U.S. partners who sell Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite to at least 20 customers for a total of 500 seats or more will be eligible to double their initial margins under a new arrangement called the Cloud Champions Club.
Microsoft held a webcast for partners on Friday about the club and has another webcast scheduled Oct. 1. The club consists of three tiers with benefits increasing as partners advance from one level to the next. Benefits include specialized cloud training, monthly webcasts, marketing support, qualified leads and an online services partner development manager.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 20, 20100 comments
A lot of the 40-or-so Microsoft National Systems Integrators are companies with a presence across several U.S. regions. But as an announcement today by Sapient that it is expanding its presence in Bangalore, India, illustrates, some of them are super-national companies that haven’t quite reached the scope of a Microsoft Global Systems Integrator -- yet.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 01, 20100 comments
The massive, global build out of cloud computing data centers by major IT vendors continues with the news that Microsoft will spend half a billion dollars to construct a huge, modular facility in southern Virginia.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell announced the Microsoft data center last Friday in a press release that boasted about winning the facility over competition from North Carolina and Texas. But the win also underscores the hoops that local governments must jump through to get the mere 50 new jobs that the facility is supposed to create.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 01, 20100 comments
The markets and the Fed aren't the only ones saying the recovery is slowing enough to cause concern. Warning signs are flashing all through the small business and IT markets.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released results of its latest Index of Small Business Optimism on Tuesday. See the full PDF here.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 11, 20100 comments
Another Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is in the bag. Here are 11 key takeaways from the 2010 WPC:
1. Microsoft wants partners to be "all-in" on the cloud. Nearly everything was about cloud computing. That was a little weird for partners coming in from countries where BPOS and other offerings haven't rolled out yet, but pretty compelling for U.S. partners.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 19, 20100 comments
One of the key themes Microsoft will hammer out at its Worldwide Partner Conference next week will be the opportunity to develop and sell solutions based on the new Windows Phone 7 platform for smartphones. The latest data from comScore Inc, a Reston, Va.-based firm dedicated to measuring digital usage trends, doesn’t help Microsoft’s pitch to partners.
ComScore on Thursday reported figures for total U.S. smartphone subscribers in May that show Microsoft, Apple, Research in Motion (RIM) and Palm all losing share to Google compared to February, the last time comScore released its metric. Microsoft’s loss of nearly two points of share was the steepest drop. The Google Android platform’s gain of four percentage points was both the largest change in absolute terms and the only positive movement among major players. Other losses of share in percentage points were Apple (-1.0), Palm (-0.6) and RIM (-0.4).
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 20100 comments
Microsoft released its annual list of Partner of the Year Award winners Wednesday. This year’s list features more winners than in the past from among Microsoft’s 390,000-member community of Gold Certified, Certified and Registered Member partners.
A new category this year is Partner of the Year at the country level. For the United States, that honor goes to Slalom Consulting, an 800-person National Systems Integrator based in Seattle. Slalom was also named Business Intelligence Partner of the Year and Information Worker Solutions, Collaboration Partner of the Year. Avanade, the global consulting agency that got its start with a joint investment from Accenture and Microsoft, also cleaned up in the 2010 awards. The U.S. unit won three awards and the U.K. unit won another award.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 23, 20100 comments
The IAMCP, which now stands for the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners, is coming off its first national meeting, held last month in regional offices and remotely throughout the country. The gathering featured a keynote from Cindy Bates, Microsoft vice president of U.S. Partner Strategy. As one of the top two Microsoft partner executives nationally, the Bates keynote was a good vote of confidence for the IAMCP's first national event where my colleague Jeff Schwartz attended the New York presentation (see his report).
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 03, 20100 comments
Microsoft is bringing back its popular Big Easy promotion for the month of June in an end-of-year push to increase revenues for Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and Office 2010.
The latest version is called Big Easy 4.1. The idea of the promotion is to enable solution sales by offering increasing rebates to customers when they buy Microsoft products from different product groups. The more groups customers purchase products from, the higher their rebate.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 02, 20100 comments
The slow rollout of the new Microsoft Partner Network passed a milestone today with the launch of the new competency structure and the new Action Packs.
Any partner with a Microsoft competency and specialization under the old system was supposed to be automatically transitioned into a new competency, with an e-mail notification. For some partners, the new competency name won't be much of a change. For example, the Security Solutions competency with a specialization in Identity & Secure Access will now go by the competency name Identity and Security. The ISV competency goes to, wait for it, ISV. For others, though, the new competency name is a lot different. Partners with the competency/specialization combo of Information Worker Solutions/Office Solutions Development are now in the Portals and Collaboration competency.
More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20100 comments
A shout out to our sister publication for government IT consultants, Washington Technology, which ran a piece this month about the famous Los Angeles-Google deal. Writer David Hubler goes into a lot of depth about Computer Sciences Corp.'s role, partnering with Google to implement the messaging system. The system is eventually supposed to cover 30,000 public employees. If the implementation is a success, it will be another major case study supporting a cloud mail system, as opposed to on-premise, like Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise, which is the system the Google setup will replace. Of course, if it doesn't work properly...
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20100 comments
Big Blue made a major customer acquisition move today in buying Sterling Commerce, according to an analyst. IBM is buying the Dublin, Ohio-based electronic data interchange (EDI) software company from AT&T for $1.4 billion. Analyst Ray Wang told RCP's Jeffrey Schwartz that by processing large volumes of transactions between B2B trading partners, Sterling actually brings IBM a lot of high-value customers among large banks, telcos and retailers.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 24, 20100 comments