On Monday, we included a couple of the "Marching Orders 2010" essays from the January issue of Redmond Channel Partner magazine. Continuing as promised, here's the entry from Julie Bennani, a general manager of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, with advice for partners to transition into the new Microsoft Partner Network:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 06, 20100 comments
Partners will be the tip of the spear of a Microsoft effort to get SMB customers upgraded to Windows 7 and Office 2010.
Redmond announced a 50 percent discount on Windows 7 Professional and Office 2007 Professional for the first year of a subscription to the "open value subscription" volume licensing program. The deal lasts through the end of June, and customers who are on OVS at that point can move up to Office 2010, which is supposed to ship in June or sooner, for free.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 06, 20100 comments
Microsoft released pricing details for Office 2010 this week, as the desktop productivity suite grinds closer to its expected June release. The headline numbers for the four editions:
- Office Home and Student will cost $149.
- Office Home and Business will be $279.
- Office Professional will cost $499.
- Office Professional Academic will be $99.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 06, 20101 comments
As RCPU editor Lee Pender mentioned in his last newsletter of 2009, he's off rooting for his beloved TCU Horned Frogs in the Fiesta Bowl tonight. That leaves me to ring in the new year for the newsletter.
There's probably no better way to do that than to share nuggets from one of our latest magazine features, "Marching Orders 2010." In our annual "Marching Orders" series, we ask a handful of channel luminaries to share their best advice for the coming year.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 04, 20100 comments
Business-growth consultant and friend of the magazine Mike Harvath came through with a contribution for our readers in this year's RCP "Marching Orders 2010" feature. Mike, who is president and CEO of the Revenue Rocket Consulting Group, wrote:
"Think of two things this year: mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and business focus.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 04, 20100 comments
Every year, we've counted on Allison Watson, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, to provide our readers with some solid advice in an entry for our "Marching Orders" piece. She came through again this time with some guidance on Microsoft's 2010 launch wave:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on January 04, 20100 comments
Google is in the driver's seat right now when it comes to cloud computing. It seems that much of what the industry does in the cloud -- I'm especially talking about Microsoft here -- is in response to some move by Google.
I don't think Microsoft would say so, but there's a widespread industry view that Microsoft's recent price cuts to its Business Productivity Online Suite, Hosted Exchange and other hosted applications were directly due to Redmond's losing the Los Angeles contract for an e-mail platform to Google.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 12, 20090 comments
Solution providers representing HP will have a broader set of networking equipment in their portfolios, with HP's bid this week to acquire 3Com. Both boards are on board, so to speak.
HP views the deal as a way to strengthen its converged datacenter solutions, and 3Com's products fill holes between HP servers and storage and its HP ProCurve products at the network's edge. The move would seem to give HP more ammunition in the battle for share with Cisco, which recently moved into servers. Jeff Schwartz has the full story, including partner reaction, here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 12, 20090 comments
Earlier this week, Microsoft and Seagate subsidiary i365 Inc. announced collaboration on a heterogeneous data protection appliance to ship in the first half of next year. The first fruits will be an appliance that includes cloud backup and software from both companies -- Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 for backing up Windows environments and Seagate technology for everything else. There seem to be some channel implications here, especially on the managed service provider side, but we're still sorting them out. Any thoughts? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 12, 20090 comments
In honor of Veterans Day tomorrow, I'll quote one of my favorite Joe Toye lines from my favorite HBO series, "Band of Brothers": "Where's the best chow? In Berlin."
You could rephrase the quote this week to "Where's the best e-mail server launch? In Berlin." Doesn't have the same punch, somehow, but a big deal for the Microsoft channel all the same.
Microsoft launched the newest version of its $1-billion-plus-per-year e-mail server along with Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server at Tech-Ed Europe in Berlin Monday. Our own Kurt Mackie monitored all the webcasts and posted a lengthy story with a lot of the details about the Software plus Services and unified communications underpinnings of the server here.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 10, 20091 comments
I've been scratching my head lately as I've compared the government's statistics for third quarter GDP growth against the corporate earnings of the IT titans. The U.S. GDP is supposed to be up 3.5 percent for Q3, while Microsoft, Tech Data and Ingram Micro all reported double-digit declines in revenues over roughly the same period.
But finally, some positive news out of the tech sector. IDC says worldwide PC microprocessor shipments in Q3 "rose substantially and to all-time record levels for a single quarter." The bounce in shipments is 23 percent quarter over quarter. Revenues for the same period are up 14 percent.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on November 10, 20090 comments
The Microsoft Response Point SMB phone system has been in a holding pattern since Microsoft basically put it in maintenance mode in June, but a few companies have been moving forward with Response Point-based products. The latest is Quanta Computer, which released the RP310 Softphone for Microsoft Response Point Phone Systems today. Quanta is looking for resellers here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 10, 20090 comments