In the bubble of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference this week in Los Angeles, you wouldn't know that Windows Phone 7 badly lags the Apple iPhone and the Google Android platform in market share. Everywhere you looked around the LA Convention Center and in hotel meeting rooms and partner parties, people's small screens were filled with tiles.
If you're a Microsoft partner using Windows Phone 7, we want to hear your story. Why did you choose the platform? What were your tradeoffs in going with Microsoft's mobile OS versus the two dominant smartphone OSes or BlackBerry RIM? What do you like best and least? What do you recommend for customers? If you're a Microsoft partner and you went with an iPhone or Android, we'd like to hear why, as well. E-mail your story to [email protected] for an article in a future issue of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 20114 comments
There are certain things you can expect on the main stage at every Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
One is a high-energy Steve Ballmer keynote to kick things off. Another is some sort of parade involving partners crossing the stage from more than 100 countries. Third is a closing keynote from Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner, in which he stirs things up with a bunch of crazy one-liner potshots at Microsoft's competition.
Microsoft played up Turner's combativeness this year, with Microsoft global channel chief Jon Roskill and others referring to the COO as Microsoft's "Chief Compete Officer." Turner did his part on Wednesday, and partners in the Staples Center in Los Angeles seemed to enjoy it. During the keynote, Jamison West, CEO of Arterian, tweeted, "Kevin Turner has a career in comedy if Microsoft doesn't work out."
Here are some of the Turner-isms from this year:
Google
- "Office 365, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing but a Google butt-kicker, that's all it is."
- "Just look at some of these customers that we've rescued from Google," Turner said in reference to a slide on the big screen. "These are win-backs, customers who made a mistake, a very innocent mistake, and we went in there and said, we're here to help with our partners, and we took these customers and we moved these customers straightaway -- straightaway."
- "Hey, the whole 50 bucks per year, per user is just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to what customers are getting charged [by Google] and what they have to do to try to prop up that inferior messaging system and set of productivity applications."
- "Google is helping us with some of their actions, and I'm encouraged to remind you all this is a company that has a mission statement that they have to remind themselves not to do evil, right?"
Salesforce.com
- "Now we've got this humongous pacifier to stick in the mouth of Marc Benioff called Dynamics CRM Online."
- "When you think about Salesforce, the best thing I can tell you is don't let the customers get forced into paying these exorbitant prices and hidden charges for a solution that doesn't quite meet their business needs."
Oracle
- "To really talk to a customer about whether they should bet on Oracle, let's just take a look at the cast of characters and you make the call," Turner said displaying photos of Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison, President Mark Hurd and President/CFO Safra Catz to huge laughter. "I don't even know what to say."
- "Their lack of focus on customer service, taking care of customers and doing the right thing by customers is catching up with them."
- "There are no happy Siebel customers in the world, you all know that."
VMware
- "We've made some tremendous progress versus VMware, probably more than any other competitor this past year. And the way we've been able to do that is we've caught VMware flatfooted, because they're fighting the economics of the cloud. ... The more VMs you have, the more our savings goes up, because at Microsoft, anything beyond six VMs is free."
Apple
- Showing a picture of an Apple Authorized Reseller in Latin America selling Windows 7 on Apple hardware: "Now, that should tell all of you a lot about the importance of having a great OS. Even the Apple franchise stores think so."
Cisco
- "Think about all the years that Cisco's been milking those high margins, 75, 85 percent margins on that unified communications product. Where do we stack in that? There's all kinds of business value to be added by our Microsoft partner group with Lync."
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 20110 comments
Microsoft will drastically expand the number of Microsoft Stores over the next few years, a senior Microsoft executive said Wednesday.
"We're going to open up to 75 more stores over the next two to three years, and continue to bring our stores outside the U.S. as well," said Microsoft COO Kevin Turner in a keynote Wednesday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles.
Turner said Microsoft currently has 11 stores open and that the retail locations are helping the company with product development.
"The biggest single thing, ladies and gentlemen, we've learned from the stores is it's helping us to transition from thinking about our customers to thinking like our customers. And giving us that direct customer feedback is what we're learning and getting from our stores, providing great choice, value and service," said Turner, who came to Microsoft from Wal-Mart in 2005 and has reportedly been a forceful advocate in Redmond for expanding the company's retail presence.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 20110 comments
Scott's last day of live-Tweeting WPC keynotes was full of zingers from Microsoft COO Kevin Turner. Read all of his Tweets from WPC at @scottbekker, and keep updated on all WPC-related news on our WPC page here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 20110 comments
For all the grief that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gets from Wall Street, he's extremely popular among Microsoft partners at the Worldwide Partner Conference. I regularly find myself in conversations with Microsoft partners who talk about the energy that they draw from a Ballmer keynote and tell me repeatedly that he "gets" partners.
During his WPC keynote earlier this week, Ballmer gave a refreshingly realistic description of the choices that partners have and did a nice job articulating the unique role partners play in Microsoft's product development and business decisions.
From the transcript (emphasis mine):
"But I find that our partners have perhaps the most interesting and unique set of insights on our business of anybody on the planet. You're involved, you care, you spend time and energy studying and understanding what we're up to. You take the time to translate these technologies into the solutions that really change people's lives, and yet you are independent business people who are coming to work every day cheering for us, but also understanding that you need to consider alternatives. So, you're pushing us, pushing us, pushing us, pushing us to improve our performance.
"Customers aren't really quite as all-in as you are, and our employees have a hard time really pushing us as objectively as our partners."
What's your take? Does Ballmer still get it when it comes to partners? Comment below or e-mail me at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 20113 comments
Microsoft treated attendees at its 2011 Worldwide Partner Conference to a steady drumbeat of warnings that Windows XP's days are numbered.
"XP end of life is not that far off -- a thousand days to be exact," intoned Tami Reller, corporate vice president and CFO for Windows and Windows Live, during a WPC keynote on Monday.
Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner amplified the theme in his keynote on Wednesday, broadening it to include Office 2003 and Internet Explorer 6 in addition to Windows XP: "We love those products, but you know what? They're dead."
If Turner's remark was full of characteristic hyperbole, Reller's timeline wasn't fudged. The end of extended support falls on April 8, 2014, according to a Microsoft Windows lifecycle fact sheet. That's 1,000 days from Wednesday, according to an online date calculator.
Reller defined what end of life will mean for XP. "Ongoing standard support and software maintenance will not be a part of the Windows XP experience," she said.
While 2014 seems like a long way off, it's not so far off in terms of corporate desktop OS upgrade planning cycles. For the many organizations that skipped Windows Vista, it means they may need to commit to Windows 7 rather than waiting for Windows 8 if they want to stay current on support.
Meanwhile, Reller encouraged partners to urge their customers to migrate to Windows 7, which she said has sold 400 million copies so far. "[The end of extended support] can introduce material risk to a business. Together we must help our customers migrate more than 300 million desktops to a modern experience. You most certainly will play a critical role," Reller said.
In addition to applying the customer stick of fear, Reller held out the partner carrot of service revenues. "Numerically, we believe that well over 40 billion of services will be purchased by customers over the next several years as part of this move," Reller said.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 20112 comments
Toronto will be the host city for the 2012 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, said Wednesday during the closing keynote of the 2011 event in Los Angeles.
The announcement marks a return to Toronto, where Microsoft held the WPC in 2004. It's the first time since that year that Microsoft has held the event, intended for partners from all around the globe, outside the United States.
U.S. locations have obvious pull for Microsoft, which has both its global headquarters and its largest single-country group of partners in the United States. Previous WPC locations include Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Houston, Denver, Boston and Minneapolis.
After the announcement, IDC Analyst Darren Bibby obliged my request to give a pitch for Toronto, which is his home city.
"It's one of the most multicultural cities in the world," Bibby said. "You've got a Chinatown, a little India, a little Korea, a little Italy, a little Portugal. Everyone from around the world is going to feel comfortable."
The 2012 WPC is scheduled for July 9 through July 13.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 20110 comments
Every year at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft lays out the total it plans to invest in its massive channel for its coming fiscal year.
This year, that total will be $5.8 billion, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Worldwide Partner Group Jon Roskill said Wednesday during his WPC keynote.
"A significant portion of that $5.8 billion is going into channel incentives. Our old incentive model rewarded just the transaction," Roskill said. "Our incentive model now is designed to reward your efforts across the sales cycle."
In a slide, Roskill showed that Microsoft has defined three other stages of the sales cycle that will receive incentives. In addition to "transact," Microsoft will now reward "sell, deploy and manage."
Microsoft has ramped up its stated investment total in the channel from about $4 billion last year and $3.3 billion the year before.
The company's channel consists of about 640,000 partners worldwide. Earlier in the week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer riffed on Microsoft's traditional claim, made a few minutes earlier by Roskill, that the company gets 95 percent of its revenues through the channel.
"Jon said we have 95 percent of our business through partners, I can't find the last 5 percent myself. So, I'm just going to say we've got 100 percent of our business with partners," Ballmer joked.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 20110 comments
Scott is still valiantly Tweeting his way through all of this week's WPC keynotes. Follow him at @scottbekker, and keep updated on all WPC-related news on our WPC page here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 12, 20110 comments
Since the March launch of Windows Intune, Microsoft has allowed partners 10 internal licenses, known as Internal Use Rights (IURs), to try out the service for free. Microsoft normally charges $11 per user per month for Intune.
In an interview Monday, Alex Heaton, director of product management for Windows Intune, said partners in Microsoft's Cloud Essentials program will now get 25 IURs and partners in Microsoft's Cloud Accelerate program will get 100 IURs.
The increase in IURs puts Windows Intune in line with the numbers of internal use rights Microsoft normally provides for most silver competencies (generally 25 client licenses) and gold competencies (100 client licenses.)
Microsoft partners often use IURs to test products while they decide whether they want to recommend them to customers. Partners also use IURs to train their employees and for certification exam preparation. The 10-user limit on Windows Intune limited partners from testing Intune in non-micro SMB environments without paying for additional licenses.
Meanwhile, when Windows Intune's first update, which entered the public beta stage this week, becomes available later this year, partners can look for a few changes intended for them.
Windows Intune has a console that partners can use to monitor multiple customers. According to Heaton, the new version allows partners to view information on about twice as many customers in one screen as the current version does.
In addition, the partner console shows more information about each customer than the current version does.
[Click on image for larger view.] |
| The new multi-account console in the beta version of Windows Intune provides seven data points on customer environments.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 12, 20110 comments
Microsoft posted a public beta on TechNet Monday of the next version of Windows Intune, the cloud-based systems management service. The beta version is currently expected to replace the current version of the service by the end of 2011, Microsoft officials said.
Tami Reller, a corporate vice president for Windows marketing and chief financial officer of the division, announced the Intune beta availability during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote Monday at the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
The key feature of the new version is software distribution, Alex Heaton, director of product management for Windows Intune, said in a briefing at WPC Monday. "That was really what we heard from partners and customers was missing from Windows Intune," Heaton said.
The current version of the Windows Intune service includes the Windows Update catalog for patching, but it doesn't allow for distribution of Microsoft software or third-party patches.
The beta, which Heaton said is called the Windows Intune July 2011 Beta, allows for patching of third-party applications such as Adobe Acrobat and distribution of Microsoft software, including Office 2010 Professional Plus. The latter distribution option will make Windows Intune appealing in combination with the Office 365 cloud service, which includes rights to the full Office suite in higher end SKUs.
Not supported in the beta or the final release will be distribution of Windows operating systems. That means that Windows Intune users who want to exercise their Windows 7 Enterprise upgrade rights option will need to find another way to distribute that operating system.
Heaton said the new version of Intune leverages Microsoft Azure for software distribution. When administrators load software distribution packages into Windows Intune, Microsoft will store those packages in its Azure infrastructure and download the packages from Azure to the client systems the administrator designates. There will be no cost beyond the Intune subscription cost for using Azure storage, compute or bandwidth resources, Heaton said.
The original version of Windows Intune was not built on Azure because the two cloud services were developed in parallel, Heaton said.
One caveat for users interested in testing the Windows Intune service is that the beta's users will not be able to convert to the paid service once the new edition of Intune goes live. "Anyone who wants to deploy on Windows Intune should use the current version," Heaton said.
The new Windows Intune won't be called Windows Intune 2.0, but rather will be referred to as the Windows Intune December 2011 release (or whatever month the version goes live), Heaton said.
Asked how frequently Microsoft plans to update Windows Intune, Heaton said, "We don't have an exact cadence published, but we think at least every year is the kind of cadence we want to be on."
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 12, 20110 comments
As cloud becomes more important to the Microsoft channel, Parallels is working under the hood to make cloud deployments smoother.
Parallels, a hosting and cloud services provisioning specialist, made a flurry of announcements at the start of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles this morning.
Two of the announcements relate to Microsoft Office 365, which Microsoft made generally available in 40 countries at the end of June and which figures to be a dominant theme at WPC this week.
In launching Office 365, Microsoft unveiled a new category of 20 syndication partners, who will package Office 365 cloud services with their own complementary or enhanced services.
Parallels announced that it is helping some of those partners bring their services to market faster with its flagship Parallels Automation product, which automates delivery, provisioning and billing of service delivery.
"Today, we're talking with about half of the Microsoft syndication partners with regards to how we can accelerate deployment and how we can create bundled" services around Office 365, says John Zanni, vice president of Service Provider Marketing and Alliances at Parallels.
Zanni, who followed current Parallels CEO Birger Steen from Microsoft to Parallels earlier this year, says the experience of partners who piloted syndication with the Business Productivity Online Suite highlighted the need for Parallels to offer an acceleration tool.
"With BPOS, the first syndicated partner took close to or a little more than a year. The next launch took equally as long," Zanni says. The Office 365-related service will also support the ability of the major syndication partners to quickly spin up multiple bundles and packages of Office 365 and their own services.
Parallels also announced tools to help the vast majority of Microsoft hosters and ISVs, who will not be able to syndicate Office 365 or handle customer billing with that Microsoft cloud service.
One is called Parallel Automation for Microsoft Services, which also automates delivery of Hyper-V Cloud, Exchange Server 2010 SP1 and SharePoint Foundation 2010. Zanni says support for Microsoft Lync Server is coming soon, as well.
According to a Parallels statement released today, "Service providers will be able to resell Microsoft offerings and increase the average revenue per user. With support for the n-tier resell business model, Parallels Automation allows system integrators and VARs to extend the range of Cloud services without investment in infrastructure."
The company also upgraded tools to help Microsoft ISVs package their software for delivery by Parallel's network of 5,000 cloud services provider partners. According to Parallels, 50 Microsoft ISV applications have been packaged and distributed already, and the company plans to spend $2 million to market and enable cloud delivery of ISV applications in the next 12 months.
Also today, Parallels and Microsoft announced a two-year strategic relationship to create a cloud automation solution for the health industry. The companies will jointly invest up to $5 million to create the solution, with the goal of spurring rapid growth worldwide in the use of cloud services by healthcare institutions and professionals.
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 11, 20110 comments