Microsoft took one step closer to general availability of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Home Server 2011 today by issuing release candidates for both products.
Essentials had gone by the code-name "Aurora" while Home Server was referred to as "Vail."
In an e-mail statement announcing the release candidates, Microsoft described Aurora this way: "Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials provides a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution to help protect data, organize and access business information from virtually anywhere, support the applications needed to run a business and quickly connect to online services for e-mail, collaboration and CRM."
Of Vail, the statement said, "At home, the affordable and easy-to-use Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS) is the ideal solution to help families keep their important digital files and PCs automatically backed up, organized, and accessible."
For a lot more detail on the capabilities and partner opportunities in the heavily online-dependent Aurora, check out J. Peter Bruzzese's RCP review of the Aurora beta back in October.
Meanwhile, RCP's Microsoft product roadmap, with detail on products across Microsoft's software and online services stack, has been updated for 2011.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 03, 20110 comments
Microsoft Financing has some new blood at the top. According to a Microsoft PR-produced featur
e story posted today, the general manager of Microsoft Financing is now Seth Eisner. Longtime former GM Brian Madison joined Key Equipment Finance as senior vice president of U.S. vendor alliances in November. Eisner's LinkedIn profile puts him in his current job since August. Prior to taking over Microsoft Financing he was GM of investments and acquisitions for Microsoft.
The feature story indicates a slight pivot for Microsoft Financing under Eisner. Madison pushed the program heavily through partners, with a focus on smaller and midsize businesses. (Microsoft Financing allows customers to finance IT purchases, including hardware, software and services, through Microsoft. The benefit to partners was cash flow -- they got a check upfront for everything from Microsoft, and the customer made monthly payments to Microsoft. The benefit to Microsoft was generally increased deal sizes enabled by the financing.)
Eisner is making his pitch directly to CIOs, indicating that Microsoft Financing may be focusing more on expanding its foothold among enterprise customers. This would be a smart move since customers across the spectrum are looking more often to buy IT out of operational budgets rather than as capital expenses. Microsoft Financing is one way to bridge that gap -- allowing a customer to invest in the big, on-premise project but pay for it monthly as if it were a service.
We hope this simply means that an enterprise push is being added to the portfolio, not that partners and SMB purchasers are being de-emphasized. Microsoft Financing has been a good, if underutilized, deal for partners in the past. We hope Eisner will continue to keep partners front and center.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 01, 20110 comments
Microsoft and SAP AG are trying to make it easier for their respective partners to resell the other's wares in integrated solutions with a new program called the SAP-Microsoft Unite Partner Connection.
The two companies launched the program today in conjunction with the general availability of Duet Enterprise, software that connects Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and SAP solutions.
It's not the first time Microsoft and a strategic technology partner have launched a joint program for their shared channel partners. Microsoft has a similar setup with HP in the Frontline Partnership.
The new Unite program is designed for companies that belong to both the SAP PartnerEdge program and the Microsoft Partner Network.
The program will be organized around initiatives chosen by Microsoft and SAP together, such as a marketing program for joint products like Duet Enterprise software, the companies said in a FAQ at the Unite portal.
Benefits will include go-to-market support, marketing and sales enablement, field collaboration, training and demo capabilities.
According to the FAQ, Microsoft and SAP hope the Unite program will increase end-user productivity and customer satisfaction with Duet Enterprise, and lower TCO for SAP application-related infrastructure on SQL Server Enterprise Edition and Windows Server Enterprise Edition.
The companies are seeking systems integrators and ISVs belonging to both companies' partner programs with demonstrated market penetration in multiple regions. Initial members of the Unite program include Atos Origin, Logica and Wipro.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 01, 20110 comments
Registration for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference will open on March 23, the company announced Friday on the Digital WPC site.
"You’ll be able to take advantage of our Early Bird partner registration price that gives you a $300 savings off the Standard partner registration price," Microsoft said in the announcement.
WPC is Microsoft's biggest event of the year, with more than 10,000 attendees, including partners, vendors and Microsoft partner executives. This year's WPC is being held in Los Angeles from July 10-14.
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 20110 comments
Another quarter is in the books, and Microsoft's revenues and profits keep soaring. By now you've seen the headline numbers for the quarter that ended Dec. 31 -- nearly $20 billion in revenues, net income of $6.63 billion, 24 percent growth in Microsoft Business Division revenues on the back of Office 2010, 8 million Kinect sensors sold in the first 60 days, Windows 7 license sales hit 300 million and Internet Explorer 9 downloads crossed 20 million.
As analyst Allan B. Krans of Technology Business Research Inc. noted after Microsoft's announcement on Thursday, "Even as cloud becomes increasingly pronounced in Microsoft’s messaging to customers, the company is not taking its foot off the accelerator of core Windows and Office products, maintaining a long-held presence that drives large streams of revenue and profit."
Here are some tidbits that jumped out at me from the transcript of the earnings call:
* Nearly 90 percent of enterprise companies worldwide have started formal migrations to Windows 7, according to IDC data shared by Microsoft during the call.
* Revenues for premium editions of Windows Server and SQL Server grew double digits, and Microsoft has grown its share of the overall server market every quarter since Windows Server 2008 R2 launched in the year-ago quarter.
* Microsoft has one of the best lenses on the PC market in the industry. Here's what Bill Koefoed, general manager of investor relations, had to say about it: "We estimate close to 90 million PCs were sold globally, the biggest quarter ever, representing growth of 2 to 4 percent. Business PCs grew faster than consumer PCs as companies continued to refresh hardware and adopt Windows 7. Within consumer PCs, netbooks declined from their peak last year while notebook growth remained healthy."
* The Server and Tools Business also did well. Koefoed said, "Server and Tools ... posted 10 percent revenue growth. Non-annuity revenue grew roughly in-line with the underlying server hardware market, which we estimate grew high single digits. Multi-year license revenue growth was roughly 11 percent, and enterprise services revenue grew 9 percent." Can someone explain to me again why Bob Muglia needs to go?
* Microsoft credits the virtualization trend for driving double-digit growth in Microsoft System Center revenues and in Windows Server 2008 premium revenues.
* Lync growth was better than 20 percent for the quarter, and SharePoint 2010 and Dynamics CRM both had double-digit growth.
* Peter Klein, Microsoft CFO, expects a pretty good remainder of Microsoft's fiscal year, which concludes at the end of June. "According to various surveys, enterprise IT spending is forecasted to grow in 2011, and Windows 7 and Office 2010 remain among the highest priorities for CIOs. We remain confident in our ability to continue to grow our share of the IT spending market," Klein said. "We expect the business PC refresh cycle to continue. In terms of PC growth, we expect business to outpace consumer, and emerging markets to outpace developed markets."
In all, Microsoft earnings call made me feel more optimistic about 2011 for the Microsoft channel than I had been until now.
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 20110 comments
Earlier this month, I suggested that there was a coded message when Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, recently blogged on town hall meetings for Microsoft partners. I argued that Roskill might be signaling that partners should stay tuned for an announcement that they would be able to bill customers directly for the Business Productivity Online Suite/Services. Roskill took a break from midyear reviews to e-mail me a response last week. Here's what he had to say:
1) Â Â As I said we are always out talking to Partners and gathering feedback, particularly hot right now around our Cloud offerings
2)  Also as I have said, we do meet here in Redmond with the product teams and discuss Partner input in the context of our product offerings (as product and billing are fully intertwined in the Cloud world) frequently…..part of my job is being the champion of the Partners in the halls of Microsoft and I take that role on with gusto!
3)   Microsoft priority right now is to get Office 365 out the door in many languages and we have agreed that anything else that trades off against that will be a lower priority, so anything that requires engineering team resources (as the same team is doing the product/service is also the team doing the billing systems….part of the new Cloud world).
4)   From talking to Partners one of the things I have taken away is that they frequently don’t understand what we have available to help them in this area of selling Microsoft Online Services while maturing their customer relationships, specifics in this area are:
a. Â Â They have the ability to put links in their marketing that drives to trials with them automatically set as Partner of Record
b. Â Â They have ability to use the BPOS sales dashboard to track all their trials and sales and the ability to drive incremental sales (customers often start with a small sale and then scale).
c.   For partners that have made it into our Cloud Accelerate program level there is also the ability to fully assign the Partner as the Admin of Record where you can manage the deployment and admin of the customer seats…. This to me is proof that the customer really does value the Partner relationship at that level. I think this functionality is so cool that I am working to see if we can extend this to all Online Resellers (not just Cloud Accelerate).
d. Â Â Our model, while not perfect, does let partners get into market quickly with limited to no investment in cloud infrastructure for lead management, billing, quote tools, etc. and I do get a lot of positive feedback from this aspect of our Partner go-to-market approach.
5) Â Â As soon as we have any opportunities for Partners to resell any Microsoft products you will of course hear it from me first!
This topic has really struck a nerve. I'll be sharing more responses from readers soon.
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 20115 comments
Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, put up an innocuous-looking entry on his "Partner Perspective" blog yesterday.
In it, Roskill sings the praises of listening to partner feedback, which of course every vendor says they value but few really do effectively. Roskill writes, "Some of you already know that I think Town Hall style meetings are great forums for us to meet in person and have meaningful discussions."
At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much of substance to the post. But then Roskill references the recent Town Hall meeting in the Microsoft Store in Bellevue. He highlights his exchange with Jamison West of JWCS as an example of the kind of "meaningful discussions" that can take place in town halls.
You have to start the video and move it ahead to 21:45 (a time stamp Roskill helpfully includes) to see the exchange. What is it? It's the part that we highlighted in RCP magazine here and here about how partners are unhappy with Microsoft's direct-billing on Business Productivity Online Services and where Roskill says Microsoft is working to find a way to allow partners to bill their own BPOS customers.
With this subtle reference in this blog entry, I think Roskill's signaling that the effort to get partner billing fixed remains a high priority for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group. I read it as a coded message that Microsoft isn't ready to announce anything yet, but that Roskill wants partners who may be considering other options to give Microsoft a little more time to get its internal ducks in order. What do you think?
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 13, 20112 comments
I've been slightly obsessed with the Stuxnet worm (see Unpacked Stuxnet Is Ugly for the Channel).
Now Newsweek has a lengthy article tying the worm together with the late November bomb attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists. In my admittedly obsessive view, the article is worth a read.
Authors Christopher Dickey, R.M. Schneiderman and Babak Dehghan Pisheh have put together a pretty good summary of the state of play. For example, one thing I missed in my Thanksgiving turkey leftover-induced haze was that on the day of the scientist bombings, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the first Iranian government acknowledgement that a cyberattack had damaged some Iranian centrifuges.
Bottom line, nearly everything remains murky.
Key quote from Newsweek:
"What we can deduce from the limited evidence that has emerged so far, according to former White House counterterrorism and cyberwarfare adviser Richard Clarke, is that at least two countries conducted operations against Iran simultaneously and not necessarily in close coordination. One likely carried out the hits; the other created and somehow infiltrated the highly sophisticated Stuxnet worm into computers of the Iranian nuclear program."
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 14, 20100 comments
The Azure Platform, Windows Phone 7 and Internet Explorer were big topics at the Professional Developers Conference last week. The high-level takeaways: Microsoft tried to put a freeze on any developer drift to Google Chrome while it readies IE9, the company issued a call-to-arms for developers to write apps for Windows Phone 7 and there's a ton of new stuff coming to the Azure Platform. Kathleen Richardson  has the details here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 01, 20100 comments
Microsoft reported their earnings late last week after our last RCPU of the week went out. Since it's World Series time, we'll go with the baseball analogy -- Microsoft hit it out of the park.
The results were powered in part by Windows 7 sales, which include a little fudging of about $1.5 billion in revenue deferred from the first quarter of last year from a Windows 7 upgrade program. But the headline numbers are $16.2 billion in revenues (a 25 percent jump) and net income of $5.4 billion (a 51 percent jump). See Chris Paoli's article for more on the numbers.
But digging into the transcript from the investor call to discuss earnings turned up a few nuggets for the channel.
Bill Koefoed, general manager of Investor Relations for Microsoft, had good news about sales in the SMB sector, which struggled the last few years. "Sales to small and medium businesses were exceptionally strong with revenue up over 30 percent. This growth was partially due to a greater level of [partner] engagement as we had an increase of over 15 percent in the number of partners selling Microsoft products around the world."
Partners focused on enterprise could take heart from Koefoed's remarks, too. "We also saw strengthening trends in the enterprise segment, despite what is typically a seasonally weak quarter. Our compelling product portfolio across Windows, Server & Tools and the Microsoft Business Division is driving increased enterprise agreement renewals," he said.
Other highlights:
- Revenue from server virtualization suites grew more than 50 percent
- Windows Azure subscriptions grew 40 percent sequentially
- Dynamics CRM had double-digit growth (unspecified)
- Sales of Exchange and SharePoint saw double-digit growth (also unspecified)
- PC market growth in the quarter was 9 percent to 11 percent.
Turning from the rearview mirror to the front windshield, Microsoft CFO Peter Klein kept up the positive tone.
"We expect business PC and server hardware purchasing to remain a high priority for most businesses. The business PC refresh cycle should continue through at least the remainder of this fiscal year. As was the case this quarter, we expect business PC growth to outpace consumer PC growth, and emerging market growth to outpace developed market growth," Klein said.
Say what you will about MSFT as a stock, the company's business gives it an unparalleled perspective on the health of the IT market, and the company tends to be pretty straightforward in its assessments to investors of the strength of PC and server sales. Sounds like a relatively promising foundation for Microsoft partner sales over the coming quarter.
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 01, 20100 comments
The Microsoft Partner Network went all the way to reality Monday, when Microsoft turned on the new MPN site and made it possible for partners to begin re-enrolling in the new Gold Competencies. "[We've got our] fingers crossed, but we're feeling really excited about it," Jon Roskill told Redmond Channel Partner magazine in an interview Friday. The full story is here, with lots of detail about what the changes to the MPN are and what they could mean.
In addition to some interesting comments from Roskill about Microsoft's view on the MPN, we got some commentary from MPN architect Julie Bennani about how Microsoft thinks the changes will play out. She shared Microsoft's expectations in terms of the total number of partners, and what will happen to the mix of Gold Competent versus Silver Competent partners.
Roskill and Bennani had a lot of other interesting things to say, so stay tuned to RCPmag.com and RCPU throughout the week.
While you're at the site, visit our new section specifically dedicated to the MPN. We've collected our best resources on making the transition to the MPN there.
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 01, 20100 comments
It's always interesting to scan through the comments at the infamously anonymous employee blog Mini-Microsoft when there's a major executive shakeup in Redmond, like Ray Ozzie's pending departure. Reaction to the Ozzie news is mixed over there. But more specifically, there's an anonymous post from a commenter claiming to be on the corporate sales force that's relevant to partners and the Microsoft Online Services effort. You can never tell, but there's enough detail in the post to make it seem credible. Money quote:
The company's commercial Online Services offering has nowhere near the traction that the executives and others would like everyone to believe. In FY09 and FY10, the sales force gave away BPOS, so we could hit one of [Microsoft COO Kevin Turner's] scorecard metrics. Customers took it because it did not cost them anything. In the last two years, the vast majority of these customers have not put it in production either. Now we are trying to figure out how to get our partners to help get it deployed.
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 20, 20100 comments