Hewlett-Packard Co. is beefing up its analytics portfolio, targeting mid-range and large-scale implementations with several new BI appliances.
The company today added the appliances to its newly named AppSystem portfolio during its HP Discover conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on June 06, 20110 comments
It's been nearly a month since Microsoft issued the public beta of Office 365, and the company is now encouraging its partners to sign customers up.
Microsoft said yesterday that partners can indeed sign customers up for the beta and register themselves as the "Partner of Record." More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 12, 20110 comments
Veeam Software, a provider of VMware data protection and management solutions for VMware datacenter environments, is looking to recruit Microsoft partners.
Company officials will be at this week's Microsoft Management Summit trolling for partners who want to help customers manage VMware environments through Microsoft System Center. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 22, 20110 comments
Cisco Systems this week took the wraps off a unified communications platform that combines chat, presence and voice messaging onto PCs, tablets and smartphones.
Cisco Jabber is the culmination of the company's 2008 acquisition of Jabber Inc. Cisco said Jabber works with or is set to support Windows, iPhone, iPad, Nokia, Android and the BlackBerry platforms. Support for the Mac is slated for this summer. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 02, 20110 comments
If you had your eyes set on any number of new notebooks based on Intel's Second Generation Core processors code-named Sandy Bridge, you're going to have to wait a few months. And if you or any of your customers already have one of the few that have shipped, you may want to return it. Intel this week abruptly halted production of systems based on the company's Second Generation Corei5 and Core i7 quad-core processors.
It is the costliest glitch in the company's history, surpassing a flaw in the original widely publicized Pentium processor that led to a $475 million write-off in 1995, according to The Wall Street Journal. This time around, Intel is putting aside $700 million to fix the problem and has is reducing its revenue forecast by $300 million as a result of the new flaw putting the total cost of the flaw at $1 billion. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 03, 20110 comments
Nokia's shares rose for the fourth consecutive day, apparently on rumors that the struggling phone maker is going to abandon its Symbian operating system in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.
The company has scheduled an announcement for next Friday. Though the nature of the event, to be held in London, was not revealed, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is scheduled to brief investors. The rumors perpetuated upon the publication of a letter yesterday by analyst Adnaan Ahmad of Berenberg Bank in Hamburg, urging Elop and Ballmer to form an alliance. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 03, 20110 comments
Wondering what new products are coming from Microsoft this year? Redmond Channel Partner's product guide is now up. Though the 2010 lineup was a tough act to follow, there are quite a few new products in this year's pipeline as well.
Among them are new versions of Dynamics, Windows Small Business Server and, of course, Office 365. There are also a number of enabling products to look forward to including Visual Studio LightSwitch, Silverlight 5 and Internet Explorer 9. Also, while we're not sure it will ship this year, we included the next version of SQL Server, code-named Denali. The Community Technology Preview (CTP) is now available.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 03, 20110 comments
When Microsoft launched its Lync universal communications and collaboration platform this week, the mandate was clear: that Lync is destined to replace traditional office telecommunications systems.
"The era of the PBX, folks, is over," said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office Communications Group. Pall made that point several times at the public launch event and in a follow-up discussion. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 19, 20100 comments
Why should Microsoft's partners who sell software to customers feel inclined to sacrifice those revenues and margins in favor of the company's cloud services?
"If you don't do it, you will be irrelevant in the next four or five years," said Vahé Torossian, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners (SMS&P) Group. Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, reports to Torossian, and Torossian reports to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 22, 20100 comments
After attending Microsoft's launch of Windows Phone 7 Monday in New York, I walked away feeling that Microsoft has put its best foot forward in attempting to regain share in the hypercompetitive mobile phone market (see Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7). The defining question: will Windows Phone 7, despite its positive attributes, get lost in the crowd that is clearly dominated these days by Google's Android, Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry?
"I've never seen anything like it," said Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond, who was at Monday's launch event. We were talking about the rapid ascent of the Android mobile platform, which had virtually no share a year ago, and now has emerged as the fastest selling smartphone OS, according to data released by Nielsen last week. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 13, 20104 comments
IBM yesterday unleashed a new online e-mail, scheduling, instant messaging and contact management service largely targeted at users of its traditional Lotus Notes platform.
Big Blue's new LotusLive Notes is available for $5 per user per month. The company is going after Google and Microsoft, which both have similarly-priced cloud-based messaging and collaboration services. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 06, 20101 comments
After determining that PowerShell is popular among SharePoint admins and developers, Idera Inc. last week rolled out a tool aimed at users of Microsoft's popular scripting tool.
The company launched the new SharePoint productivity toolbox at the SharePoint Connections conference held in the Hague, Netherlands. The tool, which costs $295 per administrator, combines Idera's PowerShell Plus and SharePoint page profiler. The former is an IDE that automates repetitive administrative tasks and the latter is a set of popular SharePoint scripts. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 05, 20100 comments