Aspect Software this month renewed its Microsoft Partner Network membership with an impressive 13 competencies. Even for a Microsoft National Systems Integrator, that's a lot of competencies.
Aspect, a provider of customer contact and workforce optimization solutions, is based in Chelmsford, Mass. and has 1,900 employees worldwide. Microsoft made an equity investment in Aspect in 2008 to guarantee a global partner for delivering contact-center solutions based on the Microsoft unified communications platform. The platform at the time was Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, a product that has morphed into Microsoft Lync Server 2013.
In the interim, Aspect has greatly expanded its Microsoft practice beyond the call center. A major expertise build-out occurred when Aspect acquired Quilogy Inc., a Microsoft NSI, in January 2010. Aspect is continuing to invest in Microsoft training and certification internally, as well.
As of this month, Aspect has seven gold competencies in the Microsoft Partner Network -- Communications, Collaboration and Content, Digital Marketing, Mobility, Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, and OEM. The company's six silver competencies are Application Development, Data Platform, Application Integration, Midmarket Solution Provider, Hosting, and Learning.
That's way up from last year, when Aspect renewed its MPN membership with three gold competencies and nine silver competencies. The golds at that time were Communications, Portals and Collaboration and CRM.
Microsoft global channel chief Jon Roskill said in a statement that having a single gold competency puts partners in the top 1 percent of Microsoft's partner ecosystem. Having more than one gold competency is even rarer territory. In a global review of Microsoft's Pinpoint directory of partners last year, RCP found only about 50 companies worldwide had more than half a dozen gold competencies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 21, 20130 comments
Microsoft business partners are at the center of U.S. government investigations into bribery allegations in three countries -- China, Romania and Italy.
The Wall Street Journal revealed the preliminary investigations this week in an article about the inquiries by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The article is based on unnamed sources the paper says are "familiar with the probe." The investigations involve the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law prohibiting bribes to foreign government by employees or agents of U.S. companies.
Microsoft confirmed the existence of the investigations in a blog entry posted Tuesday by John Frank, Microsoft vice president and deputy general counsel.
"Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. government is reviewing allegations that Microsoft business partners in three countries may have engaged in illegal activity, and if they did, whether Microsoft played any role in these alleged incidents," Frank wrote.
Frank's blog noted the matters raised by the paper are "important" and should be reviewed by Microsoft and the government, but cautioned, "It is also important to remember that it is not unusual for such reviews to find that an allegation was without merit." He suggested Microsoft would cooperate with government investigators.
The picture painted by the Journal's sources gives Microsoft a controlling role in both the China and Italy cases, with business partners as pawns.
According to the paper's account, the Chinese case involved what sounded like not a channel partner but a Microsoft contractor. "The tipster, who worked to land potential new business, alleged that an executive of Microsoft's China subsidiary instructed the tipster to offer kickbacks to Chinese officials in return for signing off on software contracts," the paper reported, quoting unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The tipster's contract ended in 2008. According to the newspaper, Microsoft hired an outside law firm to investigate that allegation. The 10-month internal investigation concluded in 2010 and found no evidence of wrongdoing, according to the paper.
In Italy, the case involves consultants specializing in customer loyalty programs. The allegations that U.S. officials are investigating in Italy involve consultants giving gifts and trips on behalf of Microsoft to Italian officials to win government contracts, the Journal said.
The newspaper's description of the Romanian allegations is more ambiguous about Microsoft's possible role. According to the sources quoted by the newspaper, resellers offered bribes to win software deals with Romania's Ministry of Communications.
No business partners are identified in the report.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 20, 20131 comments
After reporting earlier this week that Microsoft is dropping OEM licensing costs to goose Windows 8 sales, Digitimes today is quoting channel retailers on the pricing sweet spot the move allows them to target.
The magic number is $506, the publication reported that its Taiwan-based channel retail sources say. That represents a price drop of about 10 percent.
The publication earlier this week reported that Microsoft will cut the OEM price for Windows 8 by $20 starting in April or May. The price cut will apply to Windows 8 notebooks with touchscreens that are 11.6 inches or smaller, according to the report. Systems based on the new price could start appearing in June.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting similar price cuts this week.
The price cut leaks, which Microsoft is not confirming, comes amid a new round of gloomy projections for the PC market in 2013.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 07, 20133 comments
Business continuity is a huge and mature opportunity for the channel. Much of the selling process centers on technology questions and setup. Doing that part right is critical, but the opposite end of the process often gets overlooked.
Time and again, it's lack of attention to three final steps that leads to a data disaster when recovering from a physical disaster.
1. Scheduling a Full Disaster Rehearsal
Planning and installing a business continuity solution is time-intensive and exhausting. Once the system appears to be up and running, there's temptation on both the partner and customer sides of the deal to move on. The revenues are booked, and backups look like they're occurring correctly. This is no time to quit.
Bringing business systems back online is a complex process. Servers have startup dependencies that require other software to be loaded in the right order. Scripting the sequence can be tricky. No matter how thorough the planning, the customer may not realize a certain essential business database isn't covered until after a restoration. Every plan must be tested as completely as possible. Real-world disasters throw unique complexities into the system. Getting as many of the regular complexities as possible ironed out of the process beforehand frees partners and customers up to deal with only the novel issues that a real disaster might present.
Smart partners also know that getting a full business continuity system in place is an iterative process. Listing and addressing the issues that emerged in the disaster rehearsal is only part of the process. Running the disaster test again and again until no issues emerge is the end of the process.
2. Testing Fail-Back
If the test shows that the mission-critical application server fails over successfully to the backup server, that's an essential element of the business continuity solution. There's another critical piece that sometimes falls through the testing cracks. Will the system fail back to the original server gracefully without losing data the secondary system accumulated while it was handling the workload? It's important to not only consider, but also to test, how fail-back works. A key wrinkle is that the system might be returning to a production server that's no longer identical to the one that originally ran the system.
3. Scheduling the Next Test
The initial set of full-recovery rehearsals are absolutely critical. But they can't be the last rehearsals. In addition to ensuring that backups occur on schedule, it's important to develop a schedule to retest recovery scenarios at regular intervals. Things change fast in business. Server hardware gets replaced, business critical applications and databases get upgraded, important applications move in or out of the cloud. The business-continuity solution has to be retested to make sure it's still capturing the full current environment
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 05, 20130 comments
Through an agreement with Verizon Wireless, Tech Data Corp. partners will now be able to activate 3G and 4G mobile services on Apple iPads and other tablets.
The activations come through Tech Data's year-old TDMobility unit, a joint venture with Brightstar. Charles Kriete, executive vice president of TDMobility, said in an interview that about 700 partners are fully authorized through TDMobility to sell solutions, but that participation is open to Tech Data's entire 60,000 partner ecosystem. He said TDMobility has been adding between 50 and 100 partners a month in North America.
With Verizon on board, TDMobility now works with all the biggest carriers in the United States. TDMobility was already working with AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. However, Verizon is a big deal for TDMobility and its partners because of the size of its network and customer base, its large corporate presence and the ability to activate iPads. AT&T, the other major corporate account carrier, does not currently permit iPad activation through TDMobility. Sprint does allow iPad activation through TDMobility's infrastructure.
"Verizon has really stepped up in the channel, enabling the activation of a complete portfolio of mobile tablet solutions, including the iPad, on the largest LTE network for the VAR community," Kriete said.
The Verizon capabilities add a new type of business for TDMobility partners with higher margin, Kriete said. "Currently, we're doing around 70,000 tablet sales per month. Approximately 20,000 of those are embedded with 3G/4G, so they're capable of activation," he said. Any 3G/4G activations will be new business, he said. "We'd be coming from zero as far as the activating opportunity."
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 04, 20130 comments
When it comes to Windows Small Business Server, there are few independent observers as authoritative as Harry Brelsford, founder of SMB Nation.
And when Harry starts posting comparisons of where Office 365 stands now on a maturity scale relative to historical releases of Small Business Server, it's worth paying attention.
In Harry's estimation, the latest version of Office 365 is comparable to SBS 2000, just when SBS was, in his words, "starting to rock."
Check out Harry's full chart treatment on the topic at his blog. It's an interesting perspective on the upside for partners who position themselves to take advantage of Office 365's opportunities.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 04, 20130 comments
The Register sent Andrew Orlowski to Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, where he filed a report on Windows Phone called, "So much noise on WinMob, but Microsoft's silent on lovely WinPhone."
Orlowski brings history, market context and familiarity with the senior Microsoft executives involved to draw a nuanced portrait of the state of Windows Phone 8 and the marketing efforts surrounding it.
The upshot is that he's surprised at how little effort Microsoft seems to be putting into the everyday work of marketing a mobile platform, such as having a conspicuous presence at major shows like MWC and being hyper-responsive to carriers' every complaint. (He does acknowledge in passing Microsoft's massive primetime ad campaigns in a way that discounts their importance.)
He throws off several interesting asides in the article, as well. For one example, Nokia seems to be a very happy partner. For another, I've argued on several occasions that Microsoft is playing a long game, both with Windows Phone and the Microsoft Surface. Orlowski goes a little Occam's Razor on that idea:
"Now either Microsoft is playing a very long game, or perhaps it really doesn't care too much about winning here -- a muddling success is good enough for all the managers involved. This kind of attitude is common in bureaucracies -- keep your head down -- it's a form of risk aversion. But when the product is really good, it's baffling. Perhaps your career might actually (radical idea coming up) benefit from success?"
This piece doesn't shake my sense that a long game is a good framework to consider Microsoft's market moves in mobile. But Orlowski does raise a number of very valid questions about Microsoft's ability to follow through.
If you're interested in Windows Phone 8's prospects and the state of its marketing, this article is worth a read.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 28, 20130 comments
In the fight for cloud share, Microsoft is finally unlimbering one of its best weapons: a uniquely huge channel with unrivaled SMB reach.
Since Microsoft first joined the cloud productivity suite market with the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in mid-2008, the overall deal with partners has been that Microsoft would bill the customers, while partners would get advisor fees and the opportunity to sell add-on services around the edges.
And since the beginning, partners have been saying, in effect, "We're interested, but with the nature of the cloud, we'd be far more interested if we controlled the billing."
BPOS and its successor, Office 365 launched in June 2011, have been on the market for five years. To take the last 12 months as an example, Microsoft says 22,000 partners have sold Microsoft public cloud services, and the ecosystem for Office 365 -- when you add in training and supplemental services partners -- is about 50,000 partners. Impressive numbers, sure, but nowhere near leveraging Microsoft's frequently-cited partner base of 600,000 companies worldwide.
Jon Roskill stepped into the role of global channel chief for Microsoft in late June 2010 at the height of Microsoft's "all in" cloud mania. He immediately faced insistent questions (from RCP as well as many partners) about when Microsoft would let partners handle customer billing, and if not, why?
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| Jon Roskill |
After getting his bearings in the job, Roskill let out a hint in a Town Hall meeting in November 2010 that Microsoft was thinking seriously about making direct billing possible. Today, two-and-a-quarter years later, partners can bill customers directly with the availability of Office 365 Open and Full Packaged Product. Microsoft told partners at its Worldwide Partner Conference in July that Office 365 Open was coming, but it's taken seven months to arrive.
In general, Microsoft is now enabling partners to own the billing process, capture top-line revenue and margin on the resale, sell and service customers in ways that make sense for cloud business models, and earn rebates and co-op funding. The Open Licensing option is in addition to the existing advisor model, which will continue, along with a syndication option for about 100 partners worldwide and specialty programs for government and education partners.
In a telephone interview Tuesday, Roskill said, "It's something that has been a bit of time coming, but something that we're really excited about because we think it's really going to open up the whole next wave of Microsoft partners to get in and start selling our cloud offering."
Between mid-2010 and this July, Roskill contended that Microsoft recognized two main things as an organization.
"We've noticed since early on that deals that have a partner involved wind up with a larger deal size. They wind up getting deployed more quickly and we wind up with higher customer satisfaction. So everyone is very aligned that having partners involved in these deals is a good thing for everybody," Roskill said.
The other realization involves the importance of small and midsize businesses for cloud suites. "If you look now at the data on Office 365 customers, what we see is that over 90 percent of them are from businesses with 50 or fewer employees. Small business is at the core of this product customer base, and the fact that we're talking 50 or smaller, it really does show the partner opportunity is huge," Roskill said.
As for critics who say Microsoft was too late last July, let alone now, in delivering direct billing to meet demand for cloud suites, Roskill strongly disagrees: "Although we're selling a lot of [Office 365], the penetration is still in low single digits. So there's a great opportunity for us and partners to make a lot of money here."
The more specific delay between the WPC announcement and today's delivery involved internal engineering and process changes. "The licensing keys, the commerce platform and the product itself all need to basically come together," Roskill said. "The old world of channel and product being able to be separate is no more. Core changes had to be made in the product by the development team to be able to accommodate this, and we had to make some changes in our commerce platform."
Roskill is setting an aggressive goal for partner participation in the next five months. From the baseline of 20,000 partners selling Office 365 in the last year, Roskill said, "My expectation is that we'll double that reach by the time we get to WPC."
That projection is based on a very specific, and strategic set of partners -- partners who handle Open License transactions for other products such as Office, Windows Server and Exchange. Microsoft has about 4,000 of those partners in managed relationships, mostly through telePAMs, and 100,000 Open partners who work exclusively through distributors.
"I think the big deal here is getting that 100,000-plus Open transaction partners into the cloud game. They're sitting there on the sidelines right now. We want them in the cloud game on our side," Roskill said.
Some of those partners provided statements of support to Microsoft for the Wednesday announcement that were more revealing than the usual fodder -- a testament to how big a deal this is for the Microsoft channel.
Christopher Pyle, president and CEO of Champion Solutions Group, emphasized how Microsoft always talks about choice but is now actually delivering it in the cloud.
"The biggest thing for our company -- and the channel overall -- is that Office 365 Open gives us the power of choice," Pyle said. "We can choose how we want to work with Microsoft and how we want to work with our customers. If we want to provide value-added services on top of Office 365 all on one bill, we can do that. On the other hand, if you don't want everything on one bill, you can stick with the Partner of Record model."
Others praised Microsoft for responding to five years' worth of partner requests.
"Office 365 Open proves to us that Microsoft is listening to its partners and sees value in partners delivering total solutions to their customers," said Andy Vabulas, CEO of I.B.I.S. Inc.
On the SMB side, an Ingram Micro executive in the Netherlands related Office 365 Open to the hole left in the Microsoft portfolio by the sunsetting of Windows Small Business Server. "In the Netherlands, Windows Small Business Server is/was very popular," Storm Rohnstrom said in his statement. "Given that SBS will no longer be available in Open License, we see a huge possibility for end users who formerly would buy SBS server. Now Office 365 not only 'ties' them to their reseller, but partners can also give service."
Even before any potential bump in the number of Microsoft partners reselling Office 365 because of the direct billing option, Microsoft argues it has the biggest cloud partner ecosystem by far.
"We believe [Office 365]'s ecosystem is more than 10 times the next biggest competitor. More than 10 times Google, more than 10 times Salesforce, more than 10 times Amazon. If we can double this in the next five months, obviously that makes us more than 20 times. I think this is a really important milestone in our establishing the channel cloud leadership that we're going after," Roskill said. "The way that we're going to get to [cloud leadership] is through the way we always have from a Microsoft perspective, which is driving partner scale."
Related:
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 27, 20132 comments
I've been using Windows 8 almost daily for about three months, but it turns out this old dog can still learn some new tricks.
The March issue of our sister publication, Redmond, has a cover story with 20 tips for Windows 8. It's written by tech pundit and New York Times columnist David Pogue.
Pogue spotlighted a number of great features in the piece. I got the most out of his suggestions for type-searching (No. 4), ignoring the three control panels (No. 7), charms bar keystrokes (No. 11) and flipping ahead in Internet Explorer (No. 14).
Those who dislike the look and feel of Windows 8 would like Pogue's entries on putting the Start menu back (No. 1), skipping the lock screen (No. 2) and skipping the Start screen (No. 3).
The tips aren't all business either. Check out No. 12 on the camera self-timer, No. 13 on free custom magazines and No. 15 on panorama photos.
If you've played with Windows 8 or support customers who run it, I'd wager you'll find something new in the article, too.
P.S. While I'm plugging a great magazine, I should point out two other items in Redmond in March. Windows Insider columnist Greg Shields has an interesting piece about monitors in the Windows 8 era, while back-page columnist Mary Jo Foley looks at what it might take for Surface to sell.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 27, 20130 comments
Do you think Jon Roskill is getting tired of critics hating on the Houston-in-July choice for the 2013 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference?
"Everyone asks me, 'Houston in July, is it really hot?'" Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, said during an MPN [Microsoft Partner Network] Live webcast for partners Tuesday.
"We have got the Minute Maid stadium. We can close it and air condition it, so don't worry," Roskill joked. Minute Maid Park is the home of the Houston Astros and features a 242-foot-high retractable roof over its natural-turf field.
Microsoft's WPC takes place July 7-11 in Houston. Although Microsoft regularly holds the mid-summer conference in more northern cities with cooler average weather, including Toronto, Boston, Denver and Minneapolis, 2013 won't mark WPC's first visit to Houston. Microsoft held it there in 2008.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 26, 20130 comments
Apps are a key to selling customers on Windows 8, according to a panel of partners gathered by Microsoft.
Danny Burlage, CTO at Wortell; Scott Gosling, Microsoft practice manager at Data#3; and Carl Mazzanti, CEO of eMazzanti Technologies joined Microsoft executives on Tuesday for a webcast session of MPN [Microsoft Partner Network] Live about Windows 8 sales.
Mazzanti said his Hoboken, N.J.-based company had just closed a major deal involving Windows 8 seats at an architectural firm. Key to the sale was a killer Windows 8 app.
"They're going to be able to take their tablet into a building and move [the device] around to see what the building looks like for 3-D rendering," Mazzanti said. The right apps, leveraging portability of the new form factors and touch, can lead to "lightbulbs going on" for customers, Mazzanti said.
For Netherlands-based Wortell, Burlage said a program investment by Microsoft to support partner app development is extremely helpful.
Microsoft calls the program Windows Accelerate. In addition to proof-of-concept and production pilots for Windows 8 deployments, the program includes help for designing and piloting custom apps.
"We're engaged in about 20 of those projects," Burlage said. "Building an app really accelerates the customer going into Windows 8 at all. We built an app for a municipality and they right now decided to move over to Windows 8."
An added advantage, Burlage said, is owning the intellectual property of the app at the end of the process, enabling reuse of the code to support apps for other customers with similar needs. Burlage also said some of Wortell's apps are driving additional Azure and Office 365 business by using those cloud platforms on the back end.
Data#3 in Australia is seeing a fairly robust business in Windows 8, including a massive education deployment currently underway, Gosling said. While apps help attract new deployment customers, Gosling noted two other ways that partners are using apps in Windows 8. One is to use the Microsoft Store to take a partner's IP public and make additional money on some good code. The other is to use the Sideloading capabilities in Windows 8 to distribute custom apps to customer devices.
Erwin Visser, general manager of Windows Commercial Marketing for Microsoft, said partners who are achieving the best results with Windows 8 are sending their sales reps to meetings ready to "show customers Windows 8, Windows 8 devices and a prototype app."
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 26, 20130 comments
Nokia is taking its global portfolio of Lumia phones, and the underlying Windows Phone 8 platform, to more countries.
Nokia on Monday announced two new lower-priced Nokia Lumia phones. Rolled out at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, were the Lumia 720 and the Lumia 520. In a recent research report, IDC estimated that Nokia accounts for about three-quarters of Windows Phone sales.
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| The Lumia 720 |
The 720 is billed as a midrange phone and will be available this quarter in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore and next quarter in Europe, Africa, China, India and other Asian countries. Nokia describes the 520 as its "most affordable Windows Phone 8 smartphone" and plans to make it available this quarter in Hong Kong and Vietnam and next quarter in Europe, China, India, Latin America and Africa.
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| The Lumia 520 |
Nokia also is working with T-Mobile to roll out the Lumia 520 with T-Mobile in the United States.
Both phones come in five colors. In Euros, the Lumia 720 will have a base price of 249 and the Lumia 520 will cost 139. Neither price includes taxes or subsidies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 25, 20131 comments