OK, confession time: Back in November of 2006,
RCP
the magazine brought you the story of Microsoft Forefront, Redmond's
big move into the enterprise security market. As a cover piece, the
"Partners
in Security" story itself was fine -- maybe even interesting, if you'll
allow the author to comment on his own story -- but the
cover
of the magazine wasn't everything that we at
RCP had hoped it would
be.
Well, OK, it wasn't everything that your editor hoped it would be. Instead
of the rather generic "Partners in Security" with a chain and lock
around the words, one bold member of the RCP staff, the one writing this
newsletter, wanted to take a different tack. The idea was to have a picture
of a mafioso (we were thinking of somebody like Silvio
Dante from "The Sopranos") standing under the cover line, "Microsoft
Offers its Protection." (You know, kind of like the guys from gangster
movies who go around to businesses offering them the "opportunity"
to contribute to the "neighborhood watch"...you get the idea.)
Well, ultimately, every member of the RCP staff except for one disliked
the idea -- and they were probably right, in hindsight. It was a little -- what
are the kids saying these days? -- OTT, or over the top. (Plus, HBO or whoever
owns IP for "The Sopranos" would surely have sued us into submission.)
The idea was, in any case, that the owner of the operating system, the desktop
applications and a lot of the servers in most enterprises asking for money to
secure all of that stuff felt a little, well, intimidating.
Or maybe a little strange, given that some users would surely have liked for
Microsoft to have provided something beyond basic security at some point for
free, just as part of its core base of products. Partners, however, probably
wouldn't have liked that idea so much. Forefront presents, after all, a nice
potential revenue driver, and Microsoft giving stuff away for free probably
wouldn't go over all that well with the channel.
Anyway, we bring all this up now because Microsoft released
this week the beta of its new Forefront offering, codenamed "Stirling."
Simply put, the idea behind Stirling is that it will do...well, pretty much
everything. Stirling is -- or will be, when Microsoft releases it in the first
half of next year -- a sort of blanket woven together using material from
Microsoft's current Forefront offerings and a few other security and access-control
technologies to boot.
"You might have one machine being infected by a Trojan," posed Paul
Bryan, director of product management for security and access products at Microsoft,
in a recent chat with RCPU. "With traditional systems in place, that would
take the IT administrator figuring out what was wrong and going through individual
machines to investigate."
With Stirling, Bryan said, the infected machine would send a signal to the
Internet, and Stirling's network-edge security technology would intercept the
signal, scan the machine and remove the malware before it could spread. Just
like that!
For partners, Stirling's comprehensive nature makes it a potential moneymaker,
Bryan said: "A partner can have a very deep and productive discussion with
a customer to say, 'Where are you in each of these areas?' All of that accrues
to that same selling model."
There are simplified licensing options to make buying and selling easier, too.
Of course, one question does remain: How much do customers trust Microsoft
when it comes to security? And are partners confident enough in Forefront to
recommend it? Windows
Live OneCare, the more consumer-oriented anti-virus software, has gotten
better but was
a real dud when it came out.
Forefront seems to have had a better (if not exactly red-hot) reception, and
Stirling's integration and breadth of functionality seem pretty impressive,
too -- but it's still Microsoft offering its protection, stepping further into
a security market that other vendors have been in for a long time. And Microsoft's
reputation for security is...well, better than it used to be, but still not
as strong as it could be.
By this time next year, we might know just how many holes there are in Microsoft's
security blanket. Wait...a security blanket full of holes -- now there's a great
idea for an RCP cover! Maybe it could be wrapped around a gangster...
What has your experience with Forefront been as a partner? As a user? Sound
off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/10/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
We told you last November about Microsoft's entry into unified communications
and Redmond's
curious
relationship with rival Cisco. Well, this week, Jeana Jorgensen, director
of the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft, caught up with RCPU to tell
us how UC partner recruitment is going.
Microsoft has been concentrating on getting its more traditional software partners
into UC, with a strong focus on Office Communications Server, Microsoft's UC
technology backbone. At the same time, Jorgensen said, Redmond has been recruiting
new partners from the telephony space to handle voice applications. Now, she
told us, it's time to match one group with the other.
"We spent a lot of time trying to skill up our existing partners and a
lot of time recruiting new voice partners," Jorgensen said. "In the
next 18 to 24 months, we'll be matching infrastructure partners with telephony partners.
It's almost like an internship for each other. We're partnering them up on the
first several sets of customer implementations."
So, are those telephony partners coming over from, say, Cisco's side?
"I wouldn't say it's been a raid into the Cisco base," Jorgensen
said. "We've been talking to the local regions [of the Microsoft Partner
Program]. We had partners that knew the telephony partners already. We looked
at who the regions felt were the most skilled and the most reputable."
And how are those partners responding to Microsoft's software-first (as opposed
to, say, Cisco's network-first) approach to UC?
"Bringing a software-centric approach to voice is something that is new,
but what we're finding is people are interested in learning," Jorgensen
answered. "They're willing to start making bets on the software side as
well. A lot of folks have got Avaya, they've got Cisco embedded already. We're
spending a lot of time making sure our software's interoperable."
So, we asked, how flexible will Microsoft be with telephony partners that might
not buy into Redmond's UC vision 100 percent and might want to hedge their bets
by continuing to work with competitors?
Said Jorgensen: "We want them to know we're committed to them, and then
they can make a decision on how committed they want to be. We would love them
to be very committed to Microsoft, but Microsoft has partnerships with a lot
of partners, and some of those partners are competitive and we expect partners
to do the same thing. In the end, we want partners to give customers what they
want."
And, if Microsoft has its way, software and technology partners will join together
to do just that.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/10/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
In honor of the brands and companies in this entry, we'd like to start puttingWORDS
together and writing the second one in allCAPS.
Last week, mindSHIFT, a provider of hosted and on-site IT services for SMBs,
bought
a company called Collaboration Online, a provider of hosted applications
better known by some of its brand names, such as groupSPARK and AgileWave CRM.
The acquisition was of particular interest to RCPU because Ravi Agarwal, CEO
of Collaboration Online, featured prominently in RCP's April
cover story.
mindSHIFT has very little channel presence to date, its CEO says, and the company's
acquisition of Collaboration Online -- which has a partner program in place
and provides "white label" hosting for partners -- will give mindSHIFT
a foothold in the channel.
In a chat with RCPU, mindSHIFT Chairman and CEO Paul Chisholm said of the buyout:
"It gives us greater scale and capability. It's part of the economics of
this business. They do purely some Exchange hosting for some very large customers;
our model would be time consuming to do that. Geographically, they're dispersed
because of this big channel program they have. We're primarily direct."
And mindSHIFT will stay a direct-sales company, Chisholm says, while taking
advantage of Collaboration Online's channel program.
As for Agarwal and his company, they're moving on with business as usual, just
with more money than before: "We wanted to make sure that we were able
to stand on our own," the April RCP star said. "That has not changed
-- our day-to-day work hasn't changed. We now can pull a larger set of resources
from mindSHIFT. The Exchange hosting market is growing like crazy, and we needed
a greater set of resources. We still have our small company environment and
the resources of a larger company."
And now, at least at the corporate level, Agarwal has a funnyNAME to match
that of groupSPARK. It's all about synergy in this business.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/10/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Some
of them are for non-technical folks; others are for more geeky types.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/09/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Right here in the middle of the week, we're turning things over to you, the
reader. That's right; it's Reader Feedback...Wednesday!
We start with Larry's comment on OOXML
becoming an ISO standard (a topic that, incidentally, seems to have produced
a record number of comments on the RCPmag.com
blog site). Larry says:
"I know we have 'independent standards bodies,' but maybe they need
to take a new look at what it means to be standard. If any product has 90
percent market penetration, it is by definition a (de facto) standard. Microsoft
should have never been put through the hoops they went through to get OOXML
standardized by the non-standard (other than paper), no-market-penetration
OpenOffice.org standard. This indicates that the (independent) standards bodies
can be manipulated by other competitive entities to make a de facto standard
a non-standard. How ironic."
Larry, we're with you on this one. The interesting thing about OOXML's victory
(subject to lots of challenges) is that it shows Microsoft's prowess in the
industry. The fact is, though, that Microsoft document formats have been standards
for a long time because they're what people actually use. OOXML's win is kind
of like Microsoft dunking on an opponent rather than going for a layup -- not
entirely necessary, but a nice little statement all the same.
And then there's the sad
story of Avistar, a cautionary tale of Microsoft's darker tendencies. However,
says Pat, this story, like any other, has more than one side:
"I would suggest that you might be a bit more careful before taking
sides. I'm the CEO of a small company that peers networks and has tools for
managing video conferencing. We have known, talked to and tried to work with
Avistar for the last four years and have watched as they played the same game
with Polycom, RADVision and Tandberg.
"From a product perspective, they were outdated, inefficient and
lacked a lot of what was needed, but going after and threatening companies
for payment was their prime revenue stream.
"I say hats off to Microsoft for not taking the BS [BS meaning
'boring stuff,' of course. Hey, it's a family newsletter. --L.P.] they
were dishing out. They were weak because they sold almost nothing; they were
not industry-compliant, had strange views on what the world really needed
and simply missed the mark and felt that threatening all in the industry was
a great path.
"Well, in life, be careful what you wish for. Live by the sword,
die by the sword. They might have finally met a company that did not want
to be blackmailed."
Interesting! We'll be looking further into this, and we can certainly understand
Pat's perspective. However, we're still disturbed that Microsoft would use its
position of power to apparently put a smaller, struggling company out of business
and steal its stuff. We're not saying that Avistar's a babe in the woods here,
only that two wrongs don't make a right and that Microsoft still comes off as
a big bully in this case.
Thanks to Larry and Pat for their contributions. Have a deeply held grievance
or a word of praise for anything you've read in RCPU? Send it to [email protected].
(And don't stop commenting on stories on the blog site, either. Keep the banter
going. We love that activity, even if your editor, unfortunately, reads comments
but rarely has time to join in the fun. We're jacks of all trades here, after
all, and there's still a magazine to produce. There are no full-time bloggers
in this neck of the woods.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/09/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Microsoft just gave us a wonderful reason to
buy
a low-cost PC in the next couple of years.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Vista what? Vista who? As if it wasn't hard enough being Windows Vista already
-- what with the love for XP in the user base, the scant enterprise adoption
and the routine pounding in the trade press -- the man most responsible for
making Microsoft what it is today is already talking about Vista's successor.
Bill Gates kind of, sort of said that Windows 7, Vista's successor and an OS
that won't have to follow a legend like XP, might
come out in 2009. The rest of Microsoft -- from which Gates is supposed
to finally, officially retire this year -- put
the kibosh on that notion, saying that the 2010 release date most pundits
expected is still circled on Redmond's calendar.
Really, though, the date doesn't matter that much -- unless it bleeds into,
say, 2012, Vista-style. What matters is that Vista is so maligned that news
that its successor might be even a few months early has set the trade press
on fire. And, although we here at RCPU have always contended that most people
would eventually use Vista the way they now use XP, we're not so sure about
that prediction anymore.
We always figured that, Microsoft being Microsoft, Windows 7 would be a year
or two later than expected, and Redmond would just end XP support and push everybody
to Vista. Well, if Windows 7 really is due in 2010 (or, especially, 2009), and
it's on schedule, then Vista might really get the William
Henry Harrison treatment (ahem, history buffs -- he died after 31 days as
president) or might just never really hold office at all.
For partners, it's not the end of the world. They can build on XP, on Vista,
on Windows 7...whatever. But, as far as dramas go, Windows release-date sagas
are always fun to watch, and this one is getting an early start. Stay tuned.
Will you skip Vista if Windows 7 really is coming out in 2009 or 2010? Or would
you have skipped it, anyway? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/2008 at 1:21 PM15 comments
Ultimatums, threats to decrease the offering price, potential proxy fight...these
are the days of our lives with
Microsoft's
bid to buy Yahoo.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
We think that
each
one should be named for one of Dick Van Patten's brood from "
Eight
Is Enough." Then, IT people could say things like, "I've implemented
Nancy, but I'm having some trouble with Susan. And I can't get Nicholas to download
properly..."
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/08/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments