Spring is in the air in the northern hemisphere and that means Microsoft conference season is upon us.
Microsoft's Big Three tech industry-facing conferences start next week and run into mid-July. The technology giant has a lot of major products nearly ready for general availability, making the conferences even more noteworthy than usual for the Microsoft vendor ecosystem, partners, developers and customers. The big shows, in chronological order, are Microsoft Build, Microsoft Ignite and the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 22, 20150 comments
At a time when Yahoo was contractually able to opt out of its search partnership with Microsoft, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer negotiated a much more flexible arrangement for her Internet company.
Yahoo and Microsoft on Thursday announced amendments to the deal originally struck in 2009. Yahoo will now be obligated only to serve Bing ads against search results for a majority of its desktop search traffic. Previously, Yahoo needed to put Bing ads against 100 percent of its traffic. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 16, 20150 comments
Meg Whitman rolled out a new logo for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Wednesday, and her blog post revealed that she's sweating the smallest details.
By the end of its fiscal year on Oct. 31, HP is committed to splitting into two roughly equally sized independent companies -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. Whitman will be CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which includes HP's servers, storage, networking, services, software, cloud and converged systems. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 16, 20150 comments
With a few months to go before the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in July, Microsoft is starting to post details on some of the hundreds of sessions that will be available to partners at the show in Orlando.
Even with only a small percentage of sessions listed in the online catalog, some key themes for Microsoft's fiscal year 2016 are becoming clear. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 09, 20150 comments
A year to the day that Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP support, the operating system remains heavily used worldwide. How heavily used? A little back-of-the-envelope math puts the number at up to 250 million users.
Extended support ended for Windows XP on April 8, 2014. That meant no more security updates or technical support for the operating system, which at that time was already 12 years old. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 08, 20150 comments
In an unusual move, Microsoft is bundling a third-party tool into the Internal Use Rights (IUR) software and services packages for select Microsoft partners.
The new tool being offered as part of the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) IUR is the SkyKick Migration Suite for Microsoft Office 365, which helps partners simplify, automate and speed up the sales, provisioning, migration and management of Microsoft's cloud productivity suite. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 25, 20150 comments
When it comes to customers' spending plans for managed services, backup figures big.
As part of a large hosting survey conducted by 451 Research LLC and commissioned by Microsoft, researchers asked 1,736 respondents to indicate on which managed services they intended to spend heavily over the next two years. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 23, 20150 comments
After steadily eating away at Cisco's leadership position in enterprise unified communications (UC) collaboration in 2012 and 2013, Microsoft seemed poised to grab the market leader role and hold onto it. Indeed, Microsoft claimed a sliver of a lead in the enterprise UC market in the first quarter of 2014.
Since then, though, Cisco has proven itself a hard target for Redmond in UC, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 19, 20150 comments
A common piece of conventional wisdom on cloud is that it changes who buys technology.
In a detailed and wide-ranging new survey commissioned by Microsoft, 451 Research LLC attempts to provide some data to support a definition of that amorphous and elusive concept -- the new cloud buyer. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 18, 20150 comments
Ingram Micro on Monday unveiled an expanded set of automations and services around Office 365 that the distributor believes will kickstart strong growth for Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner business model.
Microsoft announced the CSP program last July and began rolling the program out in the fall. The idea behind CSP is to allow partners to package Office 365 and other cloud products and control the billing and customer relationship. Unlike Microsoft's advisor model, Microsoft does not bill the partner's customer directly. Unlike the Open licensing partner model, the partner is not responsible for buying a year's worth of licenses but instead can pay on a monthly basis in the same way that they will be billing their customers. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 09, 20150 comments
How much would Microsoft's overseas profits add up to if the company paid U.S. taxes on them the way Uncle Sam prefers? A lot, according to an infographic in the March 9-15 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.
In the graphic (see below or page 35 of the print issue, which just landed in the snow outside my house), Bloomberg compiled securities filings and U.S. Office of Management and Budget information and assumed the 35 percent tax rate that companies owe when they repatriate profits after getting credit for taxes paid abroad.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on March 06, 20150 comments
In an effort to increase channel uptake of its strategic mobility and security cloud offering, the Enterprise Mobility Suite, Microsoft is making EMS available for free to partners and providing a new way for partners to sell it.
"EMS is available in Open Licensing on March 1, 2015," wrote Gavriella Schuster, general manager of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, in a blog post Thursday. "Like many of the other cloud-based services that recently become available in Open such as Office 365, Azure or Dynamics CRM Online, the flexibility and potential cost savings of the Open Licensing model makes it possible for distributors and resellers to sell additional cloud services to small and medium-sized enterprises." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 26, 20150 comments