Citrix plans to unveil a new partner portal later this week.
The "My Citrix" portal will become "Partner Central" on Thursday. Aside from changing the name, Citrix is streamlining and reorganizing many of its partner resources.
Partner Central will be organized into five main functional areas: training and certification, sales, marketing, licensing and renewals, and support. Partners will now also be able to manage their own Citrix licenses and accounts as customers from the single partner sign-on.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 24, 20130 comments
Digital security vendor ESET this month launched a partner program specifically for managed services providers.
The ESET MSP offering covers ESET's Endpoint Security and Endpoint Antivirus products, which provide protection against malware, phishing, viruses, spam and other cyber-threats for companies with 25 users up to tens of thousands of users.
The main feature of the partner program is decreasing costs with increasing volumes of licenses. An MSP-specific benefit is the ESET Remote Administrator, which plugs into several types of remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools and allows MSPs to remotely control antivirus and other security settings. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 20, 20130 comments
Dimension Data is capitalizing on the growing demand for Microsoft Lync with a new managed services offering.
Dimension Data, one of Microsoft's largest global partners, announced the new service during the Microsoft Lync conference this week in San Diego.
The service includes application support for Lync 2010 and Lync 2013, hardware support, patch notifications, service management and administration. The company will leverage its access to Microsoft Premier Support for Lync Partners to make the offering robust. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 20, 20130 comments
IT market research firms Gartner and IDC are both out this week with smartphone shipment estimates that show Windows Phone making significant progress in the fourth quarter of 2012.
The global studies contrast with studies released a week ago by Canalys and comScore, both of which suggested Microsoft made no market share progress in the critical Q4 period, which coincided with the release of the Windows Phone 8 operating system and carrier devices. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 14, 20131 comments
Remember Microsoft's massive datacenter build-out campaign? It's still going on.
Wired has a piece this morning putting the running total of Microsoft's spending on building out datacenters for Internet services such as Bing, Skype and Windows Azure at $15 billion. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20130 comments
Condusiv Technologies is pretty confident its new virtual machine acceleration software will work.
The software optimization vendor formerly known as Diskeeper Corp. on Monday will announce a performance guarantee promising channel partners a complete refund if their customers don't realize a 25 percent performance improvement in of deployed VMs. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 08, 20130 comments
Ah, chaos. It's when all the best business opportunities emerge.
Dell created some chaos this week with the announcement that it would go private in a huge deal valued at $24 billion. (Well, intensified the chaos is probably a more accurate way to put it. Dell admitted in its official statement on the deal that rumors of the joint Michael Dell/Silver Lake merger agreement were first published on Jan. 11.) More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 07, 20133 comments
Tami Reller released some official statements on the state of Windows 8 at 90 days in the form of a Q&A posted on Microsoft's Web site earlier this week. While the Windows CMO/CFO repeated a lot of data points Microsoft had previously shared -- 60 million licenses, 100 million apps downloaded, etc. -- she did have some interesting things to say about the learning curve.
Windows 8 is essentially two operating systems. One OS is the Windows 7 desktop minus the Start button, while the other OS is the new touch-centric, tile-and-app-filled, next-generation interface. Especially on the tile side, navigating the operating system requires intricate gestures and mouse movements that are not intuitive. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 06, 20135 comments
Sophos on Monday updated its mobile device management (MDM) software to expand support to Android devices in the BYOD mix.
The latest release is Sophos Mobile Control 3.0, and it is available on-premise and as a service.
In addition to the Android device support, the new version supports Samsung SAFE (Samsung for Enterprises) devices, new protections against malicious apps and extended URL filtering.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 04, 20130 comments
Microsoft has officially opened registration for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, its huge annual gathering of partners every July.
This year's event in Houston has four big themes: big data, cloud, social and mobility.
In a blog entry announcing the start of registration, Microsoft's WPC Experience Ambassador Kati Quigley detailed other themes: More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 04, 20130 comments
Microsoft U.S. channel chief Jenni Flinders has an interesting recent blog post about redefining your role in your business.
Acknowledging that most partners had an entrepreneurial start, she calls on partners to avoid the comfortable rut of day-to-day business post start-up:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 04, 20131 comments
Microsoft shed some light last week on the state of the "great migration" -- the Herculean effort by enterprises worldwide to get their desktops on Windows 7 before Windows XP support officially expires in April 2014.
During an earnings call Thursday, CFO Peter Klein said that more than 60 percent of enterprise desktops worldwide are now on Windows 7. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 28, 20131 comments