Distribution giant Ingram Micro shook up the channel space this week with the announcement that it was being acquired by a Chinese investment company and folded into the conglomerate HNA Group, based in Hainan.
What does the deal mean for Ingram's channel customers and vendor partners? More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 18, 20160 comments
Against a backdrop of general warnings about the global economy in the financial sector, IDC is ringing new alarm bells about IT spending for 2016.
In a news release Wednesday, IDC revised its 2016 forecast and projected that worldwide IT spending would post a "major slowdown" in 2016, thanks mostly to economic weakness in emerging markets and smartphone saturation. Overall, IDC expects global IT spending for hardware, software and services to reach $2.3 trillion this calendar year. That's about a 2 percent increase, which is about a third of the roughly 5-6 percent growth in IT spending every year since recovery from the financial crisis. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 17, 20160 comments
Kaseya on Tuesday launched the Kaseya Business Management Solution (BMS), which it billed as a generation beyond the current professional services automation (PSA) tools offered by ConnectWise, Autotask and Tigerpaw.
As part of the launch, Kaseya also unveiled a competitive upgrade promotion of one year of free licenses for all ConnectWise, Autotask and Tigerpaw customers. Kaseya is one of the original vendors to managed services providers (MSPs) and comes from the remote monitoring and management (RMM) side of the market. RMM providers typically partner with PSA vendors to offer integrated solutions to MSPs. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 09, 20160 comments
Six months after telling partners that Microsoft FastTrack would only offer free cloud migration services to customers with more than 150 seats, Microsoft this week announced that the threshold is now dropping to 50 seats.
Partners contacted by RCP were scrambling to adjust their business models, after having already adapted to a major expansion of the FastTrack program to cover additional products and data migration workloads that was disclosed around the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 04, 20160 comments
Microsoft is recalling 2.44 million AC power cords for Surface devices sold in the U.S. and Canada due to fire and shock risks.
According to a recall statement published Tuesday by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, "Microsoft has received 56 reports of the AC cords overheating and emitting flames and five reports of electrical shocks to consumers." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 02, 20160 comments
Microsoft's cloud business is red-hot, but the company may have found a new way to keep its cloud server farms cool.
During Microsoft's earnings call last week, CEO Satya Nadella gave investors an update: "Our commercial cloud run rate surpassed $9.4 billion, up over 70 percent year over year and almost halfway to our [fiscal year 2018] goal of $20 billion." As one impressed financial analyst put it in the Q&A portion of the call, that run rate is "up $1.2 billion quarter to quarter, 70 percent year over year." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 01, 20160 comments
The goal of Windows 10 on a billion machines still looks like a challenge, but at least Microsoft has managed to turn back to the clock to 2010 adoption rates when it comes to the Windows client.
Independent Web analytics company StatCounter reported Monday that Windows 10 has overtaken Windows 8.1 globally for the first time. Windows 10 now has 13.7 percent market share for desktop usage. Windows 8.1 is at 11.7 percent. Windows 7 is still the gorilla in the room with 46.7 percent. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 01, 20160 comments
AppDirect, one of the major players in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) ecosystem, on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Radialpoint, a provider of cloud and technical support services for small businesses and consumers.
San Francisco-based AppDirect is one of just a few cloud marketplace technology providers in the Microsoft CSP ecosystem that combine their own systems with Microsoft's CSP API to handle functions like activating the Microsoft cloud service, license provisioning and recurring billing. AppDirect offers similar functionality for many non-Microsoft cloud applications, allowing Microsoft CSPs to offer richer bundles of services. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 27, 20160 comments
Microsoft on Thursday announced tweaks to its internal systems to recognize more partners for the work they do to help customers get to the cloud in customer engagements where more than one partner is involved.
Over the last year, Microsoft has urged partners to work together to get customers actively using more of the eligible workloads within their cloud subscriptions, such as the less-used Yammer and Skype components of an Office 365 subscription. Lighting up those workloads is a priority for Microsoft as a corporation, with some in the investment community noting the risk to the company if customers don't perceive value in their cloud bundles and cancel their subscriptions. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 14, 20160 comments
Channel-focused business recovery vendor StorageCraft Technology Corp. is getting a private equity investment of $187 million, as well as a new chairman and CEO in SonicWALL veteran Matt Medeiros, the company announced Wednesday.
Medeiros was the longtime president and CEO of SonicWALL when Dell bought the channel-centric security company in 2012. He had been at Dell as a vice president and general manager of security products since the acquisition. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 13, 20160 comments
One of our most popular recurring features over the years has been "Marching Orders," a collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead.
For 2016, we'll be running individual Marching Orders entries all through the month of January. Check back often for updates. This week look for entries from other 1105 Media editors from RCP's sister publications, including Redmond, Virtualization Review and MSDN. Next week, we'll carve out space for RCP columnists and contributors. The following week, Microsoft and other channel executives will weigh in. In the last week of the month, we'll hear from partners, analysts and other industry experts. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on January 04, 20160 comments
Microsoft was busier on the merger-and-acquisition front in 2015 than it has been in any year since 2008.
With two weeks still to go, Microsoft has acquired 14 companies in a calendar year that has seen a ton of M&A activity across the industry. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 16, 20150 comments