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. More
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. More
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. More
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. More
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. More
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." More
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.) More
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. More
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. More
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. More
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. More
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. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 22, 20130 comments