Former high-ranking Microsoft executive Maria Martinez has landed at Microsoft's archrival in the cloud CRM space, Salesforce.com, less than a year after she retired from Microsoft.
Martinez was announced Wednesday as executive vice president of Customers for Life, Salesforce.com's department dedicated, obviously enough, to customer retention. She'll report to Frank van Veenendaal, president of worldwide sales and services.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on May 06, 20100 comments
Partners often don't think of opportunity when it comes to Microsoft's management technologies that are branded under the System Center umbrella. But Microsoft is making a major marketing push to get partners involved with two System Center products that were released to manufacturing today. The products are System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 19, 20100 comments
In my column for the April issue of RCP, "Looking out for the Little Server," I shared my concern that the stand-alone server category may suffer from benign neglect as the industry focuses on data-center blade designs that serve the cloud.
The column prompted a server solution specialist and Microsoft licensing expert with a major distributor, who asked that he not to be identified by name, to respond with some interesting observations:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on April 19, 20100 comments
Registration opened today for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. The event will be held July 11-15 in Washington, D.C.
WPC is traditionally the biggest Microsoft channel event of the year, with several thousand attendees, about half from the United States and half from the rest of the world. Microsoft usually brings in high-ranking executives like CEO Steve Ballmer, COO Kevin Turner, Worldwide Partner Group Corporate Vice President Allison Watson and others for keynotes. Hundreds of Microsoft employees and partners present sessions on product roadmaps, business best practices and technology drilldowns.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 24, 20100 comments
Microsoft partners supporting customers on Apple Macs have a new version of Office coming from the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU). Today at Macworld 2010 in San Francisco, the MacBU provided some details about Office for Mac 2011, which is supposed to be available later this year.
Certain elements of the Office suite should be especially attractive to partners supporting customers with Office on both Windows and Mac platforms. The high-level changes coming in Office for Mac 2011 are new connections to Microsoft services, an updated UI that sounds like a half-step toward the ribbon interface, document compatibility and the replacement of the Entourage e-mail client with Outlook for Mac.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20100 comments
As Apple puts the tablet PC in the limelight with its iPad announcement, ruggedized device pioneer Panasonic Computer Solutions Co. used the occasion of Macworld to launch its own spin on the tablet.
Panasonic on Wednesday introduced the Panasonic Toughbook H1 Field, a device starting at $3,379 that's supposed to be available worldwide in March. According to Panasonic, the device has a six-foot drop rating, has six hours of battery life and can come with twin hot-swappable batteries for extended field use. Options include SmartCard, fingerprint reader, RFID, barcode readers, camera, GPS and several types of wireless connectivity, including Qualcomm's Gobi2000 mobile broadband technology, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi or Bluetooth 2.1.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20101 comments
Dell picked up some system management capabilities today with the announcement that it will acquire KACE. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based KACE makes the KBOX series of systems management and deployment appliances, both physical and virtual.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20100 comments
Distribution giant Tech Data Corp. this week rolled out a new service that allows resellers to provide environmentally responsible technology disposal for their customers.
Tech Data is reselling the services of Austin, Texas-based Microsoft Gold Certified Partner TechTurn, which bills itself as the world's first Windows and Windows Server Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 11, 20100 comments
While we're digging out from under a blizzard here on the East Coast, the entire IT industry is digging out from a blizzard of security patches from Microsoft this week. (I'll admit that was a weak hook, but cut me some slack. I'm tired from all this shoveling. We've gotten 38 inches and counting since Saturday here in suburban Baltimore.)
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 10, 20100 comments
In an era when some channel-focused events have gotten smaller, VMware likes the trend for its own partner event. The virtualization giant is holding VMware Partner Exchange 2010 this week in Las Vegas.
"We're north of 2,500 attendees, which is over 50 percent growth from last year," Ben Matheson, senior director of global partner marketing for VMware, said in an interview. The figure includes about 300 VMware employees, with the remaining 2,200 attendees a mix of channel partners and technology partners.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 10, 20102 comments
Dick Brass, a former vice president at Microsoft who was briefly the toast of the town about a decade ago for his e-book efforts in Redmond, has an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times this morning. In a rare public expose for a former executive, he talks about why he thinks Microsoft is a "clumsy, uncompetitive innovator."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on February 04, 20103 comments
I'm not much of a gadget geek, but one device did jump out at me from all the Consumer Electronics Show hoopla as potentially useful for the sizable contingent of Microsoft partners who do a lot of traveling and presenting.
No, I'm not talking about the Google Nexus One, which looks like a nifty piece of hardware but strikes me as only incrementally moving the ball forward in the app phone space. My colleague Jeffrey Schwartz has a nice piece on the smartphone market implications of the Google-branded device here.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 06, 20100 comments