There's some stir this week about Microsoft's
"starter edition" of Windows 7, a low-functionality version apparently aimed at the growing netbook sector that helped clobber Windows revenue in Microsoft's last earnings report Windows 7 starter would, for instance, limit users to running three applications at a time and require an upgrade for users who want more juice.
But, as Mary Jo Foley explains, the hubbub over Windows 7 starter is probably overblown (imagine that); Microsoft is more likely to offer a Home Premium version of 7 for netbooks, which will behave more in the way we expect from an operating system.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/21/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
Everything considered, this week's
IBM earnings report isn't too bad. Revenue came in a little below what analysts would have liked, but earnings per share beat the Street. And with this news, we take the opportunity to offer another profile of an
RCP Platinum Partner Program. That's right --
it's IBM!
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/21/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Oracle's corporate org chart is starting to look like one of those
maps of the Roman Empire or of
Alexander the Great's conquests or something. It already covers great swaths of the technology industry, and it just keeps spreading in every direction.
Consider for a second this paragraph, courtesy of Bloomberg:
"Oracle is entering new markets as it seeks to reach $50 billion in revenue by 2012. The purchase is Oracle's third-largest after its $10.3 billion takeover of PeopleSoft Inc. in 2005 and the $8.5 billion purchase of BEA Systems Inc. last year. Oracle has spent almost $34.5 billion on purchases since 2005 to buy 52 companies, making it the most acquisitive software company in the world."
"The purchase" mentioned in that paragraph, of course, is Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, revealed yesterday. Oracle, once mostly a database vendor, is all over the enterprise technology map now, so to speak. Enterprise applications (ERP and CRM), business intelligence, storage, database technologies, severs -- you name it, and Oracle's probably trying to sell it to corporate customers, or will be soon enough.
Yes, the Sun purchase would make Oracle a hardware company by delivering to Larry Ellison's empire Sun's server lines, which are already home to lots of Oracle databases in enterprises worldwide. (Intriguingly, there is some speculation that Oracle didn't want the hardware business and won't keep it. The talk is that Oracle just wanted Sun's software business but had to take the hardware as part of the deal. For now, though, Oracle appears to be soaking in the entirety of Sun's operations, and Ellison is talking about keeping everything for himself.)
The acquisition announcement had jaws dropping all over the industry. Steve Ballmer said he was "very surprised" and needed to think about the whole thing, a rare moment in which the Microsoft CEO seems to have been caught off guard. Some analysts expressed shock, while others took an approach that might be described, if we want to be cliché (and we do), as "cautiously optimistic."
For Microsoft partners, it's hard to say exactly how an Oracle-Sun marriage will play out. HP and IBM will more likely be concerned by the massive shift in the competitive landscape at the outset of the deal than will Redmond.
But a stronger Oracle with a more diverse product offering (to say the least) could speed the spread of Linux-based servers in the enterprise, given that Oracle as a company is kind of a Linux fan and definitely not so much a fan of Microsoft. Of course, buying Sun would make Oracle a major factor in the Unix operating system game. Everything considered, an Oracle-Sun combo probably doesn't offer many positives for Microsoft partners, unless the two companies stumble over each other in the integration process.
Which, if history is any indicator, they probably won't. Ellison and his troops have been amazingly adept at swallowing companies and making them productive parts of the Oracle empire. Despite an economic downturn and loads of purchases in recent years, Oracle has just kept rolling along earnings-wise, beating the Street again with its latest quarterly report.
Oracle-Sun is another mega-deal that signals that the age of city-states is long over in the technology industry, and the age of empires has well set in. The thing about empires is that they usually end up collapsing under their own weight (right, Wall Street?). Thus far, Oracle has avoided that fate. It probably will with the Sun buyout, too. The question now is: Where will Larry Ellison go next?
What's your take on Oracle buying Sun? Will you do business with OraSun? Send a shout out to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/21/2009 at 1:22 PM5 comments
For almost as long as they've existed, security applications have been a little like guards at the wall of a medieval city: very important, but just kind of sitting out there all day, not really living with everybody else.
There's been a movement for a while to change that, and two vendors introduced products this week that show progress toward the goal of merging security and systems management. One of those vendors is Microsoft, which bulked up the Forefront security line. The other is Trend Micro, which aims to offer more manageable endpoint security. Both new offerings have cloud components, and both demonstrate the trend toward bringing security into better harmony with the rest of an enterprise's infrastructure in order to improve management and access while not sacrificing protection.
Microsoft might have delayed its security magnum opus, Forefront "Stirling," but it gave us some idea of what Stirling will offer this week with the unveiling of Forefront Online Security for Exchange (and there's more here). Forefront Online Security for Exchange -- not yet called FOSE, as far as we know, but it probably should be -- is a hosted anti-spam and anti-malware service for in-house Exchange implementations. That's hosted by Microsoft, by the way, in Microsoft datacenters. As in not hosted by partners. So how do partners get in on this new offering?
"Right now, the partner sells the service, and they get the margin on the service," Doug Leland, general manager for Microsoft's Identity and Security business group, told RCPU in our palatial headquarters in Framingham, Mass. this week. "It actually operates similar to the traditional ways with which partners sell boxes."
OK, then. That sounds less than super-exciting from a partner perspective, but it's important to remember that there's more to Forefront than just this one service, and there will be even more to come with Stirling, the second beta of which was released today, and which Microsoft expects to have fully completed by the first half of 2010.
Leland emphasizes that Microsoft, which is bringing together identity (primarily via Active Directory) and security (via Forefront), wants to make both elements part of a greater Microsoft stack and consolidate management of everything in the Microsoft infrastructure.
"As we move forward, we will light up new convergence scenarios," Leland said. "This is a built-in versus a bolt-on approach. Active Directory is a canonical example. It speaks very directly to the role that we want to play in the industry."
To date, Microsoft's role has mostly been one of underdog in the security market. Another much smaller underdog is also talking about the convergence of security and management this week. Trend Micro thinks your endpoint security is lousy, and maybe it is.
Trend, which touts itself as a "100 percent channel" company, wants to fix that with one of two new products: an updated version of the OfficeScan Client-Server suite or the Trend Micro Endpoint Security Platform. For both, Trend uses what it calls a cloud-client architecture (hmm, Software plus Services, anyone?), which means that a hosted service updates threat information in the cloud, but an on-premises server -- which the cloud service is constantly updating -- actually processes user requests to open files. The idea is that using a cloud service to update information takes a lot of heat off of the internal server, which is freed up to process user requests. At the same time, "you can update from the cloud to that server every minute, every five minutes, every 10 minutes," Dan Glessner, vice president of enterprise marketing at Trend Micro, told RCPU this week.
Trend is also talking about companies merging security and management, ideally (for Trend) by employing Trend's endpoint products exclusively and dumping the idea of multiple-vendor "depth" in security. Using multiple security applications "has presented huge complexity challenges in terms of management," Glessner said. "The complexity of management has become a bigger problem than the challenge of keeping out the bad stuff."
So Trend, via its alliance with patching vendor BigFix, proposes a single security management console that goes beyond managing security and forges into systems management.
"More and more enterprises are merging endpoint security with endpoint operations management," Glessner said. "We're bringing to market a single management structure that combines security with systems management capability."
You're not alone. In fact, we might even call the merging of security and systems management a...trend.
How would you like to see security and systems management come together? Do you have any experience with the Forefront beta or with Trend's products? Dump everything at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/16/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We continue our series on the best "other" partner programs for Microsoft partners with a look at Microsoft's old buddy and partner in the famous "Wintel" alliance,
Intel.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/14/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
One of the more infamous worms in recent memory is
still doing damage, in part by installing a form of "scareware" on computers -- fake anti-virus malware that promises to clean users' machines if they'll just fork over $50 or so.
Redmond magazine covered scareware in depth a couple of months ago. Read more about it
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/14/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
There's a very brief scene in an
old episode of "The Simpsons" in which a couple of guys, presumably brothers, are fuming at each other over the impending demise of their restaurant, dubbed Two Guys from Kabul. At one point, one brother looks at the other and barks, "Sometimes, I think you want to fail!"
We thought of that little moment this week when reports started to surface that IT managers wouldn't be lined up to deploy Windows 7 like tweens camping out outside the ticket booth for Jonas Brothers concert. Presumably, we're supposed to be aghast that a survey by KACE shows that 83 percent of IT professionals don't plan to implement Windows 7 in the operating system's first year of release.
This is dire, dire news, apparently, if we're to believe the pundits, some of whom have already begun to equate Windows 7 with Vista before the new OS has even had the chance to appear in release-candidate form. Here's where that "Simpsons" bit comes in, with a little twist: Sometimes, we think these people want Microsoft to fail.
Microsoft partners, of course, don't want Microsoft to fail. IT professionals probably don't, either, given that most of them have major investments in Microsoft technology. So it's up to a few journalists, some bloggers and some fringe Linux and Mac types to cheer for Redmond's demise. And news that only 17 percent of IT professionals plan to adopt Windows 7 in its first year sure sounds like a Vista-style debacle.
Or does it? According to some measurements, Vista had only about 10 percent enterprise market share more than two years after its release. Even those organizations that place Vista's market share at closer to an almost unfathomable 30 percent admit that most of that number comes from consumers and that the enterprise has never warmed to the forlorn follow-up to XP.
So, if Windows 7 really does achieve even 15 percent in enterprise adoption in its first year after release, it will, by at least some measures, be more or less blowing Vista's two-year numbers out of the water. But wait; there's more: the KACE survey said that 42 percent of IT pros plan to implement Windows 7 from 12 to 24 months after its release. That's "only" 42 percent, according to some pundits.
"Only" 42 percent? Seriously? If Windows 7 has anywhere close to 40 percent enterprise market share two years after its release, it will have already made customers and partners (and Microsoft, maybe) forget about Vista. A further 24 percent said of IT folks said they would deploy Windows 7 within two to three years if its release. If all those numbers pan out, that could give Windows 7 60-plus percent market share within three years.
Of course, that's not likely to happen. For one thing, Linux adoption is growing in the enterprise, as is adoption of the Mac OS. Microsoft isn't just competing with itself, so 42 percent of IT pros saying that they'll implement Windows 7 doesn't necessarily translate to 42 percent market share. And for another, it's hard to say whether these surveys will even come close to panning out numbers-wise. Our guess is that the percentages in this one will end up being a little high when the corporate money actually starts to roll out in the next few years.
Microsoft's market dominance with Windows might not last forever. But we've had a lot of positive feedback on Windows 7, and the dire predictions coming out of some quarter based on survey numbers that just don't look that bad to us seem premature at best. Or maybe wishful, depending on who, exactly, wants Microsoft to fail.
What's your timeframe for adopting Windows 7? Do you already feel better about it than you felt about Vista? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/14/2009 at 1:22 PM8 comments
XP might be the operating system
that will never die, but most free support for it will on April 14.
Redmond magazine found some readers who
weren't too impressed with that little bit of news, and we're guessing they're not the only ones.
How do you feel about free XP support expiring? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/09/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
We're continuing our series on the best third-party partner programs for Microsoft partners as chosen by
RCP the magazine readers. Today, it's Microsoft's old friend, and sometimes foe,
Symantec.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/09/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It might not be true that there's a solution for every problem. But in the technology industry, that's not really such a big deal. What matters in tech is that there's a problem for every solution.
You've probably noticed that while software vendors love to refer to their applications as "solutions," we jaded, ink- (or pixel-?) stained wretches use words like "applications," "offerings" or even "wares." (We don't say "programs" much anymore because "software program" just sounds like something that would run from a floppy disk -- the original kind -- on a computer with 64K of memory. But we digress.)
A very important component of selling software applications, as any partner knows, is identifying problems -- preferably problems clients didn't know they had -- and then, infomercial style, whipping out a "solution" (with some services included, of course) to solve those problems. Most of the time, that's a totally legitimate practice, as companies sometimes don't realize how much more efficient and profitable a certain application, along with some guidance about it, can make them.
But sometimes those "solutions" cause problems of their own, problems that need solving by, well, another "solution" or application or whatever you want to call it. And that's what HP is talking about this week as it beefs up its Business Service Automation (or BSA, not to be confused with the Boy Scouts of America) line of software to cover virtualization storage and operations. The left-coast vendor invited a few press types, your editor included, to its Marlborough, Mass. location this week to talk about the problems virtualization can cause and how HP's applications can solve them.
Another digression here: HP's Marlborough site is a low-slung, rambling facility that sits at the edge of the earth, on the very fringe of what might be considered Greater Boston, with the hills of Western Massachusetts (and, presumably, oblivion for many Bostonians) beckoning on the horizon. The place has cubicle farms that would make Monsanto jealous -- apparently, almost everybody at HP, including a lot of executives, has a cubicle rather than an office -- and a bit of history, as well.
RCA originally built the building, which digital (yes, the long-lamented digital Equipment Corp., small "d," please) later bought. If you stand perfectly still, you can almost hear digital Co-Founder Ken Olsen saying, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home," a quote that's usually taken way out of context but is nonetheless pretty darn funny. Anyway, the ghosts of technology past roam in Marlborough, harkening back to the days when Boston-based companies mostly dominated the tech world, before Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people yanked the industry to the other side of the country. End digression.
Some smart folks from HP spent much of the three hours or so that this get-together consumed talking about the problems virtualization causes. Oh, they understand the problems it solves. But their point -- and it seems valid -- is that virtualization might cut technology costs, but it can actually drive up operations and management costs if left to grow like kudzu.
Basically, the message is that virtualization is complex, and finding the right people to administrate it can be difficult; and for all the good that virtualization does, it can actually be a bit of a nightmare when not properly managed. Hypervisors are easy to set up, which is nice, but that ease of setup can lead to excessive proliferation of virtual machines, as well as a network of connections to servers, storage and the network that becomes unmanageable, with the connections themselves becoming very hard to detect and manage.
"In the physical IT environment, if you needed additional capacity for a marketing program you were going to run, you expected a month to get that capacity," said Bob Meyer, worldwide lead for HP virtualization solutions. "Now, with a server and hypervisor, I can set it up in minutes. I can set up a server much faster, but I'm really just pushing bottlenecks. I have a new environment, much more mobile, much harder to see."
That sounds like a problem. "Virtualization and daily operation overhead are the things that yield a monthly bill," added Michel Feaster, senior director of products for HP's Business Service Automation line. "That is a cost that will only increase unless you do something dramatically different. Customers get into production and see an explosion in their storage costs. Storage is allocated but unutilized. The capacity for each virtual machine is often not used."
Hmm, that's another problem. There were actually a bunch more, but you get where we're going with this. Virtualization is a "solution" that needs another "solution." And for HP, that other solution is automation. Forrester Senior Analyst Glenn O'Donnell, who also made the trip to Marlborough, chimed in that, "We see virtualization and automation being inextricably linked. There's no way to separate the two. You cannot do virtualization without automation."
Well, then. Good thing HP is on the case. The two latest additions to BSA, announced this week and already available, are all about virtualization automation. HP Storage Essentials discovers virtual servers and provisions storage to virtual machines. The idea is to optimize storage capacity and allocation in virtual datacenters, thereby eliminating that problem of paying too much for unused storage.
HP Operations Orchestration (we'll refrain from calling it HPOO) automates workflows and repurposes servers and storage. Operations Orchestration users management interfaces from virtualization vendors, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. The goal, again, is to let companies reduce operational costs and, ultimately, help IT develop an internal cloud of services that would replace the notion of having individual pieces of infrastructure dedicated to particular departments or tasks.
"Provisioning servers is tactical, but changing business services is strategic to the business," Feaster said.
And, HP says, it's a solution to a problem caused by a solution. Or something like that.
What's your take on virtualization automation? Where are you in your rollout of virtualization technology? Share your story at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/09/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
If Rome is the Eternal City, then it must run on Windows XP. Even with considerable hype around Windows 7 continuing to swirl, Microsoft said this week that customers will be able to downgrade from Windows 7 not just to Vista (as if anybody would do that) but to XP.
Redmond columnist Mary Jo Foley
has the dish, as usual.
OK, we love XP. Everybody does. It's familiar and useful, and it still does most of what most of us need an OS to do. But at some point, isn't it going to enter a Willie Mays-with-the-Mets stage of its career? (For our foreign readers, that's another baseball reference; soccer fans, you might want to go with George Best with the L.A. Aztecs -- if you're old enough.) When does XP become antiquated? Our feeling is pretty soon -- when Windows 7, or maybe the first Windows 7 service pack, comes along and sends the legend into retirement.
Speaking of downgrades, we've been hearing that Microsoft's process for doing them is...well, not great. If you have any stories or complaints about it you'd like to share, share them at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/07/2009 at 1:22 PM1 comments
For the next few weeks, we'll be featuring the
RCP (the magazine) Platinum Partners, those companies whose partner programs are the best fits for the Microsoft partner according to the magazine's readers. Today's profile? Well, it's no surprise: It's the old pro,
Cisco.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/07/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments