Looks like Microsoft is committed to improving the Microsoft Partner Info mobile app.
Within a week of launching the app for partners with devices running Windows Phone 7 or Google Android, Microsoft released a version 1.2.
According to the app's curator, Eric Ligman, the new version adds feeds for Dynamics Partners and Microsoft subsidiary partner program information from Chile, Indonesia and Latin America. The new version also expands the feeds for partners in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Ligman, director of Worldwide Partner Experience for Microsoft, is looking for feedback on ways to make the app more useful to partners. He's currently running a survey on whether partners want product information added to the app.
The app aggregates MPN-related Twitter feeds, blogs, technical resources and partner and Microsoft MVP conversation threads.
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 01, 20110 comments
It's a truism that small business spending leads the country out of recessions.
Market researchers at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC are forecasting that a spending rebound by small and medium businesses is happening. On a morning when the Dow Jones Industrial Average is plunging and markets are fixated on the continuing fall in housing prices, IDC's forecast is welcome news indeed.
What IDC said specifically in a statement Wednesday is that U.S. SMB "IT spending growth has returned more rapidly than expected since the recession officially ended in 2009."
With this midyear forecast, IDC expects the nation's 8 million SMBs to spend $125 billion on advanced technology this year, up from about $120 million in 2010.
"These two years of spending growth represent a substantial rebound from 2009, when SMB IT spending declined by 4.2%," IDC's statement said.
Key takeaways for the SMB channel from IDC's findings were:
- To concentrate on notebook PCs, which are becoming the form factor of choice among SMBs;
- Networking could continue to be promising as more small shops look to connect their PCs; and
- Server deployments will be an opportunity among midsize firms, which will be motivated by declining prices of entry-level hardware to virtualize, upgrade and consolidate their environments.
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 01, 20110 comments
In the midst of a "meaningful enterprise infrastructure refresh," server sales were up across all geographies in the first quarter of 2011, according to the latest server numbers from IDC this week.
Server factory revenues rose 12.1 percent year over year to $11.9 billion in the January-through-March period, marking the fifth consecutive quarter that IDC has recorded server revenue growth. Unit shipments also increased 2.5 percent to 1.9 million units, the second-highest total yet for a calendar Q1.
Volume systems, which encompass most Microsoft partner sales, were up nearly 9 percent in year-over-year revenues. There were even sharper jumps in midrange systems (28 percent) and enterprise systems (14 percent). A 12.5 percent increase in Unix server factory revenue was the first improvement in 11 quarters for the platform, which was particularly hard-hit by the economic downturn.
"This was the fourth consecutive quarter with double-digit year-over-year revenue growth as the market recovery extended from x86 servers to midrange Unix to high-end mainframe class systems for the first time in nearly three years," said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of enterprise platforms at IDC, in a statement.
Windows server demand closely tracked volume systems demand, with 10 percent year-over-year growth on revenues of $5.8 billion. That revenue represented 48.5 percent of overall quarterly factory revenue. Windows-based servers also accounted for 75 percent of quarterly server shipments.
On x86 server sales, HP led the market with 38 percent revenue share, Dell was second with 24 percent share and IBM held third at 16 percent share. It was the eighth consecutive quarter with year-over-year increases in the average selling prices for x86 servers, IDC reported.
"As virtualization adoption matures in the x86 server market, IDC sees customers moving from consolidation towards more automated private cloud models for their IT needs," said IDC analyst Reuben Miller in a prepared statement. "This drives a shift in focus towards lowering the cost per application through higher virtual machine server densities."
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 26, 20110 comments
In one of the first major changes to the competency setup since fully launching the Microsoft Partner Network in November, Microsoft will split the Unified Communications competency into two this October.
The new competencies will be a Messaging competency focused on Microsoft Exchange and a Communications competency focused on Microsoft Lync, according to a blog post Wednesday that unveiled the change.
"One of the most vocal pieces of feedback I received at [the 2010 Worldwide Partner Conference], through advisory councils, 1:1 discussions, etc. is you felt that the Unified Communications competency wasn't arming you with the best branding or tools to help you differentiate your offerings to customers," wrote Ian Hameroff, group product manager for Exchange Partner Marketing, in the post.
"I took this feedback to heart and worked with many key stakeholders within the Exchange and Lync business groups, as well as our Worldwide Partner Group, to see what we could do to address this feedback," Hameroff wrote.
The change will take the current list of competencies from 28 plus the Small Business Specialist Community designation to 29 plus SBSC.
According to a chart posted by Eric Ligman on his Microsoft SMS&P Partner Community blog, assessments for the two new competencies will become available sometime between the October launch and December of this year. The assessments will be voluntary until May 2012, when they become mandatory.
One partner whose company has already attained the new MPN Gold Competency for Unified Communications acknowledged the change would be an administrative headache but anticipated that doubling down on the competency achievement effort would be well worth it.
Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Seattle-based Azaleos Corp., said, "As a partner it will cause me a little bit of extra work and anguish because today, for example, I was able to fulfill that Unified Communications competency by pooling my Exchange and my Lync guys together. In the future, I'll have to have four certified Lync guys and another separate four certified Exchange guys. In the case of Azaleos, it will be a little extra cost for the testing and a little extra cost for running people through that process," he said. A consolation is that Azaleos' competency doesn't expire until February, so the company has some time to get new requirements out of the way at a relatively leisurely pace.
Hearing about the change on Wednesday, Gode said he was neither surprised nor overly worried about the administrative side. "I actually think it's a good thing. It does a better job of highlighting on a per-partner basis who has got the true expertise and who are the wannabes. It's going to be best for the customer. There's going to be a slightly shorter list of partners, especially on the Lync side, and customers can say, 'Aha, these are the true experts.'"
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 26, 20110 comments
In the Wild West days when a technology market is emerging and expanding, everyone wants a guess at how big the market could be before getting involved.
That's the case now with the opportunity for tablet apps. More than a year ago, around the time of the first Apple iPad launch, researcher Michael Wolf at GigaOm Pro estimated that tablet apps would be an $8 billion market by 2015.
A year later, following the highly successful launch of the iPad 2 as well as the introduction of a number of competitive tablets, the back-of-the-envelope calculations are going up.
In-Stat this week forecast that tablet application revenues will top $15 billion by 2015. Researcher Amy Cravens based the new forecast partly on user surveys, which also found that 80 percent of tablet applications downloads came through an OS provider store. (Given that the Apple iPad owns 95 percent of the market by In-Stat's figures, read that as the Apple App Store.)
"The majority of respondents prefer using the application store as the preferred method of payment for both the applications and in-application purchases," according to In-Stat's research release.
Based on a year of data and usage patterns in the smartphone market, the tablet apps market is shaping up to be bigger than first expected and should be a place where a few fortunes will be made.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 26, 20110 comments
One of the few real consumer stars at Microsoft submitted his resignation this week, according to Seattle Times blogger Brier Dudley.
To review Otto Berkes' career at Microsoft is to tour the company's great consumer successes and its most promising scuttled consumer projects.
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| Otto Berkes |
Berkes was the last of the four original Xbox founders still at the company, built the slate-like touchscreen computing device that Bill Gates showed at a 2005 conference, worked on the Courier project, served as general manager for former Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and most recently was involved in Bing datacenter design.
In an exit interview with Dudley, Berkes declined to pin his departure on the environment at Microsoft or complain about current management. In explaining his move to a company he wouldn't identify after 18 years at Microsoft, he said, "No regrets, but it's time to move on for me...I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish here."
Check out the blog post; it's a good read with a lot of valuable context if you're interested in Microsoft and its future. Microsoft will have a tougher time catching the consumerization wave that is breaking over IT without Berkes' experienced eye.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 26, 20111 comments
Two months after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recapped some of the efforts by Microsoft and its partners to help, and he detailed the role cloud computing could play in rebuilding.
Ballmer's comments came during the Nikkei Symposium in Tokyo on Monday. Nihon Microsoft became Microsoft's first country subsidiary outside the United States 25 years ago, and remains Microsoft's largest subsidiary with 2,500 employees. Microsoft's partner community in Japan encompasses 8,000 companies.
Microsoft initially made what Ballmer described as a "small" $2 million donation to the relief efforts in cash and in-kind contributions and continues to match its employees' donations. The company also distributed more than 3,000 Windows PCs to evacuation workers to help them stay in touch with nonprofit organization headquarters. With so much server capacity lost along with all the other infrastructure destroyed in the area of the quake and tsunami, Microsoft also provided organizations across Japan free access to cloud-based infrastructure, such as Windows Azure, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online.
While the free cloud-based services access were available to partners, Microsoft also offered technical support and free temporary software licenses to partners, customers and organizations involved in the response and relief efforts, Ballmer said.
Partners Take Action
One Japanese partner that leapt into action was Digital Office [Japan] Inc., which built a Windows Azure-backed mobile app within five days of the disaster called JResQ. In some ways, the company had been primed to respond to a catastrophe: CEO Kiyoshi Hamada personally experienced the Kobe earthquake in 1995 that killed more than 6,400 people.
"JResQ is an emergency contact mobile application that enables people who were displaced by the earthquake to record a voice message on their phone, and send it automatically to family and to friends," Ballmer said. Integrating GPS data, photo, video and search functionality, "JResQ was used by more than 15,000 people to find each other, certainly a critical need during a time when thousands of people are still listed as missing," Ballmer said.
Toyota, a Microsoft customer so large and expansive that its role sometimes blurs into that of a partner, is also working closely with Microsoft. "Together, we're helping create new maps of passable roads in northern Japan, where people can access water, food, gas, medicine. Those things have all been severely hampered, as you know, by damage to the region's transportation, information infrastructure," Ballmer said.
Using many of the temporarily free Microsoft services, many partners have helped aid organizations and government agencies spin up relief portals. "So far more than a thousand Web sites and applications have been developed and deployed by these important organizations doing their work," Ballmer said.
Examples include a disaster response portal that enables government agencies and nonprofits, such as the Japanese Red Cross, to communicate with each other and to connect with citizens.
U.S.-based partners have also gotten involved. Slalom Consulting, a Seattle-based Microsoft National Systems Integrator, had worked on an Azure-based cloud communication portal infrastructure for future disasters.
Tom Chew, national general manager for solutions at Slalom, said in a recent telephone interview with RCP, "It was intended as a platform that can quickly be customized to support any disaster or any aid need that would exist."
In a blog entry about the project, Slalom consultant Joel Forman wrote that the solution used a custom, Azure-based CMS system that allows for real-time updates of information and was designed to eliminate infrastructure concerns for the local agency.
"With the current situation in Japan, this solution is already being put to use. Second Harvest Japan has created a communication portal for coordination across food donors, transportation providers and distributors involved in the Japan relief effort," Forman wrote in mid-March.
Looking Ahead
Longer term, as Microsoft and its partners help business rebuild, cloud computing will continue to be important, Ballmer suggested. While the remote resources were helpful when local infrastructure was wiped out or damaged, the severe blow to the Japanese power grid will have long-lasting effects.
"Cloud computing also improves efficiency, lowers the demand for energy and power, and supports business continuity. All of these things are critically important for business right now, given the damage to Japan's power grid and in particular for manufacturers in
east Japan where operations have been significantly impacted, as you know, by power outages," he said. "Studies have shown that when business applications move from corporate datacenters to the cloud, energy use can be reduced by at least 30 percent. For small businesses the result is even more dramatic, with potential savings of up to 90 percent."
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20111 comments
A Microsoft executive outlined an approach that Microsoft will probably pursue alongside partners in trying to persuade SMBs to pay for the forthcoming Office 365 cloud productivity and collaboration suite.
In a blog posting on Monday titled "Small Businesses -- Are your Mobile Workers Compromising your Security," Cindy Bates, vice president of U.S. Small and Medium Business & Distribution, described the dangers of doing business collaboration on free public social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter.
"According to a recent survey sponsored by Microsoft and conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, when working remotely, 42 percent of information workers at small and midsized businesses (SMBs) use public social networking tools (Facebook, Twitter) to collaborate with colleagues," Bates wrote.
"It may not come as much of a surprise to you to hear that these public sites do not meet the same security and privacy protocols as in-house measures provide. Yet, less than one-third (29 percent) of SMB information workers report that their companies provide access to internal social networking tools," said Bates, who has a dual channel and end user-focused role at Microsoft.
Bates' solution is for small businesses to provide Office 365 to allow their mobile workers to collaborate behind a corporate firewall while protecting their data from the whims of public social networking sites policies.
Look for Microsoft Ready to Go kits and other collateral to include this theme for SMB customers when Microsoft's cloud productivity and collaboration suite comes out.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20111 comments
Microsoft on Monday launched a new app for Microsoft partners using Windows Phone 7 or Google Android devices that aggregates Microsoft Partner Network-related Twitter feeds, blogs, technical resources and partner and Microsoft MVP conversation threads.
The Microsoft Partner Info mobile app pulls together information from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group and can include feeds from Microsoft subsidiary partner teams in several countries including Australia, Austria, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
"I sincerely hope that this new app helps many of you not only identify resources you may not have been aware of before, but also helps all of you to consume that information more easily on a regular basis so that you are able to use it in your businesses as Microsoft partners," wrote Eric Ligman, Microsoft's director of worldwide partner experience, in a blog post Monday.
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| The start screen for the Microsoft Partner Info mobile app. |
The move is the latest step in Redmond's MPN-related effort to provide information to partners in whatever social media formats and device types partners want.
Ligman added that Microsoft product information is specifically excluded: "This is designed for Microsoft Partner related info, not a product related app. That is why product teams are not included."
Also excluded in the first rev of the app is a version for Apple iPhones and RIM BlackBerry devices. The app is available in the Windows Phone Marketplace, the Zune Marketplace and the Android Marketplace.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20110 comments
For the record, the first Microsoft partner to achieve a gold competency under the revamped Microsoft Partner Network was IQ GmbH of Munich, Germany.
Microsoft rolled out the last piece of the overhauled MPN on Nov. 1, with the formal launch of the gold versions of each of the nearly 30 competencies.
On his Twitter feed on Friday, Microsoft's top worldwide channel executive, Jon Roskill, wrote, "Just had lunch with the partner who got the first Gold Competency!" The post had a link to IQ GmbH's site.
On Dec. 6, 2010, IQ GmbH had declared in a brief post on its Web site that it was the world's first Microsoft partner to earn a gold competency when it achieved Unified Communications and Software Asset Management within about a month of the competencies' gold launch. (Standard versions of the competencies, later renamed silver, were launched in May 2010).
In the meantime, the German firm has picked up another 11 gold competencies, according to the site. With 22, Avanade still has the most MPN gold competencies of any partner we've seen so far, but IQ's fast start and double-digit gold competency status shows an impressive commitment to the paperwork, retraining and all-around effort needed for MPN gold competencies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20110 comments
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the latest Millward Brown brand value rankings. I'd lost track of the metric and was surprised to find that IBM had surpassed Microsoft in brand value last year.
Now IBM, which Microsoft so famously left in the dust in several ways on the strength of its PC offerings, has retaken Microsoft on a more widely watched measure.
According to the Business Insider blog, IBM surpassed Microsoft's market capitalization around 11 a.m. on Friday and held onto about a $1 billion lead at the close (IBM $207 billion, Microsoft $206 billion.)
The post's author and former Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff notes that Lou Gerstner was brought in from the outside to turn IBM and around, and asks rhetorically, "So how much longer will Microsoft stick with Steve Ballmer before it has to make the same move?"
The anti-Ballmer drumbeat is only getting louder.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 23, 20110 comments
Windows Phone 7 this week will come to Verizon, the largest mobile operator in the United States with 104 million "wireless connections," which include 88 million retail customers. (AT&T would be larger if the T-Mobile acquisition goes through.)
Verizon will start selling the HTC Trophy as its first Windows Phone 7 device online on May 26. The device will hit Verizon stores on June 2, according to a post on Microsoft's Windows Phone Blog by Michael Stroh.
The price of the HTC Trophy with a new two-year contract will be $149.99 after a $50 rebate. To highlight Windows Phone 7's unique ability to play mobile games with Xbox Live and sync with Xbox avatars, profiles and scores, Verizon will give away a free Xbox 360 console game to anyone who buys the device before July 15. Available games include Halo: Reach, Kinect Sports and Lode Runner, with a retail value of up to $60. Given the Xbox aspect, and the fact that it doesn't matter to Verizon whether customers buy a Windows Phone 7 device versus an Apple iPhone or Google Android device, I'm guessing Microsoft is chipping in the Xbox game promotion to try to drive some device sales.
According to Verizon's news release, the key features of the HTC Trophy are a WVGA 3.8-inch touchscreen, surround sound through SRS WOW HD, a 5-megapixel camera, 720p HD video capture, 16 GB of on-board storage, Wi-Fi connectivity and that the phone is global-ready.
Verizon also notes that users can "view and edit Microsoft Office documents, including Excel, Word and PowerPoint with the Office Hub and data access on SharePoint servers."
The Trophy has been available in other countries for several months. It joins a stable of about half-a-dozen Windows Phone 7 devices available in the United States on the AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile networks. (See the May in-depth article comparing all the devices.)
The move should lead to an improvement in Microsoft's overall market share. Verizon commands about a third of the U.S. mobile market (although Apple did well enough even when the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T). Getting Windows Phone 7 onto the Verizon network is one more critical piece in Microsoft's long game in the smartphone market.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 23, 20110 comments