Microsoft honored several hundred partners for business excellence today with the announcement of the 2013 Partner of the Year Award Winners and Finalists.
There were 139 category winners from 44 global award categories and 95 Country Partner of the Year awards. For those, Microsoft received more than 3,000 nominations.
In a blog post about the winners, Microsoft Channel Chief Jon Roskill said, "From the five cloud technology award categories to the brand new Pre-Sales Technical Specialist category, the winners not only met the needs of our customers, but they helped them meet their business potential."
Roskill called out the appearance of some born-in-the-cloud and other cloud partners. Some of the cloud category winners included Solidsoft (U.K.) for Cloud, Object Consulting (Australia) for Cloud-Enterprise Customers, TechQuarters (U.K.) for Cloud-SMB, eSavvy (Australia) for Microsoft Dynamics Cloud, SkyKick (U.S.) for Start-Up Cloud-Developed Markets, and ISA Technologies (Malaysia) for Start-Up Cloud-Emerging Markets.
There were more non-cloud than cloud categories. Roskill highlighted a few non-cloud winners in his blog:
- The Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year Award, which went to NC4 and 6th Street Consulting for working together on the SAFECOP application for the Tampa Police Department for the 2012 Republican National Convention.
- Public Sector: Health Partner of the Year Award, which went to IN2 from Croatia for the eWaiting and eOrders solution now installed in more than half of the hospitals in that country.
- Learning Partner of the Year Award, which went to Global Knowledge for an application that provides a joint learning experience for in-class and remote students.
The complete list of awards is available here.
Microsoft will hand out the awards at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston this July.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 20, 20130 comments
New smartphone market share numbers from IDC for the first quarter of 2013 show Windows Phone at No. 3, well behind Android and iOS but boasting strong growth.
"Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia," Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, said in a statement. IDC noted that Nokia accounted for 79 percent of all Windows Phone shipments in the quarter.
"Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alternative to Android or iOS," Restivo said.
Android is the undisputed volume king with 162 million units shipped and 75 percent market share. Apple is next with 37 million units and 17 percent share. Those two platforms account for 92 percent of the market.
Leading the rest was Windows Phone with 7 million units shipped for 3.2 percent market share. The growth of Windows Phone compared to the first quarter of 2012 was the best in percentage terms at 133 percent. That looks promising against Apple's 6.6 percent growth, but it is daunting in the face of Android's pace. Even starting from a huge base, Android market share increased by 80 percent.
Holding onto third place will be a challenge for Windows Phone. BlackBerry may have seen a 35 percent drop in shipments to 6.3 percent share, but the original smartphone powerhouse company pumped out a million units of its new BB10 platform in its first quarter of availability.
IDC's market share findings are slightly different from those published a few days earlier by Gartner. Analysts at Gartner put Windows Phone shipments at a little less than 6 million. That 1 million device difference leads to a much different story about Windows Phone in Gartner's analysis. With those numbers, Windows Phone trails BlackBerry for third place -- by 0.1 percentage points of share -- and seems stagnant.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 16, 20130 comments
Microsoft is offering partner advisor incentives of up to 38 percent on Office 365 for the next few weeks.
The promotion, called Cloud Easy, is part of the annual revenue sprint to the finish for Microsoft's fiscal year. "This is our maximum time of focus and energy," Cindy Bates, vice president of U.S. SMB and Distribution at Microsoft, said in an interview. Microsoft's fiscal year is over at the end of June.
The partner advisor fee is a percentage that Microsoft pays out to the Partner of Record on Office 365 sales. Microsoft recently streamlined the payment tiers. Now partners who sell up to 150 seats total across all their customers get 12 percent of the fees customers pay Microsoft the first year and 4 percent thereafter, for a total of 16 percent in the first year.
Partners who sell more than 150 seats get an additional 7 percent in the first year for a 23 percent first-year payment.
The Cloud Easy program adds 15 percent to the first-year payment. Partners with fewer than 150 seats will get 31 percent and partners with more than 150 seats will get 38 percent. The offer lasts through May, Bates said.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 16, 20130 comments
I'm about to tell a whiny story about storage on my Nokia Lumia 822 Windows Phone. Before you judge me, understand that I have two noble goals here. One is to save others from the annoyance, bafflement, research and dead ends I endured to work around the problem. The other goal is to encourage (read, pressure) Microsoft to hurry up with a permanent fix.
What this post is not is a general bash of Windows Phone 8. We have Apple iDevices aplenty in our household and use iTunes enough to know that Apple has made many of its own questionable decisions at that awkward intersection of engineering, interface design, bandwidth and user psychology. I've seen friends struggle with their Androids at that crossroads, too. So enough already about how this particular problem proves one platform is better than another. It doesn't.
That bit of business behind us, let's delve into the particulars.
Over the last few weeks, I've been bumping up against storage limits on my Lumia 822. I found it odd given that it had 16 GB of internal storage and I'd recently added a 16 GB microSD card to boost capacity for music. I'd availed myself of the useful options to have all new photos and music routed to the microSD card.
Yet, the phone's internal storage kept filling relentlessly like a James Bond villain's drowning contraption.
The phone's Settings interface allows you to drill into the specific uses of your storage. In my case, music and videos took up 4.74 GB, pictures took up 1.73 GB, apps took up 829 MB and system took up 1.91 GB. A mysterious entry called "other" gobbled 7.36 GB. This partition seemed to have a mind of its own and there was no obvious way to reduce it.
With free space down to a scant 25 MB, many app downloads were blocked and the phone was even starting to have trouble syncing e-mail.
Various Google searches and Windows Phone Store searches turned up two apps that try to fix the problem by filling up the phone's storage in an effort to shock the OS into freeing some space in the "other" partition. Various Internet posters and app reviewers of Shrink Storage and Phone Storage Cleanup claimed success from the apps, but in my case they only succeeded in shaking loose a combined 11 additional megabytes of free space. That's megabytes with an "m"; what I needed here was gigabytes with a "g."
A little more Internet research helped me find a source of the problem -- my enthusiastic embrace of Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage service. As it's gotten warmer and the family's been doing more outdoors, there's been more to photograph than at any point since I got the phone in December. My SkyDrive Camera Roll had about 250 photos in it, and another folder called Pictures had a few hundred more.
What I learned in a helpful article at Pocketnow.com is that when you save photos on SkyDrive in order to free up memory on your phone, you're not actually freeing up memory on your phone. Even though you delete the photos after they're synced, they turn right around and sync back onto your phone in the "other" area.
Apparently this is so if you ever want to see this photo again -- this photo which you've specifically removed from the phone and put in SkyDrive so it's not taking up space on your phone -- it will be available to you immediately so you don't have to wait for it to download.
As I understand it, Microsoft has chosen to make it impossible for users to have the power to decide which photos to store on their phone and which to store in the cloud.
The solution is to move all the photos off of SkyDrive so that they don't get automagically synced to the phone. By removing all the photos from SkyDrive, I won back 2.75 GB. (I think Facebook photos may also be taking up "other" space, but the prospect of addressing that problem gives me a headache.)
Here's the problem with this SkyDrive workaround: The point of SkyDrive is so you can store all your stuff in one place and access it from every device you have. Now, in order to keep my phone from idiotically filling itself with stuff that I want stored in the cloud for occasional access, not hogging storage on my phone, I've got to move that stuff clean out of the cloud. Meanwhile, because that stuff has been moved off of SkyDrive, it's no longer available at all to my phone or any of my other SkyDrive-connected devices.
I'm sure this isn't Microsoft's cloud vision. Hopefully the Windows Phone team can make the necessary tweaks so the promise of the better-together marketing story actually works out here in meatspace.
OK, that's my whiny story. Maybe I did just want to complain after all.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 13, 20130 comments
Verizon Wireless will release a new flagship Windows Phone 8 device on its LTE network later this month.
The Nokia Lumia 928 will be available starting May 16 for the cost of a two-year contract and $150, which can be knocked down $50 by sending in a rebate. Verizon is sweetening the pot for Lumia 928 buyers with a limited-time offer of a $25 credit for Windows Phone apps and games from the Windows Phone Store.
The 928 joins the Nokia Lumia 822, the HTC 8X and the Samsung ATIV Odyssey in Verizon's Windows 8 lineup on its 4G network.
Prior to Verizon's announcement, AT&T was the only carrier with Nokia's flagship-class 92x phones. AT&T has been selling the Lumia 920 since November.
Here are the specs for the 928 from Nokia's press release Friday:
- Display: 4.5 inch WXGA HD OLED; Resolution 1280 x 768, Aspect Ratio 15:9, Pixel Density 334 ppi; ClearBlack display, Sunlight Readability Enhancement (SRE), High Brightness Mode (HBM); Luminance 300 nits (nominal max), 500 nits (High Brightness Mode); Color depth 24 bit, 16M colors, refresh rate 60Hz; Super-sensitive capacitive touch enables interacting with the display with gloves and long fingernails; Display active area: 58.37 mm x 97.28 mm; 2.5D Corning® Gorilla® Glass 2
- Battery: Integrated 2000mAh battery, Li-po, BV 4-NW
- Processor:1.5GHz dual core, Qualcomm MSM8960+WTR
- Main Camera: PureView 8.7MP Auto Focus with Carl Zeiss Tessar f/2.0, 26mm True 16:9 optics, 1.4 sensor; Optical Image stabilization; Xenon Flash for Still Images, 1.4 sensor; Optical Image stabilization; Xenon Flash for Still Images; LED for Video; HD 1080p Video Capture @ 30 fps
- Front facing camera: 720p HD video and 1.2MP still images
- Memory: 1 GB RAM; 32GB internal memory (formatted capacity is less); 7GB free in SkyDrive with additional storage via subscription
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 10, 20130 comments
The rare public look provided last week by market researchers at Gartner into vendor-by-vendor CRM revenues is raising some critical attention.
In a blog post Monday, Constellation Research Principal Analyst and CEO R "Ray" Wang argues the figures, especially Microsoft's $1 billion in 2012 CRM revenues, "do not meet the general sniff test."
For the record, Wang notes that he thinks the revenue figures for Oracle and SAP are inflated, too, although he agrees with the headline of Gartner's research -- that Salesforce.com claimed the top CRM spot from SAP in the last year.
With experience both as an analyst and as head of CRM analyst relations for PeopleSoft back in the mid-2000s, Wang acknowledges that it "is hard work" divining revenues from software vendors, who would just as soon hide their sales or lead analysts to more positive conclusions than reality warrants.
Nonetheless, Wang zeroes in on Microsoft's past public statements about overall Dynamics revenues, including both ERP and CRM. From that basis, he argues for Constellation Research's estimate that overall Microsoft Dynamics revenues totaled between $1.5 billion and $1.6 billion in 2012. CRM would have had to grow exponentially and ERP would have had to crater, Wang contends, for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to hit $1 billion on its own.
For what it's worth, Microsoft has been quiet about the alleged milestone, as well. There are no mentions of $1 billion in CRM revenue in the Dynamics newsroom or in Microsoft's section on analyst coverage or in the official Dynamics blog. That could mean Microsoft is throwing a wet blanket on the numbers or simply that the software giant doesn't want to call attention to a fourth-place finish.
Related:
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 07, 20130 comments
When it comes to tech, the annual Fortune magazine ranking of the largest global companies shows Apple, Amazon.com and Google on the march, others stumbling around in a single-digit growth range, and a third group suffering falling revenues.
Fortune released its Fortune 500 list today. Among the top 100 companies on the list are 14 names crucial to the channel: Apple (rank 6), HP (15), Verizon Communications (16), IBM (20), Microsoft (35), Amazon.com (49), Dell (51), Intel (54), Google (55), Cisco Systems (60), Best Buy (61), Ingram Micro (76), Oracle (80) and Sprint Nextel (87). (Fortune's headline ranking depends on a company's annual revenues.)
For Apple, the sixth-place ranking is the company's first time to crack the Top 10. Fortune put the company's revenues at $156 billion for the list, with growth of 44.6 percent. That was good for a jump in rank from 17th last year that vaulted Apple past tech rivals HP and Verizon Communications.
Other big winners in 2012 were Google with 38 percent revenue growth and a huge jump in placement from 73rd to 55th, and Amazon with 27 percent revenue growth and a leap from 56th to 49th place.
The single-digit growth tier included Verizon (4.5 percent), Microsoft (5.4 percent), Cisco (6.6 percent), Ingram Micro (4.1 percent), Oracle (4.2 percent) and Sprint Nextel (4.9 percent).
Perhaps the biggest story of the Fortune 100 in tech is the drops. In Fortune's main article summarizing the year's list, the only tech company that earns a mention is HP. Shawn Tully, Fortune senior-editor-at-large, called HP's swing from a $7.1 billion profit in 2011 to a $12.7 billion loss in 2012 "the 26th worst in Fortune 500 history." Tully explained to Fortune readers that the reason for the loss was "two disastrous acquisitions" -- Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems.
For all that, HP's revenues only dropped 5.4 percent from 2011 to 2012. Dell saw its ranking fall seven places on a revenue drop of 8.3 percent and Best Buy, which has made several runs at the channel in the small business market, fell eight places and had a revenue slide of 11.8 percent.
Other Fortune 100 tech companies with revenue drops were IBM (- 2.3 percent) and Intel (- 1.2 percent).
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 06, 20130 comments
In the housekeeping department, I should mention that RCPmag.com now has a responsive Web design.
For those as bewildered by the term as I was when I first heard it, responsive Web design means the pages resize automatically for different screen sizes, be they large desktop monitors, laptops, tablets or smartphones.
Naturally, it's an important step, especially on the mobile side. We've noticed, as has anyone who explores their Web analytics, that mobile views of our content are experiencing the classic hockey-stick growth pattern. Some aspects of our prior-to-responsive-design (I hate to say non-responsive) could be pretty cramped on a smartphone or tablet.
If you haven't explored the site lately, a few things to point out:
- Give us another try with your smartphone. Even the homepage content stacks nicely so you can scroll smoothly up and down to see all the content. No pinching, zooming or needing to move side-to-side to view anything. Huge kudos to the Web team for reverse-engineering a site not originally intended for smartphone viewers to make it look as if we were planning for that form factor all along.
- Printing out articles from our site has become much cleaner due to the change, even without using the "Printable Format" option.
- In other news, we've also switched comments to the Disqus system, which has some killer community features, and the sign-in requirement helps keep out the spammers and trolls.
Hope you enjoy the changes as much as I do. Please let us know if you run into an issue viewing anything.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 02, 20130 comments
Changes rolled out recently give Microsoft partners selling Office 365 and Windows Intune the maximum Partner of Record margin with a much smaller number of seats than were called for by Microsoft's original plan for this fiscal year.
In July at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft introduced a four-tier system of Advisor Incentives. The maximum level involved a first-year payout of 23 percent, but only after partners had sold 2,500 seats or more. Now partners reach the maximum 23 percent payout level with only 150 seats sold.
"What we announced at WPC had a few tiers. We decided we wanted to make it simple," said Josh Waldo, senior director of cloud partner strategy at Microsoft.
Waldo said the two-tier system went into effect around March, when Microsoft also began allowing partners to bill customers for Office 365 through the Office 365 Open licensing program.
Specifically, Microsoft offers a 12 percent incentive payment for new sales or new deployments of Office 365 or Windows Intune. Once partners clear the 150-seats-over-three-deals qualifier for Microsoft's Cloud Accelerate program, they begin to receive a 7 percent Accelerator incentive on top of the 12 percent. In addition, Microsoft pays out a 4 percent maintenance incentive to the Partner of Record each year, including the first.
The new model effectively has first-year incentives worth 16 percent or 23 percent. Previously, the tiers were 16 percent, 20 percent, 22 percent and 23 percent.
As with the earlier Advisor Incentive schedule, incentive payments are retroactive to previous deals once the partner clears the seat hurdle to earn the Accelerator.
"It's retroactive to July 1. The whole goal here is to help partners be profitable with the cloud," Waldo said.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 01, 20130 comments
New numbers released by Microsoft suggest the technology giant may finally be succeeding at persuading its huge channel to join its cloud effort.
"Today Microsoft partners have hit a big milestone. There are now more than 125,000 of you taking advantage of our Cloud Essentials program," wrote Microsoft's Jon Roskill on his "Channel Chief" blog Wednesday.
Cloud Essentials is a free subprogram of the Microsoft Partner Network that gives partners 25 Internal Use Rights (IURs) of Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online and Windows Intune; technical training, support and tools; and marketing tools. When partners join Cloud Essentials, they sign the Microsoft Online Services Partner Agreement (MOSPA) and become eligible for partner referral benefits -- basically, a 16 percent kickback from Microsoft in the first year (4 percent in subsequent years) for every seat they sell as Partner of Record.
With Office 365, partners also now have the choice to forgo the Partner of Record model and participate in Office 365 Open licensing, an approach that allows them to directly bill the customer for a package of services that includes Office 365.
The 125,000-partner milestone represents a startling acceleration of participation.
At the last Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July, Microsoft claimed 35,000 Cloud Essentials participants. By November, Cloud Essentials enrollment had hit 61,000. The new enrollment figure represents growth of 250 percent from the July 2012 level.
"I don't know any program that we've had that has increased in that kind of volume in that amount of time. It's just incredibly encouraging to see the partners get interested and start to rally around the cloud," said Josh Waldo, senior director of cloud partner strategy for Microsoft, in an interview.
Waldo attributes the momentum both to practical changes within the MPN and to overall industry attitudes toward the cloud.
Microsoft recently changed its partner portal to present partners with a prominent option to sign up for Cloud Essentials when they join the MPN or when they conduct their annual membership renewal. On the back end, Microsoft also collected formerly separate steps -- signing up for Cloud Essentials, signing the MOSPA and collecting IURs -- into one integrated workflow, Waldo said.
"Now it's a couple of clicks and you're in. When you do things that make it very easy to sign up, when you support partners in practical ways, you get good results," he said.
On the other side, Waldo contends more partners are becoming more open to the idea of starting cloud practices as they observe changes in the industry and respond to demand from their own customers.
"I think industry-wide, most everyone is talking about services and devices and how cloud is the underlying piece to all of that. Partners know they need to make an investment. They know they're going to have to act on this. When they're presented with an easy on-board, I think that helps," Waldo said.
Asked how much of a factor the introduction in the last few months of direct billing, formally known as Office 365 Open, was in the increase in Cloud Essentials participation, Waldo couldn't immediately say. "I can tell you I was out in the field around the time of the [Office 365 Open] launch, and the response from our distributors and the VAR partners has been very positive around the model," Waldo said. "We've got the most expansive, largest, most powerful channel out there, and our goal is to help partners move into the cloud, move their customers into the cloud, be profitable and do it in a business model that works for them."
While Microsoft's figures indicate that nearly a quarter of the company's estimated 600,000 partners worldwide now participate in Cloud Essentials, that doesn't mean that many partners are actually selling Microsoft cloud offerings.
Converting Cloud Essentials partners to Cloud Accelerate partners -- those who sell at least 150 seats of Microsoft cloud products over three deals -- is an intense focus of Microsoft's. Waldo said 3,000 partners worldwide belong to Cloud Accelerate. Many more partners have sold some Office 365 -- either selling less than 150 total seats or selling more seats in fewer than three deals or not registering for Cloud Accelerate for other reasons. In an interview in late February, Roskill said about 20,000 partners sold Office 365 in the last year.
Waldo said that's part of the reason the IUR process is integrated into the sign-up. "The research that we have by mining the data is that Cloud Essentials partners that deploy and use the products internally are three times more likely to sell it," he said.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 01, 20130 comments
Detailed estimates of Microsoft's CRM market share don't pop up every day. Usually it requires imaginative tea-leaf reading to figure out how the Dynamics CRM business, which is so important to a lot of Microsoft partners, is doing compared to rivals.
Which is why a new report from market researchers at Gartner is a welcome bit of data. Gartner today released excerpts from its "Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2012" report.
Where Microsoft stands is in fourth place, trailing Salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle. Salesforce's No. 1 standing, actually, is the main headline of the report, since the SaaS CRM vendor displaced SAP as the global CRM leader for the first time in 2012. Salesforce took $2.5 billion of the worldwide, all-vendor total of $18 billion in revenues. SAP sits at second place with $2.3 billion. Gartner places Oracle third with $2 billion.
That's the bad news for Microsoft, which has been at the CRM game for more than a decade. The good news for Redmond and its partners is that CRM officially joined Microsoft's billion-dollar-businesses club in calendar 2012. Gartner puts Microsoft's CRM revenues at $1.1 billion, up from $900 million in calendar 2011.
That's a sizable bump. As of May 2012, Microsoft was only claiming that all of Dynamics, which includes Microsoft's established ERP products as well as CRM, amounted to $1 billion in annual revenues. Meanwhile, one of the few public pieces of data in the past -- an IDC report from 2010 (and admittedly an apples-to-oranges comparison) -- had Dynamics CRM revenues at $214 million.
Microsoft's growth rate, according to Gartner, was 26 percent from 2011 to 2012. That's an impressive pace, no question. It could help Microsoft gain ground on SAP, which saw flat revenues, and Oracle, which increased revenues by just under 8 percent.
But it won't be enough to gain on market leader Salesforce.com, which also grew revenues by 26 percent in the same period.
Meanwhile, IBM is nipping at Microsoft's heels in Gartner's estimation. Big Blue's CRM effort leapt 39 percent from 2011 revenues of $465 million to 2012 revenues of $649 million.
That CRM appears to be outperforming ERP within the Dynamics suite for Microsoft fits with overall market dynamics that Gartner analysts are seeing. Joanne Correia, vice president at Gartner, said in a statement that market growth for CRM in 2012 was three times the average for all enterprise software.
Dynamics CRM also appears to be on the right side of another trend documented by the market researchers -- an increasing appetite for SaaS CRM among customers. Gartner says customer interest in SaaS has driven cloud versions to 40 percent of overall CRM revenues in 2012. That's a trend that favors Salesforce.com, certainly, but it also validates Microsoft's increasing emphasis on Dynamics CRM Online.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 29, 20130 comments
Over the last few months, Condusiv Technologies has steadily transformed its performance optimization technology.
The company is familiar to the channel and IT professionals first as Executive Software, then as Diskeeper -- in both cases, the company that provided the disk defragmentation software included for years with shipping copies of Windows. Historically, Condusiv's predecessors have earned their revenues by upselling fuller-featured desktop defragmentation software, as well as selling server disk defragmentation software.
But following a leadership change in late 2011 and a company name change to Condusiv in 2012, the Burbank, Calif.-based company has been rearchitecting the products. Condusiv's latest products emphasize I/O optimization inside the server, ordering the bits into more easily stored and accessed chunks before they're written to disk rather than trying to reorder the disk after the data's been scattered across it.
The first fruits of the new approach came in V-locity 4, released in December. That product attacks the problem on virtual systems -- an environment where it is especially helpful to organize the data before it leaves the virtual machine since it will generally share disk space with the output of other virtual machines. The V-locity brand has been around for a few years, but prior to Version 4, the tool handled optimization at the disk level rather than before it came out of the OS.
Now, Condusiv is releasing the technology in another way. While V-locity is intended for virtual machines, Condusiv on Monday released V-locity Server for physical server environments. In short, the product handles the I/O optimization on a physical server before sending it to the direct-attached storage or to the NAS or SAN. Condusiv positions V-locity Server as especially well-suited for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server systems, as well as other applications that throw off a lot of I/O.
The V-locity products include two main components that each tackle different problems for I/O-intensive applications. IntelliMemory caches the most active data in the server's memory to prevent many I/O operations from occurring at all. IntelliWrite short-circuits Windows' tendency to split files into multiple pieces for I/O and instead stitches them back together before they can be written to disk in widely varying locations.
In an interview, Robert Woolery, senior vice president of product marketing and management, said the new Condusiv products provide better optimization performance than the company's previous disk-side defragmentation and I/O optimization software. He said there is no tangible, additional benefit to running V-locity products in conjunction with the disk-side software like Diskeeper Server.
Woolery said Condusiv delivered the virtual server version earlier because of market dynamics.
"The footprint is enormous on the physical side, but the momentum is on virtual servers and we expect to sell more licenses on the virtual side," Woolery said.
In either configuration, Condusiv also offers a component called the Benefit Analyzer, which helps the company make a guarantee that it encourages channel partners to use as a selling point. The Benefit Analyzer is self-auditing benchmark software that provides customers with a before-and-after performance comparison. Since February, Condusiv has been offering money back for customers who don't see at least a 25 percent performance improvement, and that guarantee stands for V-locity Server too.
According to Woolery, Condusiv continues to see customers getting a performance boost of about 50 percent, making the 25 percent guarantee an under promise/over deliver proposition.
In the meantime, Woolery contends the 50 percent performance optimizations can add up to big savings in the right circumstances.
"If customers are looking at their environment, and concluding they've got to buy an additional hundred servers at $10,000 per server, that's $1 million to refresh the environment," Woolery said. "If you load our software into your servers, you can increase the performance by 50 percent and use that $1 million for other purposes."
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 22, 20130 comments