HP is trying to boil its massive portfolio of products and partner programs down to just the elements SMB-focused solution providers need to make money. The effort launched March 1 as a portal called HP SMB Central.
"This is a new program and a new philosophy in HP. How can we bring new partners to HP and get them to understand HP and get their feet wet?" said Meaghan Kelly, HP vice president of Channel Strategy and SMB, Solution Partners Organization-Americas, in a phone interview Tuesday. For HP, it's a matter of trying to get better penetration into what its research indicates is a $57-billion market opportunity for HP products that fit into the SMB space in the Americas.
"From a portfolio perspective, we arguably have the greatest breadth and depth of anyone in the industry," Kelly said, ticking off products ranging from Webcams to laptops to printers to HP Superdome servers. "The bad part is that we're very complex and there's a lot to know about HP. The good part is that we have something for everyone. As we come forward with this program, we'll serve the most appropriate products for SMBs up on a platter."
New partners can register for free. The centerpiece of the program is called the Hot 5, which Kelly summarizes as, "Go do these five things and you'll make money this month."
The five elements are:
- having HP highlight the products out of its entire portfolio that are the best fit for businesses of 10-500 employees and flag current incentives for partners,
- a new configuration tool that helps partners search the portal for the right mix of tools while providing pricing and availability information from distributors,
- HP marketing subsidies of up to $1,500 per quarter (the first time co-marketing funding has been available outside of full HP PartnerOne membership),
- access to HP Financial Services to help close deals and
- a limited number of early participants can use the HP Solutions Showcase to link HP-updated product content directly to their Web sites for free.
HP SMB Central also includes an SMB Concierge Desk that uses Webcam conferencing to connect HP experts with partners. HP plans to turn on social networking and collaboration tools in the next 30 days, Kelly said.
HP has worked with Microsoft partners especially closely in the past through the HP/Microsoft Frontline Partnership, and that joint program continues to be an important focus, Kelly said.
"We've got a huge overlap in our programs," Kelly said. Of HP's 16,000 SMB-focused VARs in the Americas, she estimated that 90 percent are enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Network.
But she said HP hopes the SMB Central program will get even more Microsoft partners to sell HP hardware, printers, peripherals and software as they sell the Microsoft stack to their SMB customers.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 02, 20110 comments
Tech Data Corp. this week went live with a software license tool designed to simplify and speed up ordering for resellers and to reduce the errors and subsequent delays inherent in the formerly manual processes for vendors.
"I've talked to so many owners who say their sales reps don't even handle software licensing anymore because it's gotten too complex," said Joe Quaglia, senior vice president of U.S. Marketing at the Clearwater, Fla.-based distribution giant, in a phone interview.
Two years ago, a team at Tech Data started working on a tool with the design goals that the system be automated, less complex and intuitive to improve accuracy and speed, Quaglia said.
The project became the StreamOne Software License Selector. To use it, a reseller works through four tabs in a matter of minutes. The tabs are called "select end user," "select vendors/categories," "select product" and "get part number & price." Answers in each tab narrow the choices in the next, sifting hundreds of thousands of software SKUs and applying complex business logic to fit each vendors' licensing rules.
"Microsoft, of all of our partners, they were ready first," said Toby McDuffie, director of product marketing software at Tech Data. "The tool that we rolled out will actually verify if an end user wants to, say, add a license onto an existing agreement that they had and provide that agreement to us. [Before StreamOne] we had to look it up. Today our system can go ping Microsoft and get that answer."
Nearly all other major vendors are now participating in StreamOne, which has been in beta with resellers for several months and has been in production use by Tech Data's sales reps and for EDI customers since mid-2010. At launch, the tool can handle SKU selection and order qualification for nearly 40 software vendors that represent more than 99 percent of Tech Data software licenses purchases, the company said in a statement.
In addition to Microsoft, supported vendors include Absolute Software, Acronis, Adobe, Autodesk, BitDefender, CA, Check Point, Corel, Datawatch, Diskeeper, Double-Take, Ericom, Filemaker, Intuit, Ipswitch, Kaspersky, McAfee, Micro Focus, Novell, Nuance, Oracle, Panda, Parallels, Red Hat, Sage, SAP, SCO, SolarWinds, St. Bernard, Sybase, Symantec, Trend Micro, USA.NET, Vasco, Vizioncore and VMware.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 02, 20110 comments
Windows MultiPoint Server 2011, which Microsoft is in the final stages of making available through its many delivery channels, is intended as a shared computing solution for libraries, labs and classrooms. But Heartland Technology Groups founder Arlin Sorensen argued in a post on his Peer Power blog Tuesday morning that MultiPoint deserves serious consideration from VARs as an SMB solution.
"This product has been revved from the previous version and I think has a great application for those of us serving small businesses," Sorensen wrote.
Arlin is looking at MultiPoint as a way to provide Terminal Services to small-business customers at an affordable price that extends the lives of their aging workstations: "It is essentially a turnkey TS server on steroids."
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 01, 20110 comments
Monday, I blogged at length whether Windows Intune, which is supposed to be generally available on March 23, will have legs as a product for managed services providers. I came down on the side that Microsoft's direct-billing approach will be even more of an issue for MSPs looking at Windows Intune than it is for VARs looking at the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.
Woody Walton, of Microsoft, had another perspective Monday night on the U.S. SMB&D TS2 Team Blog. In a post titled "So what is the value proposition for Windows Intune to an SMB VAR?" Walton argues that Windows Intune is more than an MSP tool.
"It may be that in the end you use other tools like Level Platforms to manage your customer's systems, but that doesn't mean Windows Intune doesn't have value to you or the customer," Walton wrote, arguing that Windows Intune makes a Windows 7 upsell relatively painless and opens up Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack features to customers. Great points, and ones with implications wider than for just the MSP market.
Walton provides four reasons for SMB VARs to represent Windows Intune: no price barrier to the Windows 7 desktop, doubling BPOS proceeds by adding Windows Intune, freeing up capital for partner services and breaking into managed services. Read his whole post here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 01, 20110 comments
Market researchers at IDC released their 2010 year-end version of the Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker on Tuesday and the scorecard showed a monstrously good year for servers, especially in the fourth quarter.
For the full year, revenues were up 11.4 percent to $48.1 billion and unit shipments rose 15.3 percent to 7.6 million units compared to 2009. For the fourth quarter of 2010, revenues were $15 billion, also a 15.3-percent increase over the year-ago quarter, and unit shipments reached 2.1 million, a 6.1-percent increase.
According to IDC, it was the highest quarterly revenue in three years, and it was the fourth consecutive quarter with improving year-over-year revenue growth in a market that accelerated throughout the calendar year.
Windows servers were sitting in a sweet spot, setting a record quarterly total for unit shipments on the Microsoft platform. IDC said there were 1.5 million shipments of Windows-based servers in the quarter. Although IDC didn't break out the percentage, that's 71 percent of the servers that went out for the quarter. By revenue, Windows server shipments' $6.3 billion in revenue accounted for 42.1 percent of the quarterly total. Linux-based servers continue to improve, as well, with 29.3 percent quarterly revenue growth to $2.5 billion and 9.8 percent shipment growth to 450,000 units.
Both operating system classes benefited from a fast-growing x86 market, which enjoyed 21.4 percent revenue growth in Q4, accounted for 2.0 million of the 2.1 million total shipments and claimed 59.7 percent of all server spending.
Ranking vendors by revenue market share for the full year, IBM held the top spot at 31.9 percent, helped in part by freakishly good performance in its mainframe unit. HP was a very close second at 31.8 percent, and while Dell came in third at 14.6 percent. Round Rock's revenues were improving the fastest -- they were 34 percent higher than in 2009.
Despite the rising market, Sun's server revenues have cratered since Oracle acquired the Unix server maker on Jan. 27, 2010. Sun server revenues declined 14 percent and its market share hit 6.8 percent.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 01, 20110 comments
According to an article in the New York Times over the weekend, Microsoft is encouraging employees to write apps for Windows Phone 7 on their own time, and will share any revenue on those apps in a 70/30 employee/Microsoft split. From the article:
"It has relaxed a strict rule and will let employees moonlight in their spare time and keep the resulting intellectual property and most of the revenue, as long as that second job is writing apps for Windows Phone 7-based devices.
"And they don't have to do that work quietly. The company is having weekly pizza parties for workers who pitch in to write code for the platform and is planning ways to publicize their work, including posters and awards of recognition, said Brandon Watson, director of developer experience for Windows Phone 7."
This is encouraging news for anyone who would like to see Microsoft harness its considerable engineering talent to the vibrant smartphone apps market that's been taking place mostly away from Microsoft's platforms. A lot of Microsoft partners are rooting for Microsoft to do much better, and giving Microsoft's brightest and most motivated engineers incentives to populate Microsoft's app store is a good way to build some momentum. (It's not like stock options are much motivation over there anymore, anyway.)
Once it was enough for Microsoft to sell its mobile OS by saying that Windows phones offer the tightest integration with the Windows platform. As Apple's and Google's vibrant app markets show, few developers and phone users seem to care about the plumbing. Microsoft is going to have to compete on the fun or usefulness of the apps themselves.
This human resources rule change is the most concrete sign yet that Microsoft has awoken to its underdog status in the mobile fight. If you can get an HR department of a Fortune 500 company to change a policy, you must be pretty serious.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 28, 20110 comments
Microsoft got a lot more specific today on the future of Windows Intune. A product that had been promised only for 2011 now has an exact availability date, and it's soon: March 23. Read the news story here.
For those not lucky enough to get into the 10,000-member Beta 2 club, Windows Intune is a cloud-based systems management and security tool that is designed for both midsize company IT administrators and for managed service providers. A Multi-Account Console added at the Beta 2 phase in July made the tool much more of an MSP play, rather than just an IT admin tool.
Will this tool work for MSPs as a way to manage their customers? What I think, based in part on conversations with MSPs, is Intune's got three big things against it and three big things going for it.
The Bad:
- Microsoft wants to use the same direct-billing method with Windows Intune that it uses for the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. The customer gets a bill from Microsoft and the Partner of Record gets a quarterly check from Microsoft for 18 percent the first year, and 6 percent in subsequent years. In many ways, direct-billing is more of a non-starter for MSPs than for potential BPOS resellers, who are plenty hot about it. MSPs are in the business of bundling their services into a monthly rate and billing their customers. Dealing with a discrete bill for a core part of the service? Not an option, I'm hearing.
- MSPs have a lot of mature third-party systems management tools for remote monitoring and management of customer systems. Microsoft really has to come in with an offering that's head and shoulders above the competition to be seriously considered.
- Is this a tool for end users or for partners? Microsoft's answer is both, which may make sense in Redmond but isn't a great situation for partners. It means in some cases Microsoft would be trying to sell Windows Intune as a tool to the same customers to whom MSPs would be pitching their managed services packages that include Windows Intune. (In most cases, however, Microsoft's direct sales would probably target larger organizations than many MSPs will chase.) The bigger problem is the mixed message from a product development standpoint. Is this product designed for partners or end users? That tension could hamper product development.
The Good:
- What's really appealing about Windows Intune is that no one can manage Windows systems better than Microsoft, and Microsoft is starting to make that management possible from the cloud in addition to the old way of using the System Center family of servers on premises.
- Microsoft tried to do an MSP-style, on-premise System Center solution in the past and gave it up. But the cloud lends itself to the MSP model so much more easily that there will be less incentive for Microsoft to throw in the towel if it doesn't catch on right away.
- From a licensing standpoint, Windows Intune gives partners a way to slip enterprise licensing benefits to SMB customers who wouldn't think of entering the type of licensing agreement that would bring them Software Assurance benefits. A partner that could hand over Windows 7 Enterprise upgrade rights along with Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack benefits might be very popular indeed with their customers.
What's interesting to me about the bad here is that none of the objections are insurmountable. Microsoft officials have hinted that they're working on an alternative to the direct-billing approach, and it would make sense for that change to come sometime after Office 365 (the successor to BPOS) ships this summer. If Microsoft resolves those thorny issues for Office 365/BPOS, changing it for Windows Intune would be a relatively simple port.
If Microsoft removes that billing objection, getting partners to consider a Microsoft-based alternative to existing RMM tools isn't insurmountable, either. I hope Microsoft gets Windows Intune right. MSPs have been a major part of Microsoft's partner community for years, but they haven't had much attention from Redmond's product groups. A solid systems management tool that provides a viable MSP technology option and spurs further competition (and improvement) among established vendors in the space would be a benefit to Microsoft's MSP partners.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 28, 20110 comments
(Editor's Note: The SBS 2011 isn't close to hitting the Action Pack, after all. See the update to this item here.)
Partners with Action Pack subscriptions can look for Windows Small Business Server 2011 at the Digital Download Center right about now, according a Microsoft blog.
"I've had a lot of questions [from partners] about SBS 2011, and it is scheduled to be added to the Digital Download Center at the end of February," said Julie Golding, a Microsoft partner marketing manager, in a Q&A last week on the Microsoft U.S. Partner Team blog. Golding is the U.S. lead for the Microsoft Action Pack Solution Provider, the IT version of the Action Pack subscription, which was split into IT and developer editions last May.
Small Business Server 2011 is the next version of Microsoft's general-purpose server for organizations with up to 75 employees. The product was released to manufacturing in December and posted in a 180-day trial version in January.
It is one of several small office/home office servers nearing general availability. Release candidate versions of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Home Server came out at the beginning of February. Home Server supports up to 10 PCs and Essentials tops out at about 25 users.
Action Pack Solution Provider subscribers get one internal-use license for Windows Small Business Server and 10 client access licenses, among the dozens of products and hundreds of licenses in the Action Pack. Microsoft Small Business Specialist partners get a specialized version of the Action Pack called the SBSC Special Edition Toolkit that has a shorter list of products but which includes 15 SBS CALs. In the United States, the Action Pack Solution Provider costs $329 per year. The developer edition, Action Pack Development & Design, costs $429, and has most of the same software plus an MSDN subscription and developer tools.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 28, 20114 comments
A new cloud computing fight erupted late last week between Google and Microsoft. Google released its promised Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which lets users simultaneously edit documents created in Office 2003, 2007 or 2010. Microsoft fired back with accusations that Google's efforts showed a lack of seriousness and a list of technical problems with the Google tool. Our online news editor Kurt Mackie unpacked Microsoft's complaints here in a post well worth reading.
The back-and-forth is fun to watch, but a lot of solution providers seem perfectly willing to offer customers whatever they want -- Google Apps in some cases, Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite in others. Google's new Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office will give solution providers a way to keep on offering customers what they want, which often is a mix of the best offerings from both companies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 28, 20110 comments
Mozy, the home and SMB online backup service owned by EMC Corp., refreshed its reseller program this week with a new partner portal, new tools and new benefits. Mozy currently has about 6,000 partners who resell the MozyPro version of the service, as opposed to the MozyHome edition. Members of the EMC Velocity partner program also resell MozyPro.
According to Seattle-based Mozy, about 70,000 businesses currently use the MozyPro service. Features unique to the higher-end MozyPro service include server backups and tools for backing up data locally as well as remotely in the Mozy/EMC data centers.
The new portal, called the Mozy Reseller Portal, will have MozyPro case studies, marketing tools, product documentation, training courses and access to the Mozy Support portal. An upgrade to the Mozy Administrative Console now gives resellers a consolidated view of backups, purchases and other metrics for themselves or that they can automatically send to customers.
The Mozy Reseller Program now includes co-branding that includes a personalized sub-domain ("resellername".mozypro.com), the reseller's logo and "powered by Mozy" branding.
The program also now has partner tiers with different discounts, co-marketing programs and lead generation. The levels are MozyPro Authorized, Accredited and Premier Resellers.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 23, 20110 comments
My colleague Lee Pender had the story Wednesday that Google is launching a certification for partners. As Lee said, this is a big deal for the fledgling Google Apps Authorized Resellers program, because providing certifications that distinguish partner companies that get their engineers trained from those partners that don't is an important mark of maturity for any channel program.
As Microsoft and Google are fighting over who will dominate business productivity apps in the cloud, it's interesting to look at how the two companies are going about attracting partners.
Google's initial approach has been to make the process of joining the Google Apps reseller program practical, with the main requirement being that a partner actually makes a sale. That's probably part of the reason the number of Google Apps resellers is lower. Google on Wednesday said it had 2,500 partners in 70 countries. Meanwhile, Microsoft has claimed 16,000 resellers for its comparable Business Productivity Online Suite, although even Microsoft executives have acknowledged that many of those partners aren't doing much selling yet.
Where Microsoft has huge advantages is in the infrastructure of partnering. The company has been aggressively spinning up cloud programs this year, from the Cloud Champions program in the United States to the Cloud Essentials and Cloud Accelerate programs from the Worldwide Partner Group. Over the years, the company has spun up literally hundreds of specialized partner programs on this scale.
For Microsoft, getting individual certifications going for cloud specialists is simply a matter of slotting new courses and tests into the existing certification machinery.
Google needs to build everything from certification courseware to a certification program to a testing infrastructure to community awareness. Starting from scratch, while tough, also has advantages. As Google got its cert program going, it was able to make the program 100 percent Web-based. The company's test cost is $100 and, interestingly, requires a particular Webcam for $45 that allows a test proctor to watch the candidate take the test.
Meanwhile, Google's test is launching in English, with more languages rolling out later. Microsoft, of course, has years of experience in the process of rolling out courseware and tests in multiple languages.
Certification advantage: Microsoft by a long shot for now, even if it's slow off the blocks on cloud specifically. (I suspect Microsoft will really get its act together with cloud certifications around the time of the Office 365 launch.) If you've taken Microsoft's tests and tried Google's, I'd be interested to hear what you make of the difference.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 23, 20110 comments
When consulting on technology solutions with customers, it helps to know what kind of devices they're naturally interested in and comfortable with. It's fairly obvious that a Millenial business owner is going to be interested in different devices than a boomer, but which ones exactly?
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released some interesting data today called "Generations and their Gadgets" that provides specifics worth browsing. Examples from the survey of 3,000 Americans:
- Generation X (35-46) are most likely to own a desktop
- Millenials (18-34) are the only age group more likely to have a laptop than a desktop
- E-book readers are most popular with Younger Boomers (47-56) and what Pew calls the Silent Generation (66-74).
A summary of the study is here, while a nifty bar graph broken down by device category and age group is here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 03, 20110 comments