With the latest release of Symantec's storage management and high-availability products, the company is positioning the technologies as a way to create private cloud-like capabilities without ripping and replacing datacenter infrastructure.
Symantec this week unveiled the version 6.0 releases of 10 products that are scheduled to be available in December. They are Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, Symantec ApplicationHA, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing, Veritas Cluster File System, Veritas Replicator, Symantec VirtualStore, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows, Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC and Veritas Storage Foundation for Sybase ACE. Also included in the launch was Veritas Operations Manager 4.1.
Chandra Rangan, senior director of product marketing in the Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec, said the architects at the Fortune 500 companies and other large corporate clients that Symantec talks to are interested in cloud, but with caveats.
"To them the public cloud is interesting, and OK for certain types of workloads. But for core business applications, where we really come into play, they're more interested in the private cloud," Rangan said in an interview. "It doesn't make sense for [them] to set up a new entire infrastructure. They've already made huge investments. Moving the end-to-end stack is tough, time-consuming and extraordinarily expensive. They're also worried about lock-in [with the private cloud vendors]."
Symantec isn't claiming to be a private cloud vendor with the latest group of releases. The company has just tuned current products to enable some of the main drivers for private cloud. "You can get the most out of your storage assets and manage it more like a cloud to obtain faster provisioning, multi-vendor storage chargebacks and the ability to scale and contract storage assets without disruption," Rangan said.
Although the current rev of the products resulted from direct conversations with customers, Symantec will be relying on the channel to drive demand and handle field implementations. "Over a year and a half back, we started relying more heavily on the channel, when we dismantled our internal services organization," Rangan said. "A lot of these become architectural design and service-based sales. Now [partners] can go and help customers design the type of architecture that works with what they have."
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 06, 20110 comments
Microsoft recently published the results of its biggest overhaul of the customer- and partner-facing documents that explain licensing since 2005.
The redesigned Product Use Rights (PUR) document and Service Provider Use Rights (SPUR) document were made available on Oct. 1.
"I would say bravo to the centralized licensing team. Someone put a lot of thought into this," Rob Horwitz, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview. "I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe low seven figures went into vetting this design."
Horwitz, who published an analysis of the PUR and SPUR changes on the independent analyst firm's Web site, explained that the PUR and SPUR changes don't change licensing terms, only the way the terms are presented.
"I don't want to make it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread," Horwitz said. "But it's a really nice effort by the centralized licensing group, who don't have a huge amount of control over what the individual product groups' decisions are."
Licensing terms reflect the Microsoft product groups' control over how products are licensed. "When a product group is deciding on what the rules are, it's looking a lot more at what are customers saying and what are competitors doing," Horwitz said. Consistency across all of Microsoft's licensing terms is a second-tier concern, he noted.
The cosmetic and organizational changes to the PUR and SPUR improve the documents by making information pertaining to each product mostly contiguous, by giving the whole document a better graphic design that makes it easier to navigate and by providing important context up front. On the last point, for example, Horwitz said, the document now states clearly that product-specific rules trump other types of licensing rules.
One thing the 2005 redesign attempted was brevity, but in some cases that came at the expense of clarity, Horwitz said, and in any case, the document got longer over time anyway. "It grew from 44 pages to 123 pages," Horwitz said. The new version is more than 150 pages.
In his report, Horwitz summarizes, "The new PUR format should allow customers and partners to find answers to many types of product and online services licensing questions more quickly and promises to be less intimidating to first-time users."
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 05, 20110 comments
By most accounts, Amazon's Kindle Fire looks like a nice piece of hardware.
Shipping Nov. 15, the $199 Android-powered device sports a new Amazon browser called Silk and is optimized for media consumption.
Industry speculation centers on whether this device is the iPad rival that all of Apple's would-be competitors have been trying to produce since the iPad exploded out of the gate in 2010.
For example, in his news story on the Kindle Fire, my colleague Jeffrey Schwartz quoted Forrester analyst Sarah Rottman Epps saying, "Apple's place as market leader is secure, but Amazon will be a strong number two, and we expect no other serious tablet competitors until Windows 8 tablets launch."
Amazon may be that strong number two, but the Kindle Fire is probably irrelevant to Microsoft's eventual success or failure with Windows 8-based tablets.
In my view, the Amazon Kindle Fire is the device that senior Microsoft executives like Steve Ballmer initially thought the Apple iPad was. As Ballmer quipped about the iPad in June 2010, "A guy tried to take notes on one in a meeting with me yesterday. That was fun. The meeting didn't go real fast."
Apple's iPad is a work-life balance device that is heavily weighted toward the life side of the scale. Microsoft's original mistake was in thinking that the iPad was entirely on the life/fun/entertainment side. In fact, corporate interest in the iPad's utility has been intense and business-focused apps for the iPad have proliferated.
Apple and Microsoft have related skill sets with Apple weighted toward consumer and Microsoft weighted toward business. If Microsoft can produce a great business device that's solid on the fun and entertainment side, it should be able to compete with Apple in the part of the market that Microsoft really cares about.
That would give Apple some fits in a two-front war. The Kindle Fire would be pressuring the iPad on price and consumer friendliness on one side and Windows 8 would be coming after the iPad's nascent business market on the other.
Apple, of course, is the one in the market already. Amazon and Microsoft still have a lot to prove and lot to execute on. But, at least they probably don't have to worry much about each other.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 05, 20115 comments
Virtualization tools vendor Veeam Software reached a milestone for its partner program this month. The 18-month-old Veeam ProPartner Service Provider (PSP) program now has more than 1,000 cloud and service providers, the Columbus, Ohio-based company announced on Tuesday.
The 1,000 PSP members are part of a Veeam partner community that also includes 3,000 resellers and dozens of distributors worldwide, according to the company.
"Cloud and service providers partner with Veeam for three main reasons: to gain a competitive advantage in the industry, protect all virtual machines (VMs) in the hosted environment with a single solution and increase revenue with additional services," Mike Waguespack, director of emerging market development and global hosting for Veeam Software, said in a statement.
Veeam specializes in VMware virtual machine backup and replication, and its management tools enable optimization, management, monitoring and reporting on virtual machines in not only VMware environments but also with Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 04, 20110 comments
Mobile carriers began rolling out the Windows Phone 7.5 (aka "Mango") update to Windows Phone 7 earlier this week. Last night, I updated the HTC Trophy that I've been using for the last two and half months (the same phone I recently reviewed here against the Apple iPhone 4). It hasn't been long enough to make any definitive conclusions about the new OS, but my experience over less than 24 hours has been pretty positive. I'll have a lot more to say about this later, but here are some first impressions:
Update Process
The rollout this week was only supposed to cover about 10 percent of customers initially, according to Microsoft. After the troubles involving Windows Phone 7 NoDo update rollouts earlier this year, the company and the carriers are taking an understandably measured and coordinated approach with this rollout, a multi-step process that also involves updating device firmware. A second group of about 25 percent of users will get it next. Then a few weeks later, all users will be able to upgrade.
I can't say much about the regular update experience because I, um, may not have been officially invited to update yet. A hat tip to the winrumors blog for detailed instructions on how to fool Microsoft's Zune software (which is used to update Windows Phones) and the back-end systems into thinking you're due to for the update. It involves disconnecting your Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi connection while the software is checking for updates. I don't have any idea how people figure this stuff out, but I'm grateful for them.
That said, my process involved three consecutive updates (numbered 7392, 7403 and 7720) and took about 40 minutes. It was fairly straightforward, although it was unclear for about 10 minutes during step No. 7 of the nine-step process for the 7720 update that anything was actually occurring. No status bar crawling across the screen, no percentage of progress. Turns out everything was fine. I can only counsel patience.
The Basics
There's a lot to like in Windows Phone 7's tiled home screen interface. It's clean, it's informative, it's easy to use. Happily, Mango doesn't change the basics very much. In fact, the changes are so subtle that I had to start digging deeper into the interface once the update was done to be sure I was on the new phone OS. This is a case of not changing for change's sake. Good on Microsoft here. It's got a win with this interface, and it's not messing with it.
Same goes for performance. After two-and-a-half months of Windows Phone 7, I haven't had to reset the phone even once. That's a much better record than the family iPhone 4, which is also remarkably stable. I can't say anything very useful about Mango's stability after less than a day other than to say no problems so far under heavy use. As for performance, the HTC Trophy is performing just as nimbly in sliding from screen to screen on Windows Phone 7.5 as it did on version 7.
E-Mail Threads
One of the highlights of Windows Phone 7 is the very clean, very usable interface for Outlook. E-mail works fast, is easy to read and works intuitively. Plus, the phone pulls in Facebook or other images from the e-mail sender if one is available -- a nice touch. The experience is mostly the same, although in Mango, Microsoft added a threading feature. If a new message comes in that's part of a thread, it shows up with a little indent saying the number of messages in the thread. I found this a little confusing at first, but very quickly got accustomed to it. I'm not a big fan of e-mail thread views generally, but this is a decent implementation. I'll keep it turned on for now.
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| Screenshot of an e-mail conversation thread in Windows Phone 7.5. |
Internet Explorer
My first major annoyance with Mango was on Internet Explorer. It's not that IE isn't better in Mango than on Windows Phone 7. I know it supports many more technologies, leaves more room for the Web pages and is faster. It's just that it was oversold. Andy Lees, president of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, promised in May that "[t]he good news is that IE9 on 'Mango' is not just similar to the phone browser to the PC browser, it's exactly the same."
Based on that promise, I'd been looking forward to being able to check RCPmag.com Web traffic on the Google Analytics site, just like I check it using IE 9 on my Windows 7 laptop. Instead, I get the same useless symbols showing failed downloads of key graphic-based information that I got with Windows Phone 7 and that I get on the iPhone and iPad. I'll have to dig into why that is (a plug-in maybe?), but the upshot is: No, Mr. Lees, the experience is not exactly the same.
Multitasking
Microsoft has added multitasking support into the phone and it's fairly nice. The app switcher is easy to use by just holding down the back button. Nice large images of the available apps appear that make it very easy to recall what you were doing in each. In the few things I've tried, music plays well across various applications. An interrupted game of Angry Birds resumed back at the startup screen. To be fair, that's a Windows Phone 7-era app, and it may need to be updated to behave properly in the new Mango multitasking environment. Office documents wait patiently for input just where you left them.
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| Screenshot of Windows Phone 7.5's multitasking feature. |
Microsoft Office
One of the best features of Windows Phone 7 was the mobile Microsoft Office suite, featuring Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The Mango versions are basically the same with minor upgrades. Where all documents appeared as orange tiles in Windows Phone 7, they now have different colors based on the document type, so an Excel file is green, a Word file is blue, a PowerPoint file is orange and a OneNote document is purple.
The cosmetic change makes it faster to locate documents in the folder-free environment. A handful of templates for new Word and Excel files have been added, as well: Agenda, Expenses, Golf scorecard, Mileage tracker, Modern card, Modern invite, Timesheet, Vibrant card and Vibrant invite. What would make Office really great would be the ability to print documents from the phone on a wireless printer. That capability doesn't appear to be available yet.
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| Screenshot of Windows Phone 7.5's Office templates. |
Local Scout
A new local search feature called Local Scout serves up lists of local restaurants and other nearby attractions. A check in my neighborhood turned up a much more interesting list than I expected. I'm looking forward to giving Local Scout a try in less familiar places.
Battery Saver
One nice enhancements is called Battery Server. Found in Settings, it allows the phone to automatically turn off certain battery-draining features, such as automatic e-mail retrieval and running apps in the background, when battery life falls below 20 percent.
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| Screenshot of Windows Phone 7.5's Battery Saver tool. |
Voice
Voice control for hands-free dialing, texting and searching is very easy to use in the Mango release. Options allow the voice-control interface to come up from the lock screen, minimizing the amount of looking down you have to do to get the phone into a hands-free mode. In few brief tries, I found Microsoft's TellMe engine very effective at matching my commands to the names in my address book. A nice touch is the ability to say, "What Can I Say?" for a quick tutorial. I'm expecting to use this capability quite a bit.
With something like 500 feature improvements in Mango, I'm barely scratching the surface of what's new in Windows Phone 7.5. But after less than 24 hours, it strikes me as an impressive update, and I'm looking forward to digging deeper. If you've used the new version, what do you like or dislike about it? Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Related:
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 03, 20119 comments
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| Akash Saraf |
On Wednesday, Zenith Infotech announced that it was spinning off its remote monitoring and management (RMM) business as Zenith RMM, LLC. On Thursday, we caught up with Zenith Infotech's CEO and managing director, Akash Saraf, to get more perspective on the reasons behind selling the majority stake in the RMM side of the business to a private equity firm, and for some insights on his plans for the rest of Zenith Infotech.
At a high level, Saraf, who also sits on the spin-off firm's board, said the move will greatly increase the companies' combined R&D spending, allowing faster and more comprehensive product improvements, and will create the management bandwidth for both Zeniths to expand their businesses.
The deal with Boston-based Summit Partners effectively split Zenith Infotech into the Summit Partners majority-owned RMM company, and left Zenith Infotech to focus on its MirrorCloud backup/disaster recovery (BDR) product line and its new SmartStyle private cloud computing product line.
Zenith RMM, based in Boston, will have about 600 employees and own the Network Operations Center (NOC) in India that supports Zenith's 3,000 RMM partners and 400,000 managed endpoints. Zenith Infotech will have about 500 employees with headquarters in Mumbai and keep its U.S. headquarters outside Pittsburgh in Warrendale, Pa.
Of the former Zenith Infotech's $80 million in annual revenues, the RMM business accounted for about a third of the business, Saraf said. The 4-year-old MirrorCloud line makes up most of the rest of the revenue, with SmartStyle growing quickly since its January launch, he said.
The primary motivation for the split is getting additional resources for all the product lines, he said. "The net positive should be new feature sets and new innovations. Essentially, each business will get the resources it needs to be able to compete and innovate in this space," Saraf said.
He said Zenith spent about $22 million on R&D last year. Between the two companies, that amount should ramp up, based on Summit Partners' investments and Zenith Infotech's ongoing investments.
Aside from R&D, the addition of an experienced technology management team at the helm of Zenith RMM, led by new CEO Michael George, vastly expands Zenith's management capability.
"We were a relatively small company trying to do [several things]," Saraf said. "Our management team was finding it hard to manage all these businesses. It gives us more management bandwidth in the company."
In a separate interview Thursday, George confirmed that R&D spending would be increasing on the RMM side and left the door open to Zenith RMM making acquisitions to flesh out its technologies. Describing the due diligence process that he participated in with Summit Partners in the months before the deal, George said, "Categorically, we heard from Zenith Infotech they were facing some constraints and some resource contention because they were experiencing growth in their cloud initiatives and experiencing growth here [in the RMM business]."
"I can tell you, we have an absolutely outstanding partner in Summit Partners, [which has] over $11 billion in assets under management," George said. "I don't see any constraints on us in terms of our growth and the amount of resources that we have, or for that matter, what we may choose to do in and around acquisitions."
On the Zenith Infotech side, the R&D investments will be focused on enhancements of existing products. "I don't think you'll see any major new product from Zenith," Saraf said. "SmartStyle and MirrorCloud will be enhanced a lot more."
Meanwhile, Saraf assured partners the integration among products of the two Zeniths will continue to be tight. "Our cloud and the BDR products are tied into the RMM system, and they'll be tied in for a fairly long time. Though we are spinning it off, it's not like both companies are going completely different directions," he said. "Except for getting two invoices, which partners [selling both RMM and BDR or cloud] get anyway, they won't see inconveniences from this."
Related:
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 29, 20110 comments
UPDATE: This entry has been updated throughout with quotes and details from an interview with an investor involved in the deal and an executive from the new company.
Zenith Infotech announced Wednesday that it is spinning off its managed services unit, which is one of the largest remote management and monitoring (RMM) businesses in the industry.
The new company is called Zenith RMM, LLC and is backed by a "sizable growth equity investment" from Boston-based Summit Partners, according to a news release on the deal. Zenith Infotech will be a shareholder of Zenith RMM and Akash Saraf, managing director and CEO of Zenith Infotech, will serve on the board of directors for Zenith RMM.
Summit Partners will provide two directors for Zenith RMM's board -- John Carroll and Jason Glass.
In an interview with RCP Wednesday afternoon, Glass confirmed that Summit Partners has a majority stake in the new company. Glass described Zenith Infotech's stake as a "large minority owner" but declined to provide percentages.
In a statement in the release, Carroll introduced Michael George as CEO for Zenith RMM. "Michael is recruiting a world-class management team and, as a very customer and market-centric executive, he will quickly engage Zenith RMM's partner community to discuss the company's strategies for accelerating growth -- including an elevated channel enablement program and expansion of the company's leading platform for managed service providers," Carroll said.
According to George's LinkedIn profile, he has served as CEO of three firms that have been sold to larger technology companies. Interlynx Technology was sold to ProAct Technologies in December 2000, Bowstreet was sold to IBM in December 2005, and OAT Systems was sold to Checkpoint Systems in June 2008.
Asked about Summit Partners' exit strategy, Glass said, "We look to go build a business that can be sustainable over the long term," and added that Summit Partners was "really kind of indifferent" to whether it takes "four, six, eight, nine years."
"Our strategy is to invest in growing companies in markets with big opportunities. We think about ourselves as long-term investors," Glass said. He said Summit Partners' view of the MSP market, which Zenith entered in 2005, is that it's still growing quickly and that Zenith has a differentiator in the critical RMM space with its SaaS front end and its Network Operations Center (NOC) on the back end.
Zenith says 3,000 channel partners, serving 400,000 endpoints, use its RMM platform. The spinoff company now owns the NOC, which is based in India. The new company also has more than 600 employees, indicating that the majority of Zenith Infotech's current workforce went to Zenith RMM.
Steve Ricketts, vice president of marketing for Zenith RMM, described the deal as a "real win" for Zenith's existing partners for two reasons.
"Partners are looking for a very strong platform, and dedication to the space. The investment will allow us to increase development and accelerate new capabilities," said Ricketts, citing plans to expand the RMM platform with increased automation, support for mobile devices as endpoints, custom reporting and more support for virtualization.
He said partners will also benefit from a stronger U.S. presence. "We're increasing resources on sales and marketing. We'll have a strong focus on product management," Ricketts said. He added that there would also be more communication with partners about product roadmaps.
While U.S. headquarters for Zenith Infotech were outside Pittsburgh in Warrendale, Pa., Zenith RMM will be headquartered in Boston, where CEO Michael George, members of his new management team and Summit Partners are based. "We will continue to have a strong operation in Warrendale," Ricketts said.
Zenith Infotech's remaining product lines are the MirrorCloud business continuity solution and the SmartStyle private cloud package.
Related:
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 28, 20111 comments
Insight Enterprises, a distributor and Microsoft Large Account Reseller, is in the process of buying its Tempe, Ariz. neighbor Ensynch, a managed Microsoft systems integrator partner with multiple gold and silver competencies in the Microsoft Partner Network.
The deal was announced last week and is expected to close in 30 days. Terms were not disclosed.
With 5,100 employees and $4.8 billion in 2010 sales, Insight is bringing on the much smaller Ensynch to take its Microsoft-based services to what Insight President and CEO Ken Lamneck described in a statement as the "next level."
"Through a dedicated focus on client service, the Ensynch team consistently ranks in the top 2 percent of Microsoft partners. Combining Ensynch's technical skills with Insight's sales engine will elevate our ability to provide clients with complete software solutions to drive their success. We are excited about adding Ensynch's industry-leading capabilities in cloud, identity management and virtualization to our existing offerings," Lamneck said.
The acquisition buys Insight a firm with $16.2 million in 2010 services revenues, 65 full-time employees, more than 70 contractors and regional offices in Southern California and metropolitan New York.
Ensynch has three MPN gold competencies (virtualization, security and identity, and portals and collaboration) and six MPN silver competencies (business intelligence, content management, desktop, search, systems management and unified communications). Ensynch is also a Quest Software Platinum CSP Partner and a Citrix Silver Solution Advisor Partner.
The deal received a high-level blessing from Microsoft. In a statement accompanying the announcement, Jenni Flinders, vice president of the U.S. Partner Business, said, "With this acquisition, Insight and Ensynch perfectly complement each other's relative strengths to form a business that delivers more robust and comprehensive IT solutions to customers."
In addition to getting into growth areas, the acquisition may have another motivation for Insight. Microsoft had planned to introduce changes to its LAR payment model this month, reportedly to drive LARs to make more midmarket sales by reducing licensing payouts to LARs in enterprise accounts while increasing the payments on midmarket accounts.
In an earnings statement back in February, Insight warned investors that its largest software partner [read: Microsoft] was changing its channel incentive programs in late 2011. "[Insight] has updated its analysis and now expects the full year 2012 impact on gross profit to be between $5 and $10 million," the company said at the time. "The program changes will be finalized over the coming months and in the meantime, the Company is implementing action plans intended to help mitigate this expected impact."
Getting extra Microsoft services-based revenues from Ensynch could help Insight plug at least part of that revenue hole.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 26, 20110 comments
After his command performance at Microsoft Build, there's a drumbeat emerging for Steven Sinofsky to be the next CEO at Microsoft.
Sinofsky oversaw the unveiling of Windows 8 in Anaheim, Calif., this month and his control-heavy, secrecy-focused approach to releasing technical details helped generate excitement around some sneak peeks of the OS in late May and June.
The infamous anonymous mid-level Microsoft manager who blogs at Mini-Microsoft on Wednesday wrote: "psst. Board. CEO ma-ter-ial. Uh-huh. There you go. Not that I'd probably work in a SteveSi CEO Microsoft, but ya could do a lot worse!"
Picking up on the theme was Microsoft watcher Tom Warren at winrumors, who noted: "Don't be surprised if Sinofsky is named Microsoft CEO following a roaring success with Windows 8. The company's bets lay firmly on his head and it seems inevitable that he will succeed Ballmer over the next couple of years."
And both referenced longtime Microsoft blogger Joe Wilcox who last week compared Sinofsky to Steve Jobs.
The standard case for Sinofsky involves his stewardship of Windows 8 so far and his work in turning around the Windows franchise after the Vista debacle for the Windows 7 release, which so far has sold around 450 million licenses.
His under-promise/over-deliver approach notwithstanding, his success with Windows 7 is less impressive when you remember that the Vista failure was driven by Bill Gates' overreach. As chief software architect, Gates was famously involved in much of the design of Vista and, knowing it was his swan song, was trying to shoehorn many of his ambitious pet technologies, such as WinFS, into the OS. At the time, and probably still, there was no one within Microsoft with the stature to tell Gates to scale back, although Jim Allchin had the unenviable task of finally convincing Gates that major pieces had to be dropped if the OS were to ship on a reasonable timeline. For Windows 7, Sinofsky didn't have to try to manage Gates, as well as the project.
That said, Sinofsky delivered a remarkable, and remarkably successful and well-received, version of Windows as a follow-on, which was absolutely critical for Microsoft. (And there's nothing easy about quarterbacking any release of Windows.)
What's also impressive about Sinofsky's past is that he ran Microsoft's other crown jewel, the Office franchise, and built a reputation there for meeting ship targets with quality products.
The key (in addition to whether Steve Ballmer would let go of the company) is how Windows 8 fares. It's a vastly different type of project than Windows 7. With Windows 7, Sinofsky needed to get Windows back on track. With Windows 8, he's setting the operating environment on an entirely new set of tracks. He's proven an ability to execute with Windows 7 and Office. If Windows 8 is a winner, he'll have the vision thing, too.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20111 comments
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 lags badly in the smartphone market with low single-digit share, but a new independent survey that digs into buyers' purchase plans indicates that the platform may be close to breaking out.
The survey released this week by Connected Intelligence, a service from the NPD Group, notes that the Google Android platform remains dominant.
"The Android juggernaut continues, and that's not great news for some of their OS competitors," said Linda Barrabee, research director for Connected Intelligence, in a statement. "For example, one-third of BlackBerry smartphone owners are most interested in Android for their next smartphone purchase. That said, Android is also experiencing continued competition from Apple's popular iPhone, as well as some nascent competition from Windows Phone 7."
The Connected Intelligence survey digs a little deeper than most smartphone market share reports by asking respondents what they're considering buying next.
Android dominates in those questions, as well, generating more interest than any other operating system at 63 percent and being the platform that consumers were "most interested in" at 36 percent.
Where it gets interesting for Windows Phone is that 44 percent of smartphone owners and those who intend to buy a smartphone are considering purchasing a Windows Phone 7 device.
An equally high number, 45 percent of consumers, are still not aware of Windows Phone 7, according to the Connected Intelligence survey. Another obstacle is the 21 percent of survey respondents who said they had "too much time or money invested in another smartphone OS."
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 21, 20110 comments
A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in India has had its certification stripped by Microsoft based on complaints the partner company was using phone scams to drum up business, according to a report.
The Web site for the U.K.-based magazine PC Pro reported Wednesday that Microsoft had revoked the Gold status of Comantra.
According to the magazine, Microsoft acted after more than 18 months of complaints that the Gold Certified Partner was cold-calling users in the United Kingdom and elsewhere and offering to remove nonexistent malware for £185. In some cases, Comantra employees may have posed as Microsoft employees, according to the report.
"We were made aware of a matter involving one of the members of the Microsoft Partner Network acting in a manner that caused us to raise concerns about this member's business practices," PC Pro reported a Microsoft spokesman as saying in a statement. "Following an investigation, the allegations were confirmed and we took action to terminate our relationship with the partner in question and revoke their Gold status.
"There are no circumstances under which we would ever allow partners or any other organisations to pose as Microsoft," the spokesman continued. "We view matters such as these extremely seriously and take immediate action if such behaviour is brought to our attention and found to be the case."
Comantra's director Rajesh Bajaj told the magazine Microsoft's move was a surprise and said online reports of Comantra's business practices resulted from "negative marketing" by competitors.
Like all Gold Certified Partners, Comantra's right to use that logo would have ended soon anyway (see "Certified, Gold Certified Logos, Benefits Expire in 7 Weeks"). On Oct. 31, all partners are required to use only the new Microsoft Partner Network logos, which do not include Microsoft Gold Certified Partner or Microsoft Certified Partner as official partner levels.
Noting the PC Pro report, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security vendor Sophos, blogged later on Wednesday that Comantra may have had its status officially revoked but visitors to its Web site wouldn't know. "Hmm...Maybe someone should tell Comantra to update their website and remove that Gold Partner logo?" Cluley wrote next to a screengrab showing the Gold logo on the Comantra site.
Comantra has since removed it from a rotator that now shows only logos from "Norton from Symantec" and "McAfee Secure."
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 21, 20111 comments
The ambiguous era of overlap between the old Microsoft Partner Program titles and the new Microsoft Partner Network labels is drawing to a close.
Eric Ligman, director of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Experience, issued an official warning Monday in the form of a blog post titled, "Certified and Gold Certified partners, your Microsoft partner logo and software usage rights are about to expire."
Even though the full gold competencies of the newer Microsoft Partner Network went live on Nov. 1, 2010, partners had a full year -- until Oct. 31, 2011 -- to make the transition from the Microsoft Certified Partner and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner branding of the Microsoft Partner Program. Under the Software and Logo Benefits Extension, former Certified and Gold Certified partners could continue to brand themselves and use the software benefits of the older designations until that deadline.
"Well, as hard as it is to believe, that October 31, 2011 deadline is now just 7 weeks away," Ligman wrote. " As such, once we pass the October 31, 2011 date, there is no such thing as the 'Gold Certified Partner' or a 'Certified Partner' branding anymore and all benefit extensions are gone."
Soon all Certified logos will be out of the market (or at least risking Microsoft's legal wrath). Partners with silver competencies, and especially gold competencies, in the MPN will have a cleaner story to take to their customers. They'll no longer be competing with legacy partners with non-comparable precious metal-related titles.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 12, 20110 comments