Perficient, a St. Louis-based IT consulting firm and Microsoft National Systems Integrator, this month acquired Charlotte, N.C.-based Exervio Inc. in a $13.6 million deal.
With the acquisition, Perficient will absorb the 100-employee management consulting firm with footprints in Atlanta, Charlotte, N.C., and Dallas. Exervio's enterprise customers include AT&T, Bank of America, the Boy Scouts of America, Coca Cola, Duke Energy, Family Dollar, Lowe's, Piedmont Natural Gas and Wells Fargo. Exervio co-founders Jon Nance, Mark Heisig and Edward Pounds will all join Perficient.
Jeffrey Davis, Perficient's CEO and president, said Exervio offers "strong pull-through potential for our custom and packaged application development, implementation and integration services."
The deal follows Perficient's late 2010 purchase of speakTECH, another Microsoft NSI. Davis has said M&A is an important part of the growth strategy for Perficient, which will have about 1,450 total employees and $245 million in annual revenues counting Exervio's $13 million a year in business.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 15, 20110 comments
There were a lot of significant aspects to Microsoft's release this month of a Bing app for the Apple iPad tablet.
It's clearly a shot across Google's bow as an attempt to move the search paradigm forward. Media industry observers are atwitter about the Bing app's possibilities as a next-generation newspaper.
What makes it most significant for Microsoft partners, however, is that at least one business group inside Microsoft was able to overcome the company's internal resistance to supporting any platform other than Windows with a popular Microsoft application.
The idea that projects get killed at Microsoft if they don't have Windows at their core has been known for more than a decade as the "strategy tax." A recent article in Fortune magazine on Steve Ballmer introduced some new terms for similar concepts: "licking the cookie" by the Windows group and rejection by the "Made Men" inside Microsoft. Recent public casualties of this kind of thinking in Redmond are the Sidekick phone and the Courier tablet.
The search team was able to get the Bing app made (and even heavily promoted) despite the way the app's existence tacitly acknowledges Apple's dominance of the consumer tablet space, a market that Microsoft both downplays now and obviously wants to take over in the Windows 8 timeframe.
There were special circumstances pushing Microsoft's Made Men toward approving an app for Bing. Strategically, Microsoft needs Bing to compete everywhere with Google on search. A critically applauded app on the iPad helps get attention for the underdog search engine.
But if one business group can overpower internal resistance to creating an iPad app, maybe others with more partner potential can follow the path Bing blazed.
Microsoft's most popular application by any measure is Microsoft Office, and it's critically important to most partners' businesses. Being able to extend their Office-based solutions easily to the iPad platform would be a win for Microsoft's partner community as the tablet's market reach expands. A lot of conversion apps exist for viewing, creating and editing Office applications on iPad, but all (even Apple's own productivity apps) have problems with various Office features and formats.
In a way, Microsoft could already be making Office available for iPad with the Office 365 cloud computing suite scheduled for release this summer. Nonetheless, an iPad-specific client app tuned for multi-touch and different device orientations, as well as integrated and intuitive digital keypad options, would be a big deal.
Microsoft develops Office for the Mac already, further greasing the skids for an iPad version, and a product manager in that group said publicly last year that an iPad version was under consideration. Microsoft would be able to command a premium for an iPad Office client -- a $40 to $60 price range probably wouldn't be out of the question, although a lower price tag would be embraced.
It's far from an easy decision for Ballmer and company. No matter how popular the iPad gets, putting Office on any platform remains Microsoft's ultimate kingmaking move. Could Microsoft bear to put the crown on Steve Jobs' tablet, even if Redmond believes it'll only be a steward until Windows 8 arrives? Tell me what you think by commenting below or e-mailing me at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 15, 20112 comments
Several managed services provider tools vendors are making parts of their software available for iPad-wielding MSPs through the Apple App Store.
This week, LabTech Software put new versions of its LabTech Mobile remote monitoring and management (RMM) application for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. According to the Tampa, Fla.-based vendor with about 1,000 MSP customers, the application offers the ability to work tickets, access client data and work with scripts.
For now, the tool is really an iPhone application that is compatible with an iPad, although the company says a dedicated iPad version is coming soon.
"Having a dedicated app for the iPhone in addition to LabTech Mobile apps for Windows Mobile and Android means that we offer the greatest breadth of choices for our customers in how they choose to connect to their LabTech interface," said Brett Cheloff, director of development for LabTech Software, in a statement.
While LabTech announced the apps this week, the iPhone app has been in the App Store since at least November 2010. Such soft launches are fairly common among vendors dabbling in Apple's marketplace.
Professional services automation tool vendor Autotask Corp. this week also updated its iPad app, Autotask LiveMobile. The free app requires a current Autotask Pro or Autotask Go! user license.
Service desk functions include capturing time entries, scheduling service calls and appointments and editing tickets and projects.
Earlier in April, N-able Technologies Inc. updated its free RMM app, N-central Mobile, which is also iPhone-targeted but iPad-compatible. The N-central Mobile app provides access to N-central Server, with the option to view screens for All Devices, Active Issues and Job Status and to acknowledge notifications, view details of failed services, add notices to devices and view asset information of a device, according to the company's app description.
LabTech and N-Able join Kaseya, which last updated its Kaseya Mobile app in the iTunes AppStore in August 2010. The service ticket-focused tool allows for viewing and updating of all tickets assigned to a team, driving directions to a ticket location and the ability to call a user right from the application. The free app was originally designed for iPhone and iPod Touch, and is iPad-compatible. It works with an on-premise installation of Kaseya 2 Master IT Services Edition or Enterprise Edition.
For more iPad apps, see "47 Intriguing iPad Apps for Microsoft Partners."
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 14, 20110 comments
A lot of attention has been paid to the cloud end of cloud computing -- the applications and for-rent infrastructure that run in megavendors' megadatacenters. The Chinese computermaker Lenovo has taken steps to address the other side of the question: What would an ideal cloud client look like?
The default answer so far has been that the cloud client can be any device. So long as the client has a fast Internet connection, the server farm can do all the work.
Lenovo makes the case that the capabilities on the client end of the connection still matter. To that end, Lenovo this week introduced Cloud Ready Client, an $80 per user software package currently available for ThinkPad laptops and ThinkCentre desktop PCs equipped with second-generation Intel Core or Core vPro Processors.
The client and its first application, Lenovo Secure Cloud Access (SCA), allow users to access Web, local or published (read: Citrix-delivered) Windows applications through a browser-based interface that looks like a Windows desktop.
The secret sauce comes in when the Cloud Ready Client and SCA determine the security, processing power and graphics capabilities of the client device to determine whether to process parts of the applications on the server side or to let it occur on the client's resources. Recognizing secure and high-power clients allows the server to save some processor cycles. Recognizing an iPad that can't run Flash (to borrow an example from analyst Roger Kay's sharp analysis at Forbes) could prompt the server to run the Flash presentation in the datacenter and send the display to the iPad.
"For cloud computing to be truly effective, the cloud must recognize the client device and its capabilities, and the applications and resources have to be capable of exposing themselves to the cloud," said Rich Cheston, executive director and distinguished engineer at Lenovo, in a statement. "SCA levels the playing field between cloud application and device by mirroring what users are already familiar with while creating an easy management experience for the IT staff."
Ezra Gottheil, a senior analyst with Technology Business Research (TBR), said the offering will make Lenovo's PCs more attractive to businesses in the cloud era.
"Lenovo will provide server software and assistance to customer organizations, which will use Lenovo's tools to make their cloud-based applications work better on a diversity of clients without actually modifying the applications. Lenovo has started with private clouds, but will progress to public cloud-based applications once it has demonstrated the usefulness of its approach," Gottheil said in an e-mail to technology reporters.
"TBR believes Cloud Ready Client is a stepping stone for higher utilization of tablets and smartphones in the enterprise space, by allowing the server to optimize the end-user's experience," Gottheil said.
Yes, Lenovo's a PC vendor, and it's in the company's interest to make users think the devices at the edge of the cloud remain relevant. But Lenovo seems to be on to something here that will be especially important to enterprise customers. Look for other PC vendors to follow suit with their own variants of the Cloud Ready Client.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 14, 20111 comments
The Q1 2011 numbers are in for one of the key indicators of the health of the IT industry -- PC sales -- and the diagnosis is not good.
IDC said this week that PC shipments contracted worldwide by 3.2 percent and in the United States by 10 percent. In discussing the U.S. results, IDC noted the strong gains through all of 2010 and called the drop "yet another inflection point in the rubber-band effect of the demand cycle that has become prevalent over the past two years."
Jay Chou, a senior research analyst with IDC, cast about widely in trying to find explanations for the worldwide drop. "While the consequences of events in the Middle East and Japan remain unclear, these will surely be factors that will influence short-term market performance for 2011," Chou said in a statement. Japan's year-over-year decline in shipments for the quarter was 16 percent.
"Long-term success will depend on hardware manufacturers being able to articulate a message that is beyond simple hardware specifications. 'Good-enough computing' has become a firm reality, exemplified first by Mini Notebooks and now Media Tablets. Macroeconomic forces can explain some of the ebb and flow of the PC business, but the real question PC vendors have to think hard about is how to enable a compelling user experience that can justify spending on the added horsepower," Chou said.
Among vendors, Acer Group had the toughest quarter, with shipments falling 16 percent worldwide and 42 percent in the United States compared to the year-ago quarter. Lenovo had double-digit growth worldwide (17 percent) and Apple and Toshiba both saw about 10 percent growth in the U.S. market. Dell's U.S. sales fell 12 percent, but strength in emerging markets limited its global losses to less than 2 percent. HP's sales fell about 3 percent globally and 2 percent in the United States.
According to IDC, early indications for Q2 also suggest PC shipments will be weak, but the market research firm is expecting a stronger second half of the year.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 14, 20110 comments
Scribe Software, a data integration provider with a special focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this week launched a cloud-based platform for integrating CRM and ERP data with other business applications.
The 60-employee, Bedford, N.H.-based ISV made the announcement during Microsoft Convergence in Atlanta, where Scribe also saw eight of its customers and partners win Microsoft Dynamics customer excellence awards.
The new Scribe Online Services platform is a cloud-based version of the Scribe Insight integration platform, for which the company has about 800 partners and 10,000 customers.
Insight is a traditional server-based transformation engine inside the corporate firewall. Partners use a workbench and console to map data from source to target and transform, massage and orchestrate the data, says Betsy Bilhorn, vice president of market and product management at Scribe, which has produced a number of adapters for Microsoft and other vendors' ERP and CRM products.
"Scribe Online is a cloud-based product, so the only thing that would potentially be on the client side is the agent," Bilhorn said. The cloud framework also opens some new use scenarios, according to Scribe. "It extends a platform framework for people to be able to package and deploy integration services, which is not easy to do with an on-premise product and is not easy to do with Insight," Bilhorn said. "The other thing is there are collaborative features for partners and customers to work together" on data integration.
In keeping with Scribe's Dynamics CRM-first approach, the first service for Scribe Online is the Scribe Replication Services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. A five-click setup allows users to replicate Dynamics CRM data for backup, compliance, operational reporting and business intelligence analysis.
About 85 percent of Scribe resellers focus on Dynamics CRM, Bilhorn said.
One of those resellers is Customer Effective, a Greenville, S.C.-based Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that was a 2010 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award Finalist for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Customer Effective uses Scribe's integration platform in about 95 percent of its deals, said Mike Rogers, vice president of business development and marketing with the company.
"We're really excited about the Scribe Online Services and being able to leverage it as a tool with our CRM customers," Rogers said.
He said the Scribe Online platform will also help because it comes as Microsoft is pushing hard to drive adoption of Dynamics CRM Online. "We've seen a transformation, and we're going to see a flip-flop -- a lot more customers will deploy online and a lot less will deploy on-prem," Rogers said. He said that two years ago, the ratio of on-premise CRM to online CRM was about 75-25. "Now it's 50-50, and I see that being 25-75 two years from now."
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 13, 20110 comments
KineticD acquired ROBOBAK this week in a merger of cloud backup providers with different channel models.
KineticD is a Toronto-based SaaS backup company specializing in backing up micro SMBs of up to about 20 employees. ROBOBAK -- the letters stand for "remote office/branch office backup" -- does agentless disk-to-disk-to-cloud backup that the company positions as a hybrid approach appropriate for SMBs into midsize companies and enterprise branch offices.
KineticD boasts about 40,000 customers that it reaches through a combination of direct sales, about 500 independent resellers and very large franchise-style or retail partners such as Nerds on Site and the Best Buy GeekSquad.
ROBOBAK's customers are primarily managed services providers, and the company has roughly 100 MSPs backing up about 20,000 customer sites. ROBOBAK customers are generally in the 20-100 employee range, with some enterprise branch offices, as well, company officials said.
The company's immediate focus will be technology integration rather than channel integration, said Jamie Brenzel, CEO of KineticD.
"We're really focused on integrating the products," Brenzel said. By the end of April, KineticD plans to bring ROBOBAK capabilities of agentlessly backing up servers, networks and server applications to KineticD customers and partners.
Further out, the company will roll both companies' technologies into a single release. ROBOBAK Version 11 shipped in early March, and integration efforts will focus on a Version 12 to ship sometime in the third quarter, Brenzel said.
"It's really about bringing the best of both into what we're calling Version 12. [We'll focus on the] patented continuous data protection [and] a Mac client, for example. We're integrating the best of both and keeping in mind that really what we're looking to do is maintain the ease-of-use of our product and complement what ROBOBAK has done," Brenzel said. Other technology goals include developing for virtual machine environments, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, along with Microsoft servers, such as SharePoint.
Ben Puzzuoli, formerly of ROBOBAK, who will run technical sales and marketing at KineticD, said, "We were in the process of doing all the certifications for VMware, so now KineticD is an elite VMware partner."
Brenzel said once the technology is integrated, KineticD may have the opportunity to pursue additional channel partners. "There was very little overlap in terms of the channel. What ROBOBAK's solution allows us to do is open up that channel to bigger channel partners -- MSPs and bigger OEM partners. The solution allows us, from a customer-basis, to go further up the small-business chain to small enterprises that have remote or branch offices in a different location."
The majority of the ROBOBAK employees will stay in place and the executives said ROBOBAK's operations won't be interrupted.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 08, 20110 comments
The financial ratings agencies are weighing in on the Microsoft-Nokia plan on smartphones and finding it wanting.
According to Parmy Olson's Disruptors blog at Forbes, "Moody's has just cut Nokia's credit rating because of a 'significant degree of uncertainty' about its transition to running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7."
The Moody's cut follows a similar move by Standard & Poor's last month.
On the other hand, Goldman Sachs has upgraded Nokia's shares, and, as we reported, IDC projects that Microsoft's Windows Phone platform will leapfrog Apple's iOS and BlackBerry to take second place behind Google's Android platform by 2015. Color us skeptical of predictions that far ahead, but Gartner analysts also recently arrived at conclusions similar to IDC's.
I'm not going to say I'm swayed by Moody's or Standard & Poor's negative attitude -- or by Goldman Sachs' positive attitude, for that matter. The bloom is off the rose as far as how good the ratings agencies and big-name Wall Street firms are at predicting anything. After all, look how well they did rating the mortgage-related investments that collapsed and helped bring on financial armageddon a few years ago -- and that was much more in their wheelhouse than predicting mobile market share.
Nonetheless, the dueling analyst predictions just underscore that there's a lot still to be decided in this multi-horse smartphone race.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 08, 20112 comments
The marketing drumbeat in favor of getting businesses onto Facebook and other social media has been pretty heavy (from RCPmag.com, as well, here, here and here), although there are some signs of backlash, such as the recent Fortune magazine article "Facebook: Where marketing efforts go to die?" and RCPU Editor Lee Pender's blog entry, "5 Reasons Why I Hate Twitter."
In a column for the February issue, I wrote about the struggle to balance personal and professional contacts in Facebook. Jeff V. Pulver, an IT consultant with Intercomp Design Inc. in New Jersey, e-mailed a thoughtful response about why he doesn't recommend Facebook to his clients.
Here's what Jeff had to say:
"I am advising my clients to not use Facebook in their business. This is because I do not trust Facebook for two reasons.
"The first is they unethically connected my Facebook account to another Web site. And secondly, they obfuscated the means to undo that connection. An example will make this clearer.
"I was browsing CNN's Web site and I noticed a window in a corner of the screen. It displayed a Facebook 'Friend' along with a picture of them. I did not request this association to be made. What if I had been in a corporation when I was viewing CNN's Web site, as I was performing my job? And what if a Friend of mine connected to me in my personal Facebook account, and they used an inappropriate picture of themselves for their Facebook entry? If a co-worker noticed that picture, that could be grounds for dismissal from my company.
"This is why I do not trust Facebook. They had no right connecting my personal account to CNN. I then went to turn it off and was unsuccessful at learning how to do it. I spent one hour searching Facebook's Web site and could not learn how to do it. I then performed an Internet search, and that led me to a Facebook page with instructions on how to remove the connection. First off, I should have been directed to that page by Facebook, and secondly, those instructions did not work.
"For those reasons, I am advising my clients to not use Facebook for business purposes."
Do you recommend that clients use Facebook, and why or why not? Comment below or e-mail me at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 07, 20112 comments
More than 50,000 users at MSP and VAR companies are using ConnectWise PSA for professional services automation, the Tampa, Fla.-based company reported this week.
Jeannine Edwards, director of the ConnectWise Community, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that those licenses cover nearly 4,300 solution provider organizations. "We have anywhere from a one-user company to our largest partner is 450 users. Our sweet spot is probably 15 to 20 users," Edwards said.
While most of the community uses ConnectWise PSA to run their managed services businesses, many also run product/VAR businesses out of the system. "PSA is like an ERP system designed specifically for a VAR. The epicenter of that system, if done well, is time -- capturing time and being able to bill time so you can put money in the bank," she said.
ConnectWise developed its PSA to run its own IT services firm and began selling the tool 10 years ago. The number of organizations using the tool has accelerated since mid-2009 when the company lowered hosting pricing. "We were typically known as an on-premise solution. We started realizing that the less-than-five-person VAR needed" a lower price, Edwards said.
ConnectWise is one of two PSAs that Microsoft chose to target for integration with its Windows Intune cloud-based remote monitoring and management tool.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 07, 20111 comments
Microsoft normally plays it close to the vest when it comes to saying how many of its 430,000 enrolled partners have qualified for various competencies.
We recently got a rare glimpse into some of those numbers on the database end of the Microsoft Partner Network. In reporting the RCP "Partner's Guide to Cutting-Edge SQL Server Engagements," Alison Diana spoke with Betsy Pridmore, director of partner marketing for the Business Platform Marketing Group at Microsoft.
Pridmore said the MPN Data Management competency has about 4,000 members, the Business Intelligence competency has about 3,200 members and the Application Integration competency has about 3,000 members.
Given partners' overlapping competency enrollments and the pervasiveness of the SQL Server platform in the Microsoft stack, it's still hard to define the size of the SQL Server sub-community within the larger MPN.
"We realize we have a very large and diverse partner ecosystem with different skill sets," Pridmore told RCP. "Additionally, as SQL Server is a platform component for Dynamics and SharePoint, it's very hard to know the exact amount of partners and the real size of the ecosystem."
For more about what SQL Server-focused partners are doing with SQL Server 2008 R2, download the partner's guide here (registration is required, but it's free).
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 06, 20110 comments
There's no question that getting gold competencies in the new Microsoft Partner Network is tough -- but it's less of a challenge for a partner firm with 12,000 consultants and 13,000 Microsoft certifications.
That's the baggage Avanade brought with it when it came time to qualify for the new MPN competency requirements last fall.
In the months since the MPN switchover on Nov. 1, the Seattle-based consulting giant, which is majority-owned by Accenture and partly owned by Microsoft, has earned 22 gold competencies. (Avanade shares the competencies with Accenture. In most cases, the technical people come from Avanade, while many of the gold-required case studies come from Accenture engagements that Avanade consultants are attached to.)
In a news release about the competencies earlier this year, Avanade said the 21 MPN gold competencies it had at the time were the most of any Microsoft partner. In a statement provided for Avanade's release, Microsoft global channel chief Jon Roskill said, "Avanade and Accenture have set a very high bar."
No other partners that we know of have close to as many gold competencies. Intellinet, a Microsoft National Systems Integrator based in Atlanta, boasts of 12 gold competencies (and it's got a non-standard, but clever, logo that says 12x Microsoft Gold Certified Partner).
In fact, Microsoft has been saying that it is only expecting about 2 percent of its 640,000 partners worldwide to achieve any gold competencies, let alone multiple gold competencies. Partners have slightly higher ambitions. When RCP surveyed current Gold Certified Partner readers (read the story here) about their plans in the new MPN structure, about 39 percent said they planned to pursue multiple gold competencies, while 15 percent planned to pursue one gold competency, and 19 percent intended to go for a mix of gold and silver competencies. Many Certified Partners reported that they planned to pursue one or more gold competencies, as well.
Avanade's latest gold competency is the new Midmarket Solution Provider competency, Joe VanWinkle, Avanade corporate vice president for global market development, told me in an interview this week.
Avanade's other 21 golds are Application Integration, Application Lifecycle Management, Business Intelligence, Content Management, Customer Relationship Management, Data Platform, Desktop, Digital Marketing, Enterprise Resource Planning, Hosting, Identity and Security, Mobility, OEM Hardware, Portals and Collaboration, Search, Server, Software Development, Systems Management, Unified Communications, Virtualization and Web Development.
The company also has silver competencies in Learning, Project and Portfolio Management and Software Asset Management.
"When we get those three gold, we'll have 25 out of the 28 competencies, and I don't think the other three apply," VanWinkle said.
For Avanade, publicizing its high number of competencies is part of a strategic goal of establishing its expertise for potential customers. "In order to be the best, we need to have the broadest and deepest coverage," VanWinkle said.
Has your company pushed its number of MPN gold competencies into the teens? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 06, 20110 comments