In an effort to get more of its best advocates to become walking advertisements for Windows Phones, Microsoft is instituting a discount program for partners.
Windows Phone Division President Andy Lees announced the Windows Phone Discount Program for Partners last week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, where many partners were already walking around with Windows Phone 7 devices.
Under the program, partners with at least one competency are eligible for offers for unlocked Windows Phone devices and savings on voice and data service plans. The program applies to any competency, not just the mobility competency.
While Microsoft's universe of partners is about 640,000 companies, about 20,000 organizations have a competency, according to figures released at WPC. Employees need to associate their Windows Live ID with the partner company to take advantage of the offer, and multiple employees can participate.
The device offer is worldwide. Partners who meet the eligibility requirement can access the unlocked phones from eXpansys, a global consumer technology online retailer based in the United Kingdom. So far, the voice and data plan discounts are only available in the United States through Sprint and T-Mobile. According to a FAQ, Microsoft is working to add mobile carriers in other countries for non-U.S. partners.
There is currently no end date for the program, and partners with current Windows Phone service plans may be able to update their service plans to a discounted plan.
More information is available here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 21, 20110 comments
A Japanese newspaper is reporting that one of the Windows Phone "Mango" devices on display at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last week may go on sale as early as late August.
That would put the phone out ahead of the fall release schedule that Microsoft officials have offered for the Mango, aka 7.5, update to Windows Phone 7. As if beating a ship date target wouldn't be jolting enough, the phone is also waterproof and, apparently, pink.
According to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei (via engadget), Fujitsu will offer the first Mango device called the IS12T for $378 to $505 on the KDDI network in Asia.
Given that current Windows Phone 7 devices will be upgradeable to Mango, it seems possible that the device could ship before the phone OS is actually ready.
The device from Fujitsu is one of four Windows phones displayed on stage during a WPC keynote last week by Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's OEM Division.
HTC, LG, Samsung and Dell have all made Windows Phone 7 devices, and all but Dell have publicly committed to making devices for Mango. But the Mango release will feature three new manufacturers: Fujitsu, Acer and ZTE.
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| Microsoft OEM Chief Steve Guggenheimer shows off Windows Phone "Mango" devices at WPC. The pink one on the table from Fujitsu could ship as soon as August. |
Last week, Guggenheimer showed devices from each of the three new manufacturers running live Mango builds. Of the IS12T, he said, "I think this Fujitsu brings a little bit of lightheartedness and life along with a waterproof design. Great capability in terms of the camera."
Guggenheimer said Acer "brings one of the large OEM brands into the phone space" and ZTE "brings one of the largest manufacturers in the phone space" into the Windows Phone world.
He also showed for the first time the next-generation Samsung device. "It's very thin and light, and that's the theme you're going to see as the processors get thinner and better battery life. As the screens get better, we're going to see phenomenal screen resolutions, great battery life, lightweight devices across the phone," Guggenheimer said.
Also hard at work on Mango devices are the engineers at Nokia, which is transitioning from the Symbian platform to Windows Phone Mango. Nokia plans a limited release of Windows phones in the fall and full-scale production in 2012 (read "Nokia: Yes, We'll Have a Windows Phone in the Fall").
UPDATE 7/27: Fujitsu previewed the Mango-based IS12T smartphone in Japan this morning, one day after the mobile OS update hit RTM. According to an IDG video from the event (below), the IS12T "will be available in Japan only in September, or sometime thereafter."
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20110 comments
Apple released its quarterly earnings Tuesday night, and the company continues to sell consumer devices at a crazy clip.
For the product numbers that everyone cares about: The company sold 20.34 million iPhones in the quarter ended June 25, and sold 9.25 million iPads over the same period.
By growth rate compared to the year-ago quarter, that's 142 percent growth for the iPhone and 183 percent growth for the iPad.
Macs beat the PC market with a 14 percent unit increase over the previous year to 3.95 million. Sales of the iPod are dropping -- down 20 percent to 7.54 million units. That's not surprising given that the iPhone and iPad are both supersets of iPod functionality.
Apple revenues and profits, quite recently a fraction of what Microsoft put away each quarter, are now well above Redmond's revenues. Apple had quarterly revenues of $28.57 billion and net profit of $7.31 billion. When Microsoft reports earnings on Thursday, analysts are expecting revenues in the vicinity of $17.25 billion.
In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, "We're thrilled to deliver our best quarter ever, with revenue up 82 percent and profits up 125 percent. Right now, we're very focused and excited about bringing iOS 5 and iCloud to our users this fall."
Meanwhile, the lack of a Microsoft tablet with traction is giving the iPad an opportunity to gain a foothold in the enterprise.
During the earnings call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said 47 percent of Global 500 companies are testing or deploying iPad.
"In the 15 months since iPad is shipped, we've seen iPads used in the enterprise in ways we could have never imagined," Oppenheimer said according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "Companies like Boston Scientific, Xerox and Salesforce.com are deploying thousands of iPads and revolutionizing how their sales teams engage their customers. iPad is being used inside the country's top hospitals like HCA and Cedars-Sinai and in retail at Nordstrom and at Esteé Lauder's Clinique counters. General Electric, SAP and Standard Chartered have developed internal apps for training, currency tracking and business process management to help make employees even more productive. And Alaska Airlines and American Airlines are using the iPad in cockpit to replace paper-based navigational and reference information pilots carry with him on every flight."
Oppenheimer offered a similar enterprise story for iPhone that underscores the uphill battle for Windows Phone 7 even among enterprise customers. "iPhone continues to be adopted as the standard across the enterprise with 91 percent of the Fortune 500 deployed or testing the device, up from 88 percent last quarter," Oppenheimer said. "We're also seeing great growth in scale worldwide. Today, 57 percent of Global 500 companies are testing or deploying iPhone, fueled by strong employee demand and opportunities for custom App development."
Cupertino is still spinning inside the tornado.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20110 comments
Zenith Infotech is expanding the types of services it makes available to its managed services provider (MSP) customers with a new program called NOC Service Miles.
"The Service Miles program is similar to what a rewards program would be for a credit card or an airline," says Jason Jacobetz, director of sales at Zenith, a Pittsburgh area-based provider of services for remote monitoring and management (RMM), backup and disaster recovery, and virtual helpdesk.
Zenith's 5,600 partners will earn so-called Service Miles, or credits, that can be redeemed for service projects performed by Zenith's Network Operations Center staff on behalf of end-user customers.
The credit system depends on how many software agents a partner has installed with customers. Zenith's desktop agent is worth three credits, Remote Server Watch is worth five, Proactive Server Care is worth five and Remote Server Care is worth 15. Each month, Zenith will tally a partner's total credits and divide it by 12 to calculate the number of the "Service Miles" credits the partner gets that month. (Unused credits expire after six months.)
Credits can be used to buy NOC services such as third-party patching, service pack installs, anti-virus rollouts, client software installations, installing BlackBerry servers, configuring or migrating Exchange servers, optimizing desktops or troubleshooting applications.
The MSP can then bill the customer for that service in any way they choose. "The NOC Service Miles program will help MSPs get even closer to that 100 percent utilization rate [for technical staff] because they're uncovering more billable time, doing more project work and still having their own time during the day," Jacobetz says. He says the types of projects MSPs can use Zenith's NOC for are generally those which the MSP's helpdesk staff would often perform remotely anyway.
As an example of how credits are allocated, Jacobetz says a partner with Zenith agent deployments equating to 1,200 credits would have 100 "Service Mile" credits to use on behalf of customers each month. Each credit roughly equates to a single desktop in a Zenith NOC project.
To schedule service for a customer using the credits, an MSP would need to look on Zenith's NOC schedule for an available time 48 hours or more in the future. The MSP would select the customer's site and select the targeted desktops, and Zenith would perform the work and notify the MSP upon completion.
Zenith began piloting the Service Miles program with 300 of its MSPs in late April and opened it to 750 more partners a few months later. As of mid-July, the program is available to all of Zenith's MSPs.
Service Miles enrollment is free for Zenith's MSP customers through Oct. 1. After that, partners will need to enroll and pay a $99 monthly subscription, which will include an automatic 20 new credits per month in addition to the credits the partner has earned through customer installations.
Jacobetz positions Zenith's move to expand its NOC-based services on behalf of MSPs as a way to avoid what he describes as a downward price spiral in the RMM market. "We're seeing the RMM market slowly migrate to trying to play a price game. Cost of an agent is continuing to go down and down and down, and thus the value of what that software does is continuing to decrease," he says. "Instead of playing that pricing war, we're looking to accentuate the value of what we can do on the service side."
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20110 comments
There was a session at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last week on "Upselling and Cross Selling Windows Intune and Office 365." While I found time to write about the tweaks in billing on Office 365, the increase in the Internal Use Rights available to partners for Intune, and about the beta of the next rev of Intune, I missed this session (along with several hundred other great-sounding WPC sessions).
Looks like this was an interesting one. Steve Deming of Microsoft's TS2 team blogged about it late last week, especially the roundtable segment when partners talked about how they're selling the products.
Highlights of the roundtable, according to Deming's blog [emphasis his]:
- One partner gives the [Partner of Record] fees right back to the customer to show a lower acquisition cost. This partner has a 90%+ close rate and currently 80+ Intune customers.
- One partner LOVES the Intune/Office 365 pay-as-you-go model. No upfront costs -- immediate dollars toward services.
- One partner talked about using Intune as the prep step for Office 365. Helps identify marginal Office 365 machines and shows IMMEDIATE value of central management with Intune.
- One partner talked about Intune with MDOP wasn't even an option - it was how they started the conversation. They found App-V to be VERY popular with their small business customers.
RCP will be tracking down some of these partners in the coming weeks for more details and insights on their business models.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 20, 20110 comments
Microsoft is throttling back on the absolute number of National Systems Integrators (NSIs), but the elite group of U.S.-based, high-growth partners continues to have an outsized effect on Microsoft ecosystem revenues.
To qualify as an NSI in 2010, U.S.-based systems integrators generally needed to meet revenue bars and pipeline bars reportedly in the seven- to eight-figure range, have more than 50 Microsoft-focused employees, and meet a "law of threes" -- engaging in three or more locations, customer size segments or vertical markets (read "Microsoft Partners, Meet the NSIs"). Benefits included a national Business Development Management or NSI Partner Account Manager, special market development funds and other advantages that come from being top-of-mind for the Microsoft field.
Microsoft started fiscal year 2011 (in July 2010) with about 40 NSIs. The company is starting its fiscal year 2012 this month with 34, said Jenni Flinders, vice president of U.S. partner business development and sales in the U.S. Partner Group at Microsoft. Microsoft has been gradually upping the requirements and paring the list of NSIs since launching the designation in 2006 with about 70 partners.
Examples of major U.S. partners currently identifying themselves as NSIs include Perficient, ePlus Inc., PointBridge, Azaleos Corp., Tribridge, Catapult Systems, iLink Systems, Slalom Consulting, En Pointe Technologies and Magenic Technologies.
In an interview at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this month, Flinders provided some metrics on the revenues that NSIs are posting:
- NSIs recorded $4 billion in annual Microsoft-related consulting revenues last year, for an average of about $120 million per NSI.
- NSIs influenced about $1 billion in Microsoft revenues over the course of the year, and Microsoft reports the average per NSI is $36 million.
- The estimated influence pipeline for all NSIs right now is also about $1 billion.
Also over the last year, NSIs -- along with the rest of the Microsoft partner community -- have been focused on switching over to the Microsoft Partner Network. "We've landed MPN with the NSIs," Flinders said. "Partners are transitioning to the competencies that are important right now." Those areas of focus for Microsoft include online, virtualization and unified communications competencies, she said.
According to Flinders, NSIs have earned an average of seven to 11 competencies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 18, 20110 comments
Quest Software, a multiple winner of the Microsoft Global ISV Partner of the Year award, is rolling out a unified worldwide partner program for its community of 4,500 reseller, referral and distribution partners.
The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company announced the new Quest Partner Circle program during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles last week.
The main goal of the program is to pull together previously unrelated partner programs in a way designed to help individual Quest partners sell a broader portfolio of Quest's systems management products into a potential global market that the company estimates at $16.7 billion.
"Each of [our] partner communit[ies] has been treated differently on requirements, certification, training, enablement, deal registration and discounts," said Michael Sotnick, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances for Quest. "In addition, there was no clear way that a partner who was doing business in our data-protection business [for example] could see a path to selling other solutions. We talk about it internally as opening the aperture."
Quest, which had 2010 revenues of about $765 million and has more than 100,000 customers, has grown its business both organically and through the acquisitions of many companies over the years, including ScriptLogic, NetPro, Aelita Software, BakBone, MessageWise, Vintela, Provision Networks, PacketTrap Networks, PassGo, Vizioncore, Fast Lane, Foglight, Surgient, Wingra Technologies, Volcker Informatik AG and Toad.
Many of those acquisitions came with their own channel ecosystems. Over the last 18 months, Quest has been making an effort to build its channel organization and unify its various and sundry programs.
Sotnick himself is part of that build-out. The veteran channel executive, with recent channel experience at SAP Americas, also helped VERITAS integrate its global partner network just ahead of its acquisition by Symantec Corp. in 2005. Quest has added executive, sales, marketing and technical people in the last year-and-a-half to build its channel team to several hundred employees.
Quest has been gradually ramping up the percentage of indirect sales in its revenue mix from 38 percent in 2008 to 39 percent in 2009 to 40 percent in 2010 and seems poised to really start tipping the scales toward indirect revenues.
One example of that investment is the company's Market Development Funds for top-tier partners. "Our multi-million MDF has quadrupled over the last 18 months," says Christine McDermott, senior director of partner marketing for Quest. "It was in North America, and it's extended throughout the world."
The new Quest Partner Circle framework has three tiers: Elite, Premier and Registered. Registered and Premier partners will go through distribution sourcing, while Elite partners will have a mix of one-tier sourcing and distribution sourcing.
While Registered and Premier partners will sell across the product portfolio, Elite partners can earn their status in any of five areas. Those Elite areas include Quest Core, ScriptLogic, Data Protection, Server Virtualization and Public Sector.
Among the five Elite areas, the Quest Core group accounts for the most revenue by far, while the Server Virtualization group has the largest number of partners, Sotnick says.
A few of Quest's partner communities are not included in the first step of unifying the company's partner programs. "The announcement does not encapsulate our relationships with global systems integrators, MSPs and global alliance partners," he says.
Within the new program, partners can choose from 100 courses covering technical and sales training across seven solution specializations. The specializations are Windows Management, Database Management, Virtualization & Cloud, Data Protection, Application & Performance Monitoring, Identity & Access Management, and Migration.
The decision to launch at the Microsoft WPC reflects Quest's longstanding and deep bets on Microsoft technology and the Microsoft ecosystem. "Our biggest piece of business is in the Microsoft ecosystem," says Sotnick.
Quest was a silver sponsor of the WPC and a platinum sponsor of Microsoft's Office 365 part of the expo floor. Sotnick says launching at WPC was one of the most effective ways Quest could get the word out to its own partners, most of whom are Microsoft partners.
In a statement accompanying Quest's program announcement, Larry Orecklin, vice president of worldwide specialist sales in the Microsoft Enterprise Partner Group, said, "Microsoft recognizes the value of the new Quest Partner Circle program as an important step towards Quest's commitment to building a powerful ecosystem to support our mutual global customers."
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 18, 20110 comments
Microsoft will merge two of the new Microsoft Partner Network competencies -- virtualization and System Center -- into one in the next few months.
"Just as System Center and Hyper-V have integrated and grown together, partners have told us there's an opportunity for us to streamline the competencies in this area," said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last week. "We're [merging] the systems management and virtualization competency into one."
Specific details of when the new virtualization-System Center combined competency would take effect weren't available immediately. However, Roskill said the change would fit a pattern that the Worldwide Partner Group will follow in rolling out changes to the MPN competency structure, which was first introduced in a gradual process from May 2010 through November 2010.
"Major changes will be announced in July, and they will go live no earlier than October. This gives you an opportunity to be able to plan for your own businesses," Roskill said.
The virtualization-System Center competency merger is the second recent change to the competency lineup.
In May, Microsoft announced plans to split the Unified Communications competency into two competencies: a Messaging competency based on Exchange and a Communications competency focused on Microsoft Lync.
Roskill mentioned the Communications competency, as well, when he announced the virtualization-System Center competency merger. "The communications competency is a direct response to the next billion-dollar opportunity for Microsoft. You asked for it, we listened, go get it," Roskill said on Wednesday at WPC.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 18, 20110 comments
Microsoft is putting some new partner incentives behind Microsoft Lync to try to capitalize on the buzz surrounding its unified communications solution set.
"We're going to increase the incentives for partners that lead with Lync as their communications solution, whether on-premises or in the cloud," said Microsoft's top channel executive, Jon Roskill, in a keynote this week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. "This brings the power of our solution incentive program to Microsoft's next billion-dollar business."
In an interview, Ashima Singhal, Group Product Manager for Lync, said, "The idea behind this program is to reward partners who drive Lync transactions."
Microsoft large account resellers (LARs) previously were the only partners to get direct revenues from Microsoft in on-premise Lync or Office Communication Server deals.
Under the new program, solution providers who drive the deals will get up to 20 percent margins on first-year revenues on net-new Lync licenses for voice and conferencing, Singhal said. Those partners will get 10 percent margins on net-new Lync licenses for instant messaging, she said.
Singhal said Lync joins a handful of other products singled out for solution provider margins at the moment.
Other similar incentive programs should be coming. During his keynote, Roskill said that Microsoft is working to broaden its partner payouts in FY '12 on more products. In all, Microsoft plans $5.8 billion in channel investments, including solution incentives, over the next 12 months, he said.
Microsoft executives were especially bullish at WPC about the prospects for Lync to experience hockey-stick growth in the coming year.
In his keynote on Wednesday, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, equated enterprise excitement around Lync to consumer excitement around the Kinect motion controller for Xbox.
"I have yet to demo that product and not see customers light up like you're showing them Kinect in a retail mall. It's a lot of fun to show that product," Turner said of Lync.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20110 comments
Microsoft is tweaking the way partners will be paid advisor fees when they get customers signed up for public cloud services like Office 365 and Windows InTune.
A change announced this week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles tips payments in partners' favor. But the change doesn't address many partners' fundamental complaint that Microsoft won't let partners bill their customers themselves.
Microsoft left the fundamental formula unchanged -- when a partner sells new seats of Office 365, the partner is eligible for 12 percent margin on the customers' entire first year payments to Microsoft, plus a 6 percent renewal fee every year as long as the customer keeps subscribing and maintains the original partner as the Partner of Record.
What changed is that Microsoft accelerated when that 12 percent net-add seat payment goes to partners. Under the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which was the predecessor to Office 365, partners got the 12 percent in four quarterly payments over the course of the year -- in other words, a 3 percent margin each quarter.
Now Microsoft will pay partners the entire 12 percent in the first quarter after the sale. Microsoft, correctly, positions the change as a cash-flow-boon to partners.
(There are some other less significant changes to the payout model, but I got different stories from different product teams at WPC about how those would work. I'll report on those when I can confirm the details.)
Microsoft officials are saying that they're getting fewer complaints from partners about direct billing (see our interview with Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, from the July issue for details).
Some of the partner metrics around cloud that were announced at WPC do seem to point to growing acceptance by partners of Microsoft's direct billing approach.
The strongest evidence is that Microsoft now says 42,000 partners are signed up to sell public cloud services, more than double the 16,000 the company had signed up by WPC 2010. (An important caveat is that only an undisclosed fraction of those numbers of partners have actually closed cloud deals.)
The other question is what limit the direct billing model might impose on the audacious target Microsoft COO Kevin Turner set during his Wednesday keynote for partners selling cloud.
"Office 365: 5 million licensed users, 2.8 million already deployed, 42,000 partners trained. I want the other 600,000 partners to get on board. That number needs to be 642 next year," Turner said.
Does the faster payment on the 12 percent advisor fee make a difference to you? Comment below or shoot me an e-mail at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20113 comments
An annual focus of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is partner-to-partner activity.
The 2011 WPC in Los Angeles, with its 12,000 reported partner attendees, presented exceptionally strong opportunities for P2P activity. Microsoft officials said attendees had scheduled 25,000 P2P meetings and counting during WPC and reiterated a previously disclosed estimate of $10.1 billion in P2P activity among Microsoft partners in 2010.
But the company also provided an update on a new structured P2P effort, called the Dynamics Lead Referral Program, in which Microsoft passes leads from non-Dynamics partners to Dynamics partners and pays bonuses to the referring partners if the deal closes. (Read "Dynamics: The Power of Referral.")
We described the program's basic outlines in a feature in March this way: Partners who come across a potential Dynamics customer can refer the deal to Microsoft by registering it with the Microsoft Dynamics organization. Microsoft then makes a referral to an appropriate Dynamics partner. If the deal closes in 12 months, the referring partner gets a bonus worth 5 percent of the deal value, up to $20,000 per deal.
From the WPC stage this week, Microsoft's top channel executive, Jon Roskill, said, "In the first six months of running this, over 750 of these deals have been submitted."
Roskill didn't mention the amount paid out in bonuses, the number of deals closed or the value of deals that have passed through the program. Due to the length of the sales cycle, Microsoft may not have meaningful figures yet for those metrics.
In any case, it's good to see that some partners are taking advantage of a relatively painless way to pass along some business and make some money.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20110 comments
The literal centerpiece of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last year in Washington, D.C. was the Azure Platform Appliance. The tractor-trailer-sized prototype dominated the 2010 WPC show floor.
A year later, the Azure Appliance played a strictly backstage role at the 2011 WPC in Los Angeles this week. While the Appliance was absent, however, at least it was mentioned.
Microsoft and its Appliance partners -- HP, Dell, Fujitsu and eBay -- had been mostly tight-lipped about the Appliance in the year between the conferences even though executives had said last July that services based on them would start becoming available in late 2010.
Last year, Microsoft and OEM executives said the Appliances would initially consist of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Microsoft-specified configuration of nearly 900 servers, along with storage and networking gear. Microsoft would remotely manage the Appliances and provide platform software updates.
With little public discussion of the Appliances in the interim and with two of the boxes' key public advocates -- Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie -- gone from Microsoft, the future of the devices was very much in doubt. Meanwhile, Microsoft has recently ramped up emphasis on the related concept of private cloud, which is more a software play and more in line with Microsoft's traditional strengths.
While no Appliances were on display at this year's Dell, Fujitsu, HP or Microsoft booths, Microsoft did confirm that work is continuing on the joint projects.
In a blog post by the Server and Tools Business team on Tuesday, detailed progress by Fujitsu, HP and eBay. According to the blog:
- Fujitsu announced in June that they would be launching the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform (FGCP/A5) service in August 2011, running on a Windows Azure Platform Appliance at their datacenter in Japan. By using FGCP/A5, customers will be able to quickly build elastically-scalable applications using familiar Windows Azure platform technologies, streamline their IT operations management and be more competitive in the global market. In addition, customers will have the ability to store their business data domestically in Japan if they prefer.
- HP also intends to use the appliance to offer private and public cloud computing services, based on Windows Azure. They have an operational appliance at their datacenter that has been validated by Microsoft to run the Windows Azure Platform and they look forward to making services available to their customers later this year.
- eBay is in the early stages of implementing on the Windows Azure platform appliance and has successfully completed a first application on Windows Azure (ipad.ebay.com). eBay is continuing to evaluate ways in which the Windows Azure platform appliance can help improve engineering agility and reduce operating costs.
Missing from the blog statement is any mention of Dell. In an interview on Wednesday, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Worldwide Partner Group Jon Roskill confirmed that Dell was still working on an appliance. Roskill also contended that the message from Microsoft and the OEM partners about the availability timeline for the Appliances at the 2010 WPC was more nuanced than was generally reported.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 20110 comments