Perficient Inc., the St. Louis-based, publicly traded Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI), deepened its Microsoft SharePoint expertise today with the acquisition of a major Microsoft partner company in the southeastern United States.
Perficient acquired Northridge Systems Inc. in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $14.4 million. The move follows Perficient's purchase in February of Pointbridge, another Microsoft NSI with heavy SharePoint expertise. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 02, 20120 comments
Microsoft's Ben Rudolph posted a new video demo this week for the Windows Phone 7.8 Start Screen. For those who missed the Windows Phone announcements last week, Windows Phone 7.8 is the consolation prize for all Windows Phone 7.5 users, whose devices won't be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8.
One of the nicest visual changes coming to Windows Phone 8 is the ability to resize tiles and the introduction of a third, small tile size that can fit four-abreast on the home screen. All of the tiles take up more of the screen's available real estate, and new tile color options are available, too. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 27, 20121 comments
The average solution provider will soon manage a portfolio of 50 cloud solutions and can look forward to direct sales battles with vendors, predicts channel veteran Bob Godgart.
Godgart's comments came Tuesday during the SMB Online Conference going on this week. Godgart has an exceptionally broad view of the IT industry. In addition to founding Autotask, he is chairman of CompTIA and more recently launched ChannelEyes, a platform for vendors to communicate with partners. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 27, 20120 comments
Oracle's channel got a lot bigger in the last 12 months.
During the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) Kickoff event online Tuesday, Judson Althoff shared some metrics on partner numbers and the channel business in the technology giant's fiscal year 2012, which ended May 31. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 26, 20120 comments
One of Oracle's big partner events takes place online tomorrow. The computer industry giant with a fast-growing channel program will hold its fourth Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Kickoff with five interactive events timed for different areas of the world.
The event starts Oracle's fiscal 2013 for both internal sales and for the channel and lays out some of the themes Oracle will expand on at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Sept. 30-Oct. 4. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 25, 20120 comments
Well, I guess Yammer is the next social media phenomenon that Microsoft partners will be forced to pay attention to.
We've all seen it with Facebook and Twitter. Each platform went from something in the background to something that exploded among consumers to something that became critical to business. (LinkedIn became an everyday social network, too, but its business utility was always pretty clear.) Microsoft partners could ignore those social networks only at their peril once customers expected to see them and Microsoft started using the platforms for its to-partner communication. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 25, 20121 comments
Microsoft on Monday published its list of Partner of the Year Award winners and finalists for 2012. The awards will be handed out next month at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The awards this year cover 74 categories. In all, 68 companies won worldwide category awards. Leading the multiple-award-winning companies was Capgemini, which took three awards counting two by its wholly-owned subsidiary Sogeti. Double-award winners were Accenture/Avanade, New Signature, SoftwareONE and Wortell. The list of winners is posted below. Lists that include finalists and country award winners can be found on Microsoft's site. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 25, 20121 comments
At the Windows Phone Summit today, Microsoft declared that the Windows Phone Marketplace has reached 100,000 apps. The number has been floating around the ether unofficially for a few weeks now, but the official confirmation is worth noting.
While 100,000 Windows Phone apps pales in comparison to the estimates of 650,000 apps in Apple's App Store and 500,000 apps in Google Play, it's a huge milestone for Microsoft. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 20, 20120 comments
Microsoft is famous for its demo failures (who can forget the Windows 98 beta crashing on Bill Gates during a Comdex demo?), and the Surface debut kept that tradition alive.
Surface is Microsoft's newly unveiled tablet designed in part to take on the Apple iPad with a single-vendor integration of hardware and software. The idea is to make the experience smooth and seamless and highlight what is possible with Windows 8 and Windows RT. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 19, 20120 comments
There's more trouble for one of Microsoft's underdog strategic partners. This time it's Nokia, rather than Yahoo or Barnes & Noble.
The Finnish phone company today announced up to 10,000 layoffs by 2013 and an executive shakeup at the tier below Stephen Elop, Nokia president and CEO and a former Microsoft senior executive. Nokia also cautioned investors that second quarter results would be worse than the company had predicted previously. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 14, 20120 comments
One of Microsoft's Office 365 syndication partners is looking for 400 North American resellers.
The syndication partners are the select few Microsoft partners, mostly major hosters and providers of high-value related services, with permission from Microsoft to directly bill their customers. Non-syndication Microsoft partners that offer Office 365 to their customers must leave billing for that portion of their offering to Microsoft. The arrangement has been a source of controversy. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 13, 20120 comments
While Flame has been all the rage lately, huge news broke today on another piece of malware suspected to have been cooked up in a spy agency lab. Turns out all that speculation about Stuxnet having been created by either the United States or Israel to attack Iran's nuclear capabilities appears to have been on target.
In a book excerpt published today on The New York Times Web site, Times reporter David Sanger quoted several government officials in the Bush and Obama administrations on a not-for-attribution basis. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 01, 20120 comments