in sustained growth.
Today we're pleased to announce the three winners of our inaugural award: Axis Group, LLC, a business intelligence (BI) solutions provider for mid-market and Global 1000 companies; Envision LLC, a provider of custom applications development, integration services, software product and staffing services; and Intellinet Corporation, an IT Management as a Service (MaaS) company, specializing in network management, cloud innovation and information technology services.
The award recognizes the companies for their innovative business strategies that resulted in sustained growth over a three-year period, from 2010 through 2012.
The award sought applications from U.S.-based IT services firms with annual revenues between $5 and $75 million.
Stay tuned for the October issue of RCP when we'll profile the winners and tell their inspiring growth stories.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20130 comments
- Stay up-to-date on the latest news from WPC here.
Steve Ballmer paused in Microsoft's flurry of datacenter construction to assess Microsoft's position in the race among the megavendors investing in scaled public cloud infrastructure.
Speaking at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Monday in Houston, Ballmer provided some rare context on the size of Microsoft's server farms and how big he thinks the company's main competitors have gotten.
"We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure," said Ballmer, noting that the build-out started in support of the Bing and Office 365 services, which provided institutional knowledge that is being built into Azure server farms.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at Monday's WPC keynote. (Source: Microsoft)
Ballmer only lays claim to second place from those billions of dollars in capital expenditures that funded datacenters all over the world. "Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller," he said.
The rest of the field is pretty limited -- at least at the Google-Microsoft-Amazon order of magnitude, Ballmer suggested. "You get Yahoo and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less," he said.
Like any good businessman, Ballmer then rephrased the issue to make the case that Microsoft is still No. 1 even if it's No. 2.
"The number of companies that are at the same time seriously investing in the private cloud, which is not going away, and in these hybrid clouds is really just one and that's us," he said.
More News and Analysis from WPC 2013:
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20130 comments
- Stay up-to-date on the latest news from WPC here.
In yet another sign of Microsoft's newfound commitment to aesthetics, the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) will add a competency in User Experience Design in January.
MPN competencies are badges that partners can earn to demonstrate their expertise in a given practice area. Microsoft currently has 25 competencies, each with either a silver or gold level. Achieving a competency requires a partner to employ professionals with relevant certifications, pay a joining fee, complete other training and, in some cases, make revenue commitments.
Tami Reller, Microsoft's chief marketing officer and chief financial officer for Windows, announced the User Experience Design competency during her keynote Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston.
Microsoft's Tami Reller speaking at Monday's WPC keynote. (Source: Microsoft)
"Apps that are better designed, they absolutely achieve better ratings in the Windows Store, and even equally as important, they are more engaging for customers, and they deliver greater monetization opportunities," Reller said. "The whole idea behind this competency is to give you the best way to train your designers and to get recognized for your expertise with the Microsoft design language and user experience for app building."
Microsoft first began gaining notice for its design work with the Windows Phone launch several years ago, and many of the design principles behind the Windows Phone UI and that platform's apps influenced the design of Windows 8.
In a blog posting about the new competency, Orlando O'Neill, product marketing manager for Windows Apps, reinforced Microsoft's current attitude toward design.
"In the past few years, we've focused on improving the user experience and design of our platforms, making them more intuitive, familiar and enjoyable to engage with. Our point of view is embodied in the Microsoft design language: we sweat the details of every pixel, we let the OS fade into the background while your ideas and content come to the fore, and we believe in presenting content and controls in a way that is authentically digital," O'Neill wrote. "We firmly believe that user experience and design are going to be the next big differentiators for Microsoft and, more importantly, for the apps and experiences that you build for your customers."
While Reller didn't say so, Microsoft has been increasingly steering incentive money through Gold Competency partners in recent years, and Microsoft's ongoing efforts to expand the number of Windows Store apps are likely to mean more MDF funds and other incentives for partners with the competency than those without.
More News and Analysis from WPC 2013:
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20130 comments
- Stay up-to-date on the latest news from WPC here.
RCP Editor in Chief Scott Bekker is in Houston this week for Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference. He live-Tweeted all through Monday's opening keynote -- the high points are below. Stay up-to-date on all WPC-related news and impressions by following Scott at @scottbekker and bookmarking our WPC 2013 page here.
More News and Analysis from WPC 2013:
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 08, 20130 comments
- Stay up-to-date on the latest news from WPC here.
Microsoft's Server and Tools Business on Monday rolled out a series of technology previews and incentives aimed at making Microsoft's cloud and big data offerings more robust and easy for businesses to use.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft STB president, announced the cloud offerings during a keynote Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston and in a blog post.
"The technology to help our partners realize the opportunities in cloud computing and big data is here and the time to collectively help our customers embrace these mega trends is now," Nadella wrote in his blog entry.
Nadella provided details on five programs:
Power BI for Office 365 got the biggest crowd reaction at WPC, especially after an entertaining demo by Microsoft Technical Fellow Amir Netz, who pulled visual data on the comparative popularity of different music stars over the decades and breathlessly narrated the results as if it were a horse race.
Nadella described Power BI as "our new self-service business intelligence (BI) solution that combines the data analysis and visualization capabilities of Excel with the power of collaboration, scale and trusted cloud environment of Office 365."
Power BI requires an IT department or partner to prepare data sets, such as company financial data or CRM data, and place them in a Data Catalog, which is hosted in SharePoint Online. IT can configure how frequently the data is updated. Users can then import that internal data and combine it with public data prepared by Microsoft from sources such as Wikipedia.
Once they've found data from the catalog, end users can use Excel to connect data from different sources and analyze it.
Power BI also allows the creation of BI Sites, where companies can set up dedicated workspaces for business intelligence projects. Mobile apps will allow for access to those BI sites from iPads or Windows 8 devices. Another feature, called Q&A, includes a natural language query experience in which users ask questions of the data in a search box and get back answers in a table, graph or map, depending on how Power BI interprets the question.
[Click on image for larger view.] Q&A in Power BI. (Source: Microsoft)
Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, highlighted Power BI as a huge partner opportunity. "With the launch of Power BI for Office 365, partners will be able to bring powerful BI solutions to SMBs," Roskill said.
A public preview of Power BI for Office 365 will be available later this summer. Microsoft has not released pricing for the production version, but officials say it will be a per-user, per-month model.
A Premium offer for Windows Azure SQL Database will offer dedicated capacity "for more powerful and predictable performance from Azure databases," Nadella said.
"One of the challenges with [Windows Azure] SQL is what I'll call noisy neighbors," said Eron Kelly, general manager of SQL Server Product Marketing, in an interview. "With the new premium version, we're locking down and dedicating a certain amount of capacity -- bandwidth and CPU."
The premium Platform as a Service database will debut as a preview toward the end of July. Once in production, customers will pay an additional fee per core along with the standard per-gigabyte price of SQL Azure. The per-core price will be disclosed later.
New Windows Azure Active Directory capabilities will extend AD management to third-party cloud services, making it possible for organizations to control employee accounts for cloud services used as part of their job. While Microsoft is working with some of the biggest Software as a Service vendors to integrate their services with Azure AD, the system is also extensible so ISVs and other third parties can create their own integrations.
Cloud OS Accelerate is an incentive program to encourage new private and hybrid cloud solutions for customers. A $100 million combined investment in incentives for Cloud OS Accelerate will be made by Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell.
A Windows Intune offer will go into effect Oct. 1 for discounting Microsoft's cloud management suite. Customers who buy Windows Intune as part of the Office 365 or CAL suite will get a 30 percent discount, Microsoft officials said.
More News and Analysis from WPC 2013:
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 08, 20130 comments
Don Mattrick's departure for Zynga could be delaying CEO Steve Ballmer's rumored reorganization plan for Microsoft.
All Things D's Kara Swisher in early June reported, based on anonymous sources, that Ballmer was in the midst of a major "devices and services"-themed reorganization. According to Swisher's original report and a late June update, Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, seemed slated for a major role in the executive shuffle, which Swisher reported might come as soon as July 1.
On July 1, however, Microsoft released a company memo from Ballmer about Mattrick's planned departure to become CEO of the social gaming company, which is best known for FarmVille.
Swisher's reporting had emphasized that the suspected winners in the reorganization would be Satya Nadella, president of the Microsoft Servers and Tools division; Tony Bates, president of Skype; and Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Division.
Bloomberg reporter Dina Bass moved the story forward Wednesday morning with an anonymously sourced story of her own suggesting that Ballmer was considering Mattrick to run hardware engineering, an important post in a devices and services reorganization. Now, according to Bass, that job may go to Windows engineering head Julie Larson-Green, currently a corporate vice president.
The Bloomberg report also has:
- Tony Bates, president of the Skype division, running acquisitions and relationships with software developers and OEM partners.
- Satya Nadella, president of the Server & Tools Business, running cloud computing and products for corporate customers.
- Qi Lu, president of the Online Services Division, running an applications and services engineering unit covering Bing, Office and Skype engineering.
- Tami Reller, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer for Windows, running an overall Microsoft marketing unit.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 03, 20130 comments
Windows 8.1 is coming fast on the heels of Windows 8 -- for a Microsoft update, at least.
Microsoft released a preview of Windows 8.1 yesterday, a scant seven months after the release of Windows 8, with a final version of Windows 8.1 coming as a free upgrade from Windows 8 later this year.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, for one, wanted to make sure the 6,000 developers at Microsoft's Build show, and the 60,000 people watching Build online, took note of that speed.
"If there's not one other message that I reach you with in my opening remarks, it's about the transformation that we are going through as a company to move to an absolutely rapid-release cycle -- rapid release, rapid release," Ballmer said.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on stage at Wednesday's opening Build keynote. (Source: Microsoft)
To be sure, Windows 8.1 is not a Windows-7-to-Windows-8-scale transition, or even a Windows-Vista-to-Windows-7-class update. Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice president of Windows Engineering, defined Windows 8.1 as a refinement that brings about 800 changes to the operating system. The changes, Larson-Green said, "address everything from performance, efficiency, to the look and feel and new features in the product. We designed 8.1 to feel natural [on] everything from the new mini small tablets up to large, powerful work stations." (Click here for more details on the changes in Windows 8.1.)
Even though it's not a lot of feature change on a Microsoft OS scale, it's a lot of updates for Microsoft to jam through an OS release process that used to last about three years.
It's another example of the way Apple, and then Google, have shocked Microsoft into action. Just as the iPad's near-instant-on finally scared Microsoft and its OEM partners into really prioritizing that capability, the fast cycle of iterative feature releases Apple adopted with iOS is finding its way into the Windows release cycle.
Ballmer promised attendees that the release cycle was not a one-time thing, and used the opportunity to make sure Microsoft partners understood their role in the new cycle. "We're certainly going to show you Windows 8.1 today. But you can think of that, in a sense, as the new norm for everything we do," he said. "For Windows releases, in addition to what we're doing with devices through our partners, what we're doing with Azure and Office 365, rapid-release cadence is absolutely fundamental to what we're doing and, frankly, to the way we need to mobilize our ecosystem of hardware and software development partners."
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 27, 20130 comments
Internal rumblings from Microsoft make it sound as if the executive shakeup that CEO Steve Ballmer is rumored to be working on will be more than the usual late-June game of musical chairs.
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, who broke the story of the pending executive shakeup in early June, wrote an update Sunday night suggesting that the "level of worry" is growing among Microsoft executives.
"Ballmer has been making these significant plans with limited consultation with the wider leadership group at the software giant. Instead, he has been working with only a small group of his direct reports and also some Microsoft board members, numerous sources said," Swisher wrote.
She quoted one anonymous source "close to the situation" as saying the reorg has the feel of a "legacy" project for Ballmer: "It's the first time in a long time that it feels like that there will be some major shifts, including some departures."
According to Swisher, Ballmer is likely to unveil the reorg plans to top executives on July 1. In the past, Microsoft has often revealed executive changes in the last few weeks of June as the end of the company's fiscal year approached.
Ballmer reportedly is reorganizing the company around the "devices and services" meme that he broached in a shareholder letter in October. The nuance of that letter's text left Microsoft's position as a software company that produces a few hardware devices unchanged, but emphasized that the software is mostly aimed now at powering devices and increasingly enabling cloud services.
Along those lines, Swisher's reporting has emphasized that the suspected winners in the reorganization will be Satya Nadella, president of the Microsoft Servers and Tools division; Tony Bates, president of Skype; and Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Division.
A big open question since the departure of Windows President Steven Sinofsky in November is where the core Windows business would fall within a devices-and-services structure. Ballmer did little to clarify Windows' direction when he let Sinofsky's departure pass without handing the bureaucratic authority of a presidential title to another executive. Instead he split the job between Tami Reller and Julie Larson-Green.
In an interview with RCP this month, Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, declined to comment on the reorganization rumors. Roskill has been Microsoft's channel chief for three years -- a short tenure compared to his immediate predecessor Allison Watson's eight-year term, but a respectable amount of time compared to Watson's predecessors.
Meanwhile, the speaker lineup for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference keynotes July 8-10 sheds some possible light on the situation, but could obviously be changed in the wake of a reorg. Current keynoters include Ballmer, Roskill, Nadella, Reller, COO Kevin Turner and Worldwide Public Sector Corporate Vice President Laura Ipsen.
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 24, 20130 comments
Microsoft partners attending the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston next month will have a crack at the same cut-rate deal on Microsoft Surface that TechEd attendees got a few weeks ago -- $100 for a Surface RT and $400 for a Surface Pro.
Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, unveiled the offer Thursday on his Channel Chief blog.
"We want to make the Surface easily available to our WPC partners, who tend to be some of the most invested and innovative partners Microsoft has the pleasure of working with. In deep appreciation of our WPC partners and with much excitement for the opportunities we share in devices and services, we are excited to announce a special offer for WPC partner participants," Roskill wrote.
Roskill said that from July 7 through July 11, WPC attendees will be able to buy the Surface RT 64 GB with touch cover for $100 and the Surface Pro 128 GB standalone for $400. By comparison, the Surface RT 64 GB is currently listed in the online Microsoft Store for $500 with a free Touch Cover or Type Cover, while the Surface Pro 128 GB without a cover is currently going for $1,000.
In a nod to the OEM partners who have been unnerved by Microsoft's entry into PC hardware and who will be on hand at WPC, Roskill called their devices "incredible" and said, "In addition to this offer, attendees will be able to see and touch the latest Windows 8 devices and software at our expansive device showcase, customer immersion experience area and device sessions throughout the week."
The similar deals at TechEd in early June led to lines of up to three hours as attendees waited to buy Surfaces.
Aside from the reasons Roskill stated for offering deals on the Surfaces, including getting the devices into the hands of market influencers, Microsoft also reportedly has a new generation of Surfaces nearing launch.
UPDATE (6/24/13): In response to some questions from RCP, Microsoft provided a few additional details about the Surface offer at WPC. For one thing, we confirmed that partners who buy Surfaces at WPC won't be pre-ordering -- they'll be taking possession of them right then and there. Asked about keeping enough Surfaces in stock for a show that drew 16,000 attendees last year, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We have enough inventory to cover all attendees at the show. Point of sales details will be available close to the conference." TechEd attendees we've talked to said that despite the three-hour lines early on, inventory for both the Pro and RT models stayed strong even as the show wound down.
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 20, 20130 comments