There's a Texas-sized ransomware problem brewing on the heels of similar incidents in Florida.
The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) on Friday revealed that more than 20 entities, mostly smaller local governments in the state, were impacted by a ransomware attack.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on August 20, 20190 comments
Microsoft is offering a big carrot to get organizations to Azure in combination with the stick of Windows Server 2008 end-of-support.
That stick that's feared across the IT landscape is that support is ending for Windows Server 2008 on Jan. 14, 2020. Specifically, Extended Support, which includes security updates, ends that day for Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Hyper-V Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 08, 20190 comments
Microsoft is investing resources in select customers in a new effort to get more on-premises data warehouses onto the Azure cloud.
Microsoft and Informatica unveiled a migration offer on Tuesday designed to lower the expense and risk of a proof-of-value project to determine the feasibility and advantages of moving a data warehouse to Azure. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 06, 20190 comments
If it seems like there's more talk about artificial intelligence (AI) than there is market momentum, that's a feature -- not a bug -- for partners, according to a senior Microsoft executive.
Julia White, the corporate vice president who leads product management for Microsoft's cloud platform, made a big splash at the Microsoft Inspire 2019 partner conference last week with a HoloLens demo involving a hologram translating her keynote into Japanese.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 25, 20190 comments
Microsoft wrapped up its annual Microsoft Inspire partner conference last week in Las Vegas with a lot of product news, business initiatives and demos.
Here are 11 quotes from the major Corenote addresses at the show that capture key moments showing what Microsoft is up to and where the company and its partners are heading. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 20190 comments
Microsoft on Thursday reported earnings per share of $1.37 and a 12% gain in revenues to $33.72 billion for the fourth quarter.
The company's stock rose by more than 1% in after-hours trading on the results, which beat financial analysts' expectations. The earnings number was non-GAAP; the GAAP figure was higher due to a net income tax benefit of $2.6 billion for the quarter. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 18, 20190 comments
Microsoft is taking a big step in the direction of making Azure a friendlier platform for managed service providers (MSPs).
The theoretical appeal of Azure for MSPs has always been clear. Customers could move or create infrastructure on Microsoft's public cloud, and Microsoft partners, with far more cloud expertise than the average customer, could provision and manage that infrastructure on their behalf. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 16, 20190 comments
It's been a few years since Microsoft wanted to talk about how many partners it had.
In the old days, the company would regularly boast of 600,000 or even as high as 800,000 partners in broad terms. When it came to registered members of the old Microsoft Partner Program or the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), the figures regularly landed north of 400,000 organizations. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 15, 20190 comments
Microsoft is reversing course on a plan to revoke partners' ability to use internal use rights (IURs) to run their businesses after a substantial partner backlash.
"Given your feedback, we have made the decision to roll back all planned changes related to internal use rights and competency timelines that were announced earlier this month. This means you will experience no material changes this coming fiscal year, and you will not be subject to reduced IUR licenses or increased costs related to those licenses next July as previously announced," said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft One Commercial Partner, in a statement posted on Microsoft's partner portal on Friday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 12, 20190 comments
Editor's Note: Due to partners' negative reaction to these changes, Microsoft on July 12 announced that it was rescinding the plan to end the internal use rights benefit. See RCP's coverage here.
Gavriella Schuster has come full circle on internal use rights (IURs).
In media briefings this week in advance of the Microsoft Inspire partner conference, Schuster, Microsoft's channel chief, addressed a major brewing controversy in the Microsoft partner community. Earlier this month, Microsoft quietly disclosed that it was ending IURs, the partner program benefit that allows partner companies to run their entire business on Microsoft software and services. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 11, 20190 comments
Like other media and analysts, I'm not invited to Microsoft Inspire, the annual partner confab in Las Vegas. The media lockout policy started last year due to Microsoft's decision to combine the partner conference with the company's internal sales conference, Microsoft Ready. (That broke a streak of 12 Worldwide Partner Conferences and Inspires for me.)
For those of you who are going, here's what to expect next Sunday through Thursday in America's gambling capital in the desert. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 11, 20190 comments
In a bid to win over governments and enterprises in highly regulated industries looking to move digital workflows to the cloud, Microsoft and ServiceNow on Tuesday announced an extension of their existing partnership.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based ServiceNow provides cloud-based platforms and solutions for delivering digital workflows. Its new agreement with Microsoft builds on an alliance from October that allowed Microsoft's U.S. federal government customers to deploy ServiceNow technology from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to the Azure Government Cloud. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20190 comments