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.
Martinez left Microsoft last July as corporate vice president of Microsoft Services, a position of special interest to large Microsoft partners. That role at Microsoft sets the company's services strategies, including how aggressively or gently Microsoft treats partners when going after consulting service business. The Microsoft post's responsibilities include management of Microsoft Consulting Services.
Microsoft filled Martinez' post immediately with Kathleen Hogan, who began her Microsoft career in 2003 in the partner-facing role of vice president of Customer and Partner Experience. Prior to joining Microsoft, Hogan was a partner at McKinsey & Co. in Silicon Valley and worked at Oracle Corp.
Martinez joins a company that is a poster child for cloud computing businesses and has enjoyed surging revenues, even during the recession. Salesforce.com first cracked the $1 billion in revenues mark in its 2009 fiscal year, which ended in January 2009, and reported revenue growth of 21 percent for fiscal year 2010 -- reaching $1.3 billion in revenues.
Those revenues are probably only slightly less than Microsoft's revenues across the entire Microsoft Dynamics line -- which includes not only cloud CRM but on-premise CRM and several lines of on-premise ERP (Microsoft bundles Dynamics revenues in with Office revenues in its financial statements, making direct comparisons difficult). But Microsoft isn't enjoying anywhere near the growth in business applications that Salesforce.com is reporting. For the nine months of Microsoft's current fiscal year, the company reported that its Dynamics revenues were down 1 percent.
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.
David Mills, a senior product manager at Microsoft, acknowledged to my colleague Lee Pender that Microsoft has more evangelizing to do with partners on the management side. "There are still a lot of partners who are not aware that Essentials is out there," Mills said. "There's a lot of noise in [the management] space." But Mills also said that because of the number of Microsoft partners and all the potential mid-market customers, the opportunity for partners to help those customers manage their networks is relatively huge.
Microsoft is making a sustained effort to get the word out to the channel ahead of the products' general availability. The effort included a Partner Readiness Week for System Center Essentials 2010 in late February. During that week, Microsoft offered five online training courses about SCE 2010 and DPM 2010.
In a webcast last week on DPM and SCE (pronounced "ski"), RCP Executive Editor Jeff Schwartz talked to Dave Sobel, CEO of Evolve Technologies, a Washington, D.C. area Microsoft Certified Professional partner company. (Sobel's main claim to fame is his cover photo on the February issue of RCP magazine, but I may be biased.)
Sobel told Schwartz that he's already talking to customers about the products and sees a lot of opportunities for his firm.
"We can help them with the installation and the configuration and get [customers] all ready because we have the experience of doing it in multiple environments, and we can tailor it to their environments," Sobel said. "Then we leave them with the tools and help them when they need the partner for escalation on the parts they want assistance with or for the new project work as an add-on."
So far, Sobel said customers have been interested in having the management pieces that SCE 2010 and DPM 2010 provide, particularly the simplified management of the environment when they want to enable their people to do a little bit more, especially on the virtualization side.
"As more and more mid-market organizations are virtualizing, this is a great way for them to keep a handle on correct management of all of those moving parts. What we've been finding is that this is a great, simplified platform to let our customers dig in deep and manage their environment," Sobel said.
Customers are in two camps, Sobel said. Some already have management technology that SCE 2010, especially, could replace or consolidate. Others know they have problems, but they're not sure how to solve them.
"In general, most organizations have some kind of management technology. But often that can be a lot of management process where they run around and do inventory, or they've got these four or five little tools that aren't really a unified piece. Or they have some Tivoli and older management tools or they have some of the tools that come from the hardware vendors," Sobel said. "They're really looking for one that's more robust. I think it's a little bit more greenfield than it is displacement. But you do find that there are these homegrown mismatches of pieces that are doing the management already."
Stay tuned to RCP's May issue for a lot more detail on the partner opportunities in the SCE and DPM releases. In the meantime, check out the news story or listen to a replay of the webcast (Registration required).
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:
"In reference to your column on April 1 (Looking out for the Little Server), I could not agree more. There are a number of players in this space that have convinced themselves that everyone in SMB will go to the cloud, for one reason or another. There are several factors that I'm seeing that push against that thought:
- VARs are only going to move their customers to the cloud if they are convinced that it's secure
- VARs are only going to move their customers to the cloud if they are convinced that they can continue to make money doing so
- VARs that derive any substantial portion of their business from hardware sales are going to need to see substantial financial up-tick to move to the cloud
- VARs will need to be convinced that their cloud providers are not going to take their customers direct
- SMB end-users will need to be convinced of the security of the cloud
- SMB end-users will need to be convinced of the stability and reliability of the cloud
- SMB end-users will need to be convinced that their data will be theirs, and only theirs, no matter whose servers it resides on.
"SBS is a great play, but it needs to be extended to meet more needs. There should be a telephony product that fits better than OCS. There should be a version of CRM that fits this space. There should definitely be an ERP solution that the average small business can use. Microsoft has the stack, but none of the parts know each other.
"If you want to see a nice play, and it makes me crazy to say it, you can take a look at Lotus Foundations Start and Foundations Reach. If you put those two together and add a ShoreTel VoIP system (made to integrate), there's a great SMB play there. I'd love to see Microsoft make a better solution than this (ShoreTel makes a system that integrates with MS CRM, too), but I don't see the current regime supporting that."
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.
The conference takes on added importance this year for two reasons. First, Microsoft is flipping the switch from the old Microsoft Partner Program configuration, with its Gold Certified Partner, Certified Partners, Partner Points and Competency Specializations, to the new Microsoft Partner Network configuration with its Subscribers, Competency Partners and Advanced Competency Partners. WPC will be a major communications venue for Microsoft to explain and facilitate the transition.
Additionally, the company is promising to explain how Microsoft’s new “all in” strategy around cloud computing will impact partners.
There are several options for registering for WPC this year. For an All-access Event Pass, the standard partner fee is $1,795, a price that is good through July 10. The cost of purchasing an All-access Event Pass onsite will be $1,995, if space remains available.
This year, Microsoft is also offering Day Passes for $650, an Expo-only Week Pass for $150 and Guest Passes for $300.
More information is available here.
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.
While Microsoft has previously discussed Outlook for Mac, which will leverage Exchange Web Services protocols, Microsoft announced at Macworld that users of Outlook for Mac will be able to import .PST files from Outlook for Windows.
The Office for Mac ribbon seems to acknowledge some of the user pushback on the ribbon interface. In a release, Microsoft stated, "We took your feedback and haven't completely rearranged what you know and love: the new design is an evolution of the Office 2008 Elements Gallery and uses the classic Mac menu and the Standard Toolbar giving you the best of both worlds." The MacBU also promises that power users will have the option to collapse the ribbon and Toolbar for more screen space.
Office 2011 will also bring to the Mac platform the Microsoft Office Web Apps that Microsoft introduced to PC users in Microsoft Office 2010.
There's more detail on the Office for Mac 2011 announcement in this news story.
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.
The device features a 10.4" dual-touch display and weighs 3.4 pounds. It includes 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive. The device comes with Windows 7 with a Windows XP Tablet downgrade option.
I'm not saying this device is better than the iPad is going to be, but I can tell you which one I'd want to have by my side in a dark alley.
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.
Current capabilities of KBOX systems include help for Windows 7 migrations through system deployment, imaging and migration. Other uses for the appliances include device discovery, system inventory, asset management, configuration management, patch management, policy enforcement, vulnerability scanning and service management.
According to Dell's statement on the deal, the appliances are suited for midsized companies and public institutions that are staffed by IT generalists, who can use the help with the specialized tasks the boxes perform. For now, KACE partners will continue to sell the appliances, but they will also be available directly from Dell or from Dell partners.
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.
Tech Data will offer several TechTurn service packages through its TDOnCall technical services team, including asset recovery and rebuilding, a service for data erasure, removal of asset tags and hardware value assessment; Logistics, a service in which TechTurn arranges for packaging and discounted shipping to either its Austin or Richmond, Va., processing facility; recycling; redeployment of wiped and rebuilt systems to the original asset owner; and lease return processing.
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.)
Microsoft this week released 13 security bulletins addressing 26 vulnerabilities. The security community doesn't seem exceptionally worked up about the flaws -- though, of course, they recommend that everyone patch them all immediately.
Jason Miller, data and security team leader with Shavlik Technologies, said in an e-mail to reporters, "There have been no reports of active attacks against these vulnerabilities. One of these vulnerabilities has been publicly disclosed."
To Miller, IT professionals need to address three of the bulletins right away: MS10-006 to fix two vulnerabilities in the SMB networking service, MS10-007 to fix a vulnerability in the Windows Shell handler, and MS10-013 to fix a flaw in Microsoft DirectShow.
Joshua Talbot, security intelligence manager at Symantec Security Response, is most concerned about MS10-012.
"The SMB Server pathname overflow vulnerability tops my list this month," Talbot said in an e-mail. "Server-side vulnerabilities aren't too common anymore, but they're a golden goose for attackers when they are discovered. With this one, if an attacker can find a vulnerable remote server that has a guest account set up, just like that, they've got access to the machine and possibly the entire local network -- all without any user involvement required."
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.
The growth of the show reflects a growth in the VMware's partner program over the last year. Matheson said the VMware Partner Network grew by 4,000 partners in 2009 to reach 25,000 partners worldwide.
"I think the thing that's probably more interesting is we've seen really significant growth in our existing partners, double-digit growth rates," he said. "The reason that they are growing is that there are some very large adjacent markets that partners are entering. A few years ago, virtualization was all about server consolidation. Now, there's massive growth in disaster recovery, business continuity and desktop virtualization."
Recognizing that RCP's audience consists of committed Microsoft partners, many of whom are looking hard at Microsoft virtualization solutions, Matheson said, "Don't view VMware and Microsoft as being mutually exclusive. You can deploy VMware and all the Microsoft applications like Exchange and SQL and basically you're doubling your profit and your opportunity."
What's your take? Do you find that layering VMware on Microsoft solutions works well for customers or does Microsoft's "better together" story match your reality? I'd like to hear your views at [email protected].
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."
The primary culprit in Brass' telling is that the dominant product groups (Windows and Office) are allowed to stifle threatening innovation, even when the innovation seems to have the support of top management. He shares some personal examples, including infighting between the Tablet PC group Brass was involved with and an unnamed vice president of Office.
In support of his fairly devastating conclusion, Brass writes, "It's not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft's music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left." It's a worthwhile read.
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.
I'm more excited by the BlackBerry Presenter that Research In Motion unveiled on Wednesday to accompany its BlackBerry smartphones. The idea is you plug it into a projector or monitor and then display a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation wirelessly from your BlackBerry, relying on a Bluetooth connection between the RIM devices. RIM is demonstrating the device at CES in Las Vegas this week.
Availability is unclear; RIM's site for the device describes it as "coming soon." However, a lot of the other specifics are nailed down. It will cost $200, its dimensions in inches are 3.4x2.4x0.9, and it weighs about a third of a pound. The amount of gear required for a business trip continues to move in the right direction.
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 06, 20100 comments