Partners that have been slow to embrace the new Microsoft Partner Network logos and branding on their Web sites are in good company.
Even Microsoft's National System Integrators (NSIs), the high-profile group of U.S. partners, seem less than fully on board with the MPN logos and branding nearly a year and a half after Microsoft released them. An RCP review of NSI Web sites this month found that about a third of NSIs are still using outdated branding or messaging.
In November 2010, Microsoft formally released the Microsoft Partner Network logo for partners' use and began phasing in a new competency-based certification system. Rather than certifying partners at the company level, such as Microsoft Certified Partner and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, as it had done for many years, Microsoft began certifying partners as silver or gold in specific competencies. Partners had a year to make the transition, and all references to Microsoft Certified Partner or Microsoft Gold Certified Partner should have been gone from partners' collateral and Web sites in November 2011.
Microsoft surfaced the issue in February, when Eric Ligman, the director or Partner Experience for Microsoft, wrote a blog post warning partners they needed to get the old Certified logos off their Web sites.
Karl Noakes, general manager of Microsoft Worldwide Partner Strategy and Programs, assured RCP that there was no crackdown and that Microsoft didn't view the issue as a particular problem.
But the mini-flap highlights that the transition is happening more slowly than Microsoft may have hoped.
Noakes declined to estimate how many of Microsoft's tens of thousands of formerly Certified or Gold Certified partners were still using old logos. "There's no easy way to [quantify] that," he rightly noted.
Still, a look at the NSIs gives a good indication. NSIs generally have their own dedicated national Partner Account Manager, in many cases among other regional PAMs, and frequent contact with Microsoft at many levels. In other words, they are heavily engaged and have a lot of resources dedicated to the Microsoft relationship. Whatever the percentage of NSIs still using old logos, the percentage among the broader Microsoft population is likely much, much higher.
Of the 33 NSIs listed in RCP's special report earlier this month, 12 were still sporting old logos or descriptions dating from the old Microsoft Partner Program.
We're not out to embarrass any particular partners; we're just making a point about relative adoption of the logos and branding, so we won't name names. Here's how the old logos and descriptions shook out.
- Four of the companies had the old Microsoft Gold Certified Partner logos splashed on their homepage.
- Three NSIs used old Microsoft Gold Certified Partner logos in a list of vendor partners or on another secondary Web page.
- Another three companies had a mix of new logos with an old logo tucked away somewhere on the page or with text describing the company's "Gold Certified" status. One of those companies had the sticky situation of having had a Partner of the Year badge built around the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner branding, making it difficult to remove that logo without de-emphasizing the accomplishment.
- Two other NSIs had outdated descriptions and no Microsoft logos at all.
On the flip side, 12 of the NSI partners embraced the new logos on their Web sites, with several featuring the new logos prominently on their homepages (three of those are also counted above among companies using a mix of new and old logos). A few other NSIs took the logo styling and altered it to fit the styles of their homepages -- for example, making the MPN logo monochrome so as not to clash with the NSI's own color palette.
The balance of the NSIs are either so focused on one Microsoft product or another that they use those product logos rather than MPN logos, or their sites appear aimed at establishing their own branding or broad expertise to the extent that they don't use Microsoft branding at all.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 09, 20121 comments
One of Microsoft's highest-profile Dynamics CRM partners is looking to expand its business with an Apple iPad app to assist road warriors.
Sonoma Partners on Thursday unveiled the Mobile Sales Kit, which is billed as an "enterprise-grade application for the Apple iPad" that will "replace the stacks of collateral a salesperson would carry on a typical visit."
The Mobile Sales Kit, which sports a "Metro"-style interface on the iPad, synchronizes with Microsoft SharePoint to provide a salesperson with access to documents and collateral while offline.
The app includes intellectual property from Sonoma Partners, a Chicago-based company that is a two-time winner of worldwide Microsoft CRM Partner of the Year awards. (Redmond Channel Partner magazine also named Sonoma Partners Principal Mike Snyder one of the Top 10 Microsoft Partner MVPs in 2011.)
The Mobile Sales Kit also employs Google Analytics to allow users' marketing departments to determine which parts of the app are getting the heaviest use from the field.
According to a statement about the app, Sonoma's plans for monetizing the kit include deployment, customization and training.
Sonoma Partners' swing to bring its Microsoft expertise to the iPad shouldn't be read as an abandonment of the Windows platform, either. The company is already building expertise in bringing the as-yet-unreleased Windows 8 tablet into its solutions.
Last month, Sonoma Partners announced it had developed the "Ultimate Beer Ranger," a Windows 8 tablet app for the New Belgium Brewing Co. -- the Colorado-based maker of Fat Tire beer. The Ultimate Beer Ranger is designed to bring Dynamics CRM information and capabilities to New Belgium's tablet-using representatives.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 06, 20120 comments
If this one slipped by you, it slipped by me as well. But apparently a lot of people are thinking hard about using game-like achievements in a corporate setting as rewards for employees and partners. One name for the concept is "gamification."
Microsoft is among the hard thinkers. On March 27, the company updated a "Visual Studio Achievements Extension," which brings Xbox-like achievements to developers. (It had been released as a beta in January.) Developers can unlock 32 achievement badges with funky names like "Close To The Metal," "Stubby" or "Interrupting Cow" that display on their Channel 9 profiles.
Why does this matter to Microsoft partners, especially those not immersed in the Visual Studio subculture? Larry Louisiana connected the dots this week in a blog post for Magenic, a Microsoft National Systems Integrator partner based in Minneapolis.
In the post, "Windows 8 Gamification Approach," Louisiana writes:
"What makes this interesting to me is the leveraging of the Microsoft LIVE account, so that achievements can be tracked and shared as claims in a claims-based authorization/authentication approach."
He continues:
"Claims-based authentication will allow you to pass your achievements around your organization and/or partners if you so choose, and across devices like smartphones, tablets, Xboxes and PCs. Displaying them, deciding the metrics, and defining the goals are obviously up to you and your organization, but the easiest way to go about it is to build from an architectural pattern that facilitates these changes internally."
Lots more nitty gritty in the Magenic post. Plus, Larry left an Easter Egg at the end as a reward for reading the post -- your very own gamification badge.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 05, 20120 comments
Pariveda Solutions, one of 33 Microsoft National Systems Integrator partners, is opening an office in Denver, solidifying an already existing presence in the city.
The Dallas-based company announced the move on Wednesday. The formal move comes a month after Microsoft recognized Pariveda's work in Denver with a 2012 Technology Innovation Award for a global Microsoft Dynamics CRM system for Ball Corp.
"Our local Denver team is extremely excited about our growth and having this new space will fuel new connections in the community," said DJ Wardynski, vice president of the Denver Office, in a statement.
Pariveda CEO Bruce Ballengee added that the location will increase Pariveda's profile in the Denver business network. According to the news release on the office opening, Pariveda has eight offices around the country.
Pariveda has gold competencies in the Microsoft Partner Network in Business Intelligence, Content Management, CRM, Digital Marketing, Portals and Collaboration, Software Development and Web Development. Microsoft also named Pariveda to the Windows Azure Circle in January.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 04, 20120 comments
This year should be the year that "smart connected devices," an IDC term for PCs, smartphones and media tablets, will pass 1 billion device shipments, the market research firm says.
In a table released this week, IDC projected that unit shipments for 2012 would hit 1.1 billion in 2012, including 660 million smartphones, 371 million PCs and 106 million media tablets.
Chart: Worldwide Smart Connected Device Shipments, 2010-2016 (Unit Millions)
Description: This data comes from IDC's WW Quarterly PC Tracker, WW Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, and WW Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker.
Tags: Tracker, mobile phones, tablets, forecast, PCs, devices, consumer, IDC ...
Author: IDC
charts powered by iCharts
Overall shipments for 2011 were 916 million units, good for $489 billion in revenues. IDC predicts compound annual growth of 15.4 percent over the next five years to 1.84 billion units in 2016.
While PCs are expected to continue their growth, media tablets are expected to grow much faster. But IDC anticipates that smartphones will dominate the shipment figures, with that category alone accounting for a billion devices a year by 2015.
The prospects for the Windows PC? Diminished.
"The once-dominant Windows on x86 platform, consisting of PCs running the Windows operating system on any x86-compatible CPU, [will slip] from a leading 35.9% share in 2011 down to 25.1% in 2016," IDC said in a statement.
Related:
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 29, 20120 comments
Dell, in an effort to give its partners a way to differentiate themselves on cloud, added a Cloud Services and Solutions Certification today.
The new PartnerDirect certification employs an interesting taxonomy that encompasses the different roles that partners play with the cloud. Called "pillars," the three different roles are Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider and Cloud Service Enabler.
The Cloud Builder pillar covers partners that offer services to design and develop a cloud infrastructure for customers. Cloud Provider partners operate a network operations center (NOC), which includes some Dell technologies but can also include other technologies. A Cloud Service Enabler is an aggregator and broker of cloud technologies and services.
What's refreshing and realistic about the certification is that Dell is acknowledging that partners will present customers with a full portfolio of technologies from many vendors and that customers still may want to see a certification from a major vendor to establish the partner's credibility.
The program is starting in North America and will be available worldwide. Certification benefits include preferred pricing, financing, co-marketing funds and account management.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 29, 20120 comments
All those who were pining for Microsoft's Courier can now try an approximation of the interface on an Apple iPad.
Courier was Microsoft's skunkworks tablet project that got killed in favor of the all-out effort to bring the tablet computing style to the whole Windows world in Windows 8.
The Courier concept involved a tablet that looked like an open notebook with two main parts to the screen and digital ink.
When Microsoft decided to go another way, a few people took notice and started a company, Taposé (a play on "touch" and "juxtapose") to bring the concept to the iPad. (No digital ink support, though.)
[Click on image for larger view.]
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| Taposé app on the iPad. (Source: Taposé) |
If there were any doubt of the product's Courier origin, it's dispelled on the company's About page:
"Team Taposé must first give credit to the once hyped Courier project, as it provided the initial inspiration for what was to come. Benjamin Monnig saw the Courier as a revolutionary idea and knew it still had a place in the current tablet market, although Microsoft had killed the project soon after the announcement of Apple's iPad."
On Tuesday, Taposé blogged that it had finally won approval to go on sale in the Apple App Store after "four months, three rejections, one appeal win and then reversal of said appeal, management UI review, and then one more final review for good measure."
The app costs $2.99. Intriguing, but can anyone help me understand how this would get past Microsoft's intellectual property lawyer army?
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 28, 20121 comments
The Nokia Lumia 900, the Windows Phone that is shouldering the smartphone market share dreams of both Microsoft and Nokia, will come to the United States on April 8.
In blogging about the release date this morning, AT&T added two twists: The device will be available in white and the price is extremely aggressive at $99.99 with a two-year contract.
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| Nokia Lumia 900 |
"Nokia Lumia 900 won the Best of CES award for smartphones and is more than just a killer phone at a killer pricepoint," wrote Jonathan Church, AT&T director of product marketing management. Michael Stroh, Microsoft's main Windows Phone blogger, also took up the pricing talking point, calling the phone "an astounding deal."
The Lumia 900 will be the third of Nokia's Windows Phones to be released as the Finnish company relaunches its smartphone line around the Windows Phone-first strategy, as opposed to the homegrown smartphone operating systems the company had previously ridden to first place in the worldwide smartphone market. The decisions have caused the phonemaker to get hammered by investors, although it's still far too early to call the strategy either a success or failure.
The previous flagship, the Lumia 800, was available only outside the United States. The Nokia Lumia 710 came to the United States via T-Mobile in January. While inexpensive at $49.99, the Lumia 710 (like the Lumia 800) had no front-facing camera, an odd design choice given Microsoft's emphasis on Microsoft Lync and its acquisition of Skype.
The Lumia 900 does have the front-facing camera, along with an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with a Carl Zeiss wide-angle lens. The device will also support Nokia's new Lumia-specific app, Creative Studio, which applies and displays photo effects to the viewfinder prior to taking a picture. Other features of the Lumia 900 include 4G LTE support, a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack Display and a 1.4 GHz Snapdragon processor. The device comes with 16 GB of memory, a limitation compared to the industry standard iPhone 4S, which is available with 16, 32 or 64 GB.
Pre-orders for the Lumia 900 will be available to qualified business customers with wireless service discounts starting March 30. The cyan and black versions of the Lumia 900 will be available in AT&T stores on April 8, and the white model will be available on April 22.
Also on April 8, AT&T will begin selling the massive HTC Titan II, the second generation of the 4.7-inch Windows Phone. The new version features a 16-megapixel camera and is priced at $199.99 with a two-year contract.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 26, 20125 comments
The Microsoft Office 365 full-court press is on. About nine months after launching the rebranded and upgraded online business productivity suite, Microsoft is finally giving the product the advertising air cover it needs to succeed.
It seems like nearly every consumer or general business Web site I visit these days has a Microsoft Office 365 advertisement. (Why this didn't start last July, I have no idea.)
That said, I was curious to see how prominently partners figure into the sales mix once a customer clicks through one of these ads. A quick click on one suggests that Microsoft views the partner role at that stage of the sales process as fairly minimal.
Looking at the landing page, I found a lot of information about the different plans and was also immediately invited to a direct sales chat session for more information.
Partner references on that landing page? Zero.
If a customer happens to know they're looking for partner help, they can find partners by clicking on the "Support" button in the horizontal navbar and scrolling down to "Find a partner" and "Partner deployment support."
A FAQ section also starts referencing partners about halfway down the page as the scenarios become more complicated. Microsoft is specifically recommending partner involvement for enterprise customers migrating from BPOS, for deployment services, for migration services and for custom development projects. The FAQ provides several contextual links to Microsoft Pinpoint.
What's your take? Is Office 365 the Microsoft channel's direct sales nightmare or is Microsoft putting an appropriate amount of emphasis on partners in this one stage of the sales and marketing process? And is a rising tide of attention from the ads in the last few weeks leading to more customer interest in your services as a partner? Let me know in the comments below or at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 22, 20123 comments
Microsoft used the kick-off of its Convergence conference today to update the Dynamics roadmap. The upshot: Cloud is still key but Redmond intends to keep using the hybrid cloud/on-premise story as a differentiator.
In a keynote, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner reiterated Microsoft's bullish view on the cloud market by extrapolating on some Forrester Research projections.
"Forrester [said cloud is] going to go from a $40 billion industry to a $240 billion industry just by 2020. We actually think that number is light, maybe even by two, at the speed that we're seeing the cloud take hold," Turner said.
Against that backdrop, Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov said the broad plans Microsoft laid out at Convergence a year ago to deliver cloud solutions with robust on-premise options are still in place.
"We made some significant statements at Convergence last year, and this year we're essentially telling you how we're continuing to deliver in Microsoft Dynamics on a cloud-based approach," Tatarinov said in his keynote.
"The world of business solutions as it relates to cloud is notoriously complex. And as we've worked with many hundreds and thousands of customers around the world to understand what their needs are that are related to the cloud, we're finding that most people really want to see mixed scenarios, and mixed workloads," he said. "And that is precisely where we're uniquely positioned, and enable people to deliver mixed workloads, some of which are running into the cloud."
Specifically, Microsoft provided five Dynamics roadmap updates:
- Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 will be available worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2012. Planned enhancements include multichannel retail capabilities with Web storefronts and "RoleTailored, in-context business intelligence" based on SQL Server technologies.
- Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 will be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2012. Both products will be cloud-enabled for Windows Azure and optimized for small and midsize businesses.
- A beta release of Dynamics NAV 2013 is planned for May.
- The next Microsoft Dynamics CRM service update will come in the fourth quarter.
The company also provided some new Dynamics CRM momentum numbers. The product is up to 33,000 customers and 2.25 million users. Microsoft did not break out online versus on-premises customers or users.
See Also:
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 19, 20121 comments
Tribridge, which became one of the three Microsoft Master VARs late last year, signed up a Sales Affiliate this month.
Tampa, Fla.-based Tribridge announced last week that 360 Consulting LLC had agreed to join its program.
Master VARs are able to create their own Microsoft-sanctioned networks of smaller Dynamics partners, called Sales Affiliates, throughout the United States. The smaller companies leverage the Master VAR's centralized marketing, support, operations and training. In addition to Tribridge, the other Master VARs are SBS Group and Socius.
This is the first sales affiliate that Tribridge has announced for its network. 360 Consulting provides Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft custom application services for small and midsize organizations in Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming and Arkansas, according to the release.
"This new relationship is an opportunity for Tribridge to extend our geographic reach in the Central Region and provide customers with the high-quality service and additional industry expertise 360 Consulting brings to the table," said Jeff Lynn, director of business integration for Tribridge, in a statement.
Tony Prelesnick, senior partner for 360 Consulting, said in the statement that his company is looking to boost sales by leveraging Tribridge's national brand and selling Tribridge's broader suite of services.
In an interview in December, Tribridge Chairman and CEO Tony DiBenedetto suggested his 400-employee company's goals for adding Sales Affiliates were modest in 2012.
"Our initial review of the partners would say we're not going to have hundreds of Sales Affiliates. We do think there will be tens of them," DiBenedetto said. "I don't think we necessarily have a goal because it's so early in the program. If we could get another 40 people in the mix [by adding Sales Affiliates], that's 10 percent growth for us."
See Also:
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 18, 20120 comments
Dell's top channel executive Greg Davis is rolling out the welcome mat for SonicWALL Inc. partners.
Davis wrote a blog entry for the channel late Wednesday, following news Tuesday that Dell would buy privately held SonicWALL, a network security and data protection vendor. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but The New York Times reported its value at $1.25 billion.
SonicWALL's channel program consists of about 15,000 resellers, while the Dell PartnerDirect program includes 100,000 resellers.
Davis promised there would be new opportunities for both groups of partners as the channel programs are combined.
"We intend to make SonicWALL products available to customers via Dell and through existing SonicWALL and Dell strategic channel partner relationships," Davis wrote. "A benefit to SonicWALL's channel members is that they will now have access to all Dell products, which we expect will open up new opportunities. And, Dell's existing PartnerDirect channel partners will have access to sell SonicWALL products. This will enable all partners to grow their business in new directions."
Davis also sought to put off any SonicWALL partner concerns about Dell's reputation for not playing well with partners. "Over the past four years we have worked hard to alleviate member concerns and earn their trust," Davis wrote, citing the deal registration process, rules of engagement and neutralized sales compensation that gives direct account teams full credit for working with the channel.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20120 comments