Microsoft has confirmed rumors that it will move forward from Windows 10, announcing that it will release Windows 11 in time for the 2021 holiday season.
Speculation about Windows 11 intensified in recent weeks with the circulation of a leaked build of the new OS. In virtual event Thursday titled, "What's Next for Windows," Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella made it official, calling Windows 11 the first version of a new era of Windows.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/24/20210 comments
Satya Nadella now adds "chairman" to his title of CEO at Microsoft.
Seven years into his stint as CEO of Microsoft, Nadella was elected unanimously by the Microsoft board's independent directors to the role of board chair, the company announced Wednesday evening. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/17/20210 comments
Microsoft won't be delivering Windows 10X at all, the company confirmed in a blog post Tuesday.
"Instead of bringing a product called Windows 10X to market in 2021 like we originally intended, we are leveraging learnings from our journey thus far and accelerating the integration of key foundational 10X technology into other parts of Windows and products at the company," wrote John Cable, vice president of program management for Windows Servicing and Delivery, in the blog post. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/18/20210 comments
In the early months of the pandemic-related shift to working at home, Microsoft provided regular updates about leapfrogging growth in Microsoft Teams usage.
The real-time collaboration platform with video meeting capabilities vaulted from about 20 million daily active users in November 2019 to 75 million DAU by mid-March of 2020. Since then, Microsoft has been relatively quiet about Teams usage metrics. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/28/20210 comments
Another reason to patch early and patch often: The Exchange Server zero-day vulnerabilities Microsoft first disclosed earlier this month are now being used in ransomware.
As Microsoft disclosed on March 2, the vulnerabilities enable attackers to access e-mail accounts and install leave-behind malware. Microsoft has issued out-of-band patches for the vulnerabilities in Exchange Server 2019 and Exchange Server 2016.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/12/20210 comments
Editor's Note: This article is updated to correct the general availability date of Azure Communication Services. The service will be available in the next few weeks.
Microsoft announced more than three dozen "general availability" service and feature releases at Ignite on Tuesday, including products that are very near GA (that is, they have been deemed stable and tested enough for a supported production deployment). Here are the key general availability announcements from Microsoft this week:
Teams
Microsoft Teams is a countercyclical. In a year of widespread lockdowns, the remote worker-enabling capabilities of Teams have been critical for organizations worldwide. In his Ignite keynote, CEO Satya Nadella indicated Microsoft is investing in Teams with the expectation that it will continue to be important even as the pandemic abates. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/02/20210 comments
Acronis will unify its products into a single line on March 31, aiming to roll up security, e-mail security, file sync and share, management, notarization, backup and disaster recovery under the Acronis Cyber Protect license.
The company announced the new licensing and branding model on Tuesday during a virtual 2021 Acronis #CyberFit Partner Kickoff. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/02/20210 comments
MessageOps, one of the pioneering toolsets for Office 365, is now part of Sirius Computer Solutions.
Sirius on Tuesday announced its acquisition of Champion Solutions Group, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider that owns MessageOps. Terms for the deal were not disclosed.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/02/20200 comments
Microsoft Teams usage keeps surging to new highs as COVID-19-related remote work has moved the conferencing, chat and collaboration platform to center stage.
Microsoft Teams now has 115 million daily active users (DAU), said CEO Satya Nadella during an earnings call with analysts Tuesday. That's a 475 percent increase over the 20 million DAU that Microsoft reported for Teams in November 2019, before a huge portion of the global workforce started logging in from home offices rather than their companies' office space. It's also a 53 percent jump over the last number Microsoft released -- 75 million DAU in April.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/28/20200 comments
During our Office 365 Security Virtual Summit today, Howard M. Cohen and I ran a joint session about recent Office 365 security incidents and reports in the news.
It was an interesting discussion, and thanks for all the audience questions. We covered a lot of ground quickly, and I promised at the end to provide links to the source documents for all the topics we covered in the last hour: More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/23/20200 comments
Market researchers from IDC, Gartner and Canalys released their respective third-quarter PC market estimates this week, and all indicators are pointing to record sales growth driven by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The three firms told similar stories -- heavy purchasing on the consumer side, robust activity around Chromebooks and education, and very strong growth in the United States. The result is growth levels not seen by the PC market for a decade.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/14/20200 comments
Microsoft flooded virtual attendees of its Microsoft Ignite conference with general availability announcements (GA) on Tuesday. Products ready for production deployments now or within the next month ranged from elements of the high-profile Project Cortex to Azure SQL for edge deployments to major and minor components of Microsoft's three clouds.
Ignite kicked off on Tuesday morning with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and was scheduled to run through Thursday. Microsoft typically treats Ignite as a major launchpad for IT pro- and IT management-focused products and services across its enterprise portfolio with some developer, education and government tools and products thrown into the mix.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/22/20200 comments
A recent study from U.K.-based Sophos indicates that public cloud security incidents were becoming disturbingly frequent since the start of 2020, even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to lean more on public cloud platforms to support remote work.
The findings of the company's "The State of Cloud Security 2020," released this week, are significant due to the substantial sample size of the survey, with responses from more than 3,500 IT managers in 26 countries. The survey was conducted in January and February of this year. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/09/20200 comments
Microsoft this week detailed its legal efforts to seize domains related to a "sophisticated, new phishing scheme" that's taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to attack customers in 62 countries.
"Our civil case has resulted in a court order allowing Microsoft to seize control of key domains in the criminals' infrastructure so that it can no longer be used to execute cyberattacks," said Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president for customer security and trust, in a blog posted Tuesday, the same day that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed documents from Microsoft's lawsuit.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/07/20200 comments
An old flaw in Microsoft Office is being used in targeted attacks, according to researchers at Menlo Security on Tuesday.
The flaw involves the Equation Editor of Microsoft Office, which allows users to embed mathematical equations or formulas inside Office documents. Microsoft first patched the vulnerability, CVE-2017-11182, in late 2017, but it turned up again over a two-week period in late May and early June, underscoring the importance of applying older patches. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/30/20200 comments
Microsoft kicked off its virtual Build conference this week, announcing a slew of product and platform developments. Here are 10 interesting technologies that hit general availability (or at least got assigned GA windows) on Tuesday:
1. Project Cortex
While still in private preview, Project Cortex makes this GA list because general availability has now been promised for "early summer." Billed as the first new service in Microsoft 365 since the launch of Microsoft Teams, Project Cortex involves applying artificial intelligence to the Microsoft Graph. The new service is intended to surface knowledge and information from within the apps that workers use daily.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/19/20200 comments
The coronavirus pandemic drove a 70 percent usage spike for Microsoft Teams in just one month, as the collaboration platform has become the centerpiece of many newly-remote employees' workdays.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave the numbers behind the Teams surge during a Wednesday call to discuss Microsoft's latest quarterly earnings, which saw the company grow by double digits even as business activity worldwide has plummeted. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/30/20200 comments
The money-printing machine that is Microsoft kept right on chugging in one of the toughest financial quarters in decades.
Microsoft on Wednesday reported quarterly earnings, managing once again to beat analyst expectations and post double-digit increases on revenue and earnings. For Microsoft's third quarter, which ended March 31, revenues were $35 billion, an increase of 15% and diluted earnings per share hit $1.40, a 23% jump. Company shares were up by 5% in after-hours trading. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/29/20200 comments
Bill Gates occupies a unique vantage point on the coronavirus debate, which pits those urging a massive public health response to save millions of people from death against others looking for less extreme measures to soften the unprecedented economic hardship that the shutdowns, self-isolation and social distancing are causing.
At Microsoft, Gates built a fortune that has ranked him as the first or second wealthiest person in the world for decades, and saw him move in the most elite financial circles. And since 2000, he and his wife have operated the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charity. Through the foundation, Gates has made himself one of the foremost experts on global health issues and has been raising concerns about pandemics for years. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/27/20200 comments
Microsoft is shuttering all Microsoft Store locations until further notice, following similar moves by Apple and other retailers attempting to limit the spread of coronavirus in their brick-and-mortar shops.
In a letter to customers and the community e-mailed Monday night, David Porter, Microsoft Store corporate vice president, wrote: "With today's recommendation from the United States government to not socially gather in groups of more than 10 people, we will be temporarily closing Microsoft Store locations -- effective immediately." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/17/20200 comments
Microsoft is cancelling the in-person portion of Microsoft Build, and moving its biggest developer conference online due to public safety concerns related to the spread of the coronavirus.
"The safety of our community is a top priority. In light of the health safety recommendations for Washington State, we will deliver our annual Microsoft Build event for developers as a digital event, in lieu of an in-person event," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. "We look forward to bringing together our community of developers in this new virtual format to learn, connect and code together. Stay tuned for more details to come." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/13/20200 comments
After observing and analyzing a massive botnet for nearly eight years, Microsoft and an international consortium of partners launched a counterstrike against the Necurs computer malware network this week in what they hope will be a devastating disruption.
Necurs is a poster child for what security researchers warn about from botnets -- those packs of hundreds, thousands or millions of PCs, sometimes called zombies, that have been infected with malware and are under the command and control of malicious actors. Think of your parents' under-patched and out-of-support Windows 7 computer infected with a Trojan that enlists that computer in various nefarious schemes. The zombie PC's owner may notice nothing at all, or sometimes suspect a decline in performance. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/11/20200 comments
Microsoft has named its first chief scientific officer: Eric Horvitz, who joined Microsoft in a research role in 1993 and was most recently in charge of Microsoft Research Labs.
Microsoft has recently been expanding beyond its software legacy -- where artificial intelligence is a natural fit -- to more physical areas of science, such as quantum computing, health care and the new corporate initiative to become carbon negative.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/11/20200 comments
It's going to be a much leaner year for the PC and smartphone markets due to the coronavirus and its effect on global supply chains.
That's according to updated forecasts from Framingham, Mass.-based IDC. The market research firm slashed forecasts last week for both PC shipments and smartphones. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/02/20200 comments
Microsoft on Wednesday warned investors that supply chain impacts from the coronavirus health emergency will put a damper on its third-quarter results.
The company had already primed investors for a potential effect from the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, which arose in Wuhan and has led to mass quarantines and industrial shutdowns in China. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/26/20200 comments
Encryption has always been neutral, as useful to bad actors for hiding nefarious activity as it is for legitimate users trying to protect their data from those trying to steal it. However, a recent report indicates just how much the industrywide push toward encrypting Web traffic can benefit the bad guys.
SophosLabs on Tuesday reported on a representative sampling of malware analyses the research team has conducted over the past six months. The findings document how widespread the use of HTTPS connections is becoming in malware circles, especially for communicating back to command-and-control servers (C2). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/18/20200 comments
Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations on revenues and earnings in second quarter results released Wednesday after the close of markets.
The company reported revenues of $36.9 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.51. The revenue figure exceeded consensus expectations of $35.68 billion and represented an increase of 14% over the year-ago quarter. EPS topped consensus expectations of $1.32 per share and was 40% above the year-ago quarter. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/29/20200 comments
For its first Patch Tuesday release of the year, Microsoft included a patch for a vulnerability affecting the latest versions of Windows that was discovered and reported to Microsoft by the U.S. National Security Agency.
The NSA's public cooperation with Microsoft in defending users of the operating system marks a change from the agency's well-documented past practice of quietly collecting and weaponizing serious OS flaws that are discovered by its researchers.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/14/20200 comments
As the world waits to see how Iran will react to the American drone killing of General Qassim Suleimani, the U.S. agency in charge of cybersecurity is warning public and private computer system defenders in the United States to prepare for potential attacks.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued its warning, "Potential for Iranian Cyber Response to U.S. Military Strike in Baghdad," on Monday afternoon. CISA is a federal agency created in 2018 to coordinate with other government entities and the private sector on cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/07/20200 comments
Microsoft this week declared May 6, 2020, as its planned end date for Wunderlist, presumably ending the drama surrounding the task list app and service.
Christian Reber, who as CEO of 6Wunderkinder sold the app to Microsoft back in 2015, created a stir in September when he Tweeted at Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and another Microsoft executive about his interest in buying back Wunderlist. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/10/20190 comments
One of the attractions of containers is the ability to spin them up nearly instantly when a cloud application needs more capacity.
Much of the promise of the Microsoft Azure cloud similarly relates to dynamic flexibility. Yet, ironically, the design of Docker containers can cause lag when used in a truly serverless environment like Azure. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/21/20190 comments
One of the biggest government contract events in, well, ever, happened Friday when Microsoft was named the winner of JEDI, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure deal.
It was a shocker because Amazon Web Services (AWS) was widely considered the front-runner for the contract. The stakes are huge -- the contract is valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years if all the options are exercised.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/28/20190 comments
Microsoft on Monday set a February 2020 general availability date for Azure Sphere and revealed a handful of new features for Azure IoT Central among a raft of Internet of Things (IoT) announcements timed in conjunction with the IoT Solutions World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona.
Azure Sphere GA Date
Azure Sphere is Microsoft's ambitious initiative, first announced in April 2018, to put itself at the center of IoT management and security. It consists of a combination of a reference architecture for microcontroller units (MCUs), a Linux-based operating system for the devices themselves, and a cloud-based Azure Sphere Security Service to manage and secure the devices. Earlier this year, Microsoft added a mechanism called "Guardian Modules" to the roadmap, which would serve as a bridge for older IoT devices to be managed under Azure Sphere. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/28/20190 comments
Microsoft is off to a strong start in the first quarter of its fiscal 2020, beating Wall Street expectations on both earnings and revenues as cloud products continued to perform well and the PC business benefitted from end-of-life deadlines for Windows 7.
Compared to the year-ago quarter, the company reported Wednesday that in the July-September period revenues were up 14% to $33 billion and earnings per share were up 21% to $1.38.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/23/20190 comments
There's been a slight speedbump in the steady drive by hyperscale service providers toward ever more compute, storage and networking gear in their datacenters.
The hyperscale service providers are companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Alphabet, which each are building and expanding dozens of datacenters worldwide to provide public cloud services to business and government customers. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/26/20190 comments
When it comes to software and services, Microsoft has always tried to offer it all, or at least as much of it as possible.
That always makes it interesting when the company acknowledges the use of a major third-party product for internal purposes in its Fortune 100-class operations. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/16/20190 comments
Kirill Tatarinov, former president and CEO of Citrix and a longtime senior executive at Microsoft, is taking on a senior executive role at data protection specialist Acronis.
Tatarinov this month was named executive vice chairman and will report to Founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov. Tatarinov has been a member of the Acronis board for the last 10 months. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/16/20190 comments
The founder of the company that created the Wunderlist app has a new item on his public to-do list: persuade Microsoft to sell him back the app.
Christian Reber was the founder and CEO of 6Wunderkinder and sold the company to Microsoft in 2015 for an estimated $100 million to $200 million. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/09/20190 comments
During his Monday keynote at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger provided a roadmap update for his company's partnership with Microsoft.
The two companies' joint offering, Azure VMware Solutions, enables VMware workloads to run natively on Microsoft Azure. As described by Microsoft at the late-April unveiling, the agreement allows customers to run, manage and secure applications across VMware environments and Azure with a common operating framework. Supported VMware technologies include VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vCenter. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/26/20190 comments
If three Florida municipalities getting hit by ransomware earlier this month sounded bad, here's a Texas-sized problem for you.
The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) on Friday revealed that more than 20 entities, mostly smaller local governments in the state, were impacted by a ransomware attack.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/20/20190 comments
To entice businesses still using Windows Server 2008 into migrating to its cloud, Microsoft is offering a big carrot: Extended Security Updates (ESU) plans at no cost.
Of course, with every carrot is a stick. In this case, the stick is the impending end of support for Windows Server 2008 on Jan. 14, 2020. Specifically, Extended Support, which includes security updates, ends that day for Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Hyper-V Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/08/20190 comments
In an effort to get more on-premises data warehouses onto its Azure cloud, Microsoft has launched a migration initiative in partnership with Informatica for select customers.
Announced Tuesday, the offer is designed to lower the expense and risk of a proof-of-value project to determine the feasibility and advantages of moving a data warehouse to Azure. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/06/20190 comments
Microsoft earned $33.72 billion in revenues for its fiscal fourth quarter, a 12% gain, as well as earnings per share of $1.37.
The company announced its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday. Its stock rose by more than 1% in after-hours trading on the results, which beat financial analysts' expectations. The earnings number was non-GAAP; the GAAP figure was higher due to a net income tax benefit of $2.6 billion for the quarter. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/18/20190 comments
ServiceNow and Microsoft on Tuesday extended their strategic partnership in a move designed to appeal to governments and enterprises in highly regulated industries looking to move digital workflows to the cloud.
ServiceNow, based in Santa Clara, Calif., provides cloud-based platforms and solutions for delivering digital workflows. The new agreement builds on an alliance from October that allowed Microsoft's U.S. federal government customers to deploy ServiceNow technology from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to the Azure Government Cloud. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/09/20190 comments
About 10 years ago, a worm dubbed Conficker began constructing a botnet that ran away to over 10 million Windows computers. The Conficker worm is still estimated to have potential control over as many as 500,000 unpatched Windows systems, but it was never used for anything but a low-yield scareware campaign.
Over the weekend, journalist Mark Bowden provided an explanation for why that powerful botnet was abandoned. Bowden is best known for "Black Hawk Down," a book-length account of the U.S. military raid in Somalia in 1993 that was turned into a movie. In 2011, Bowden wrote a book about Conficker, called "Worm." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/01/20190 comments
Azure Files premium tier has reached general availability (GA), giving users with higher performance needs the ability to access managed file services on solid-state drives in Microsoft's public cloud.
The GA announcement on Wednesday comes after the service had been available in a narrow preview since last September and a broader preview since early May. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/26/20190 comments
The pending end-of-support deadline for Windows 7 is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy forecast for 2019, contributing to what IDC is calling an "interesting year" for PC sales.
IDC on Monday released its mid-year update of the 2019 forecast for PC sales. Overall, IDC now expects to see unit shipments drop by 3 percent for the year for a total of 392.5 million units. The main challenge comes on the consumer side of the market, where shipments are expected to decline 6 percent year-over-year, as consumers spend more of their budget on replacing smartphones than PCs. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/03/20190 comments
Veeam, a provider of backup and availability software for cloud data management, revealed a significant financial milestone this week during its annual VeeamON conference in Miami.
"We achieved $1 billion in revenue bookings," said Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and executive vice president for sales and marketing. Timashev said the figure was based on revenues for the trailing 12 months. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/22/20190 comments
Orchestration technology may be a little ahead of where most customers stand on their availability journey, but Veeam is forging ahead with a second-generation product that could make the approach possible for more organizations and applications.
Failing over a complex environment in a disaster recovery situation is a multistep process. Processes and applications must be started in a precise order and spun up on the correct hardware or virtual machines. Orchestration solutions allow organizations to set the order that those automated steps are taken in case of need for a failover. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/22/20190 comments
A federal computer security watchdog agency on Monday warned Office 365 users and their technology partners about common Office 365 misconfigurations.
In an analysis report titled "Microsoft Office 365 Security Observations," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) described four common security misconfigurations found during a multi-month investigation begun last fall. CISA is the new standalone agency within the Department of Homeland Security that functions as the lead national government unit on civilian cybersecurity. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/13/20190 comments
VMware customers will be able to extend their VMware infrastructure investments to the Microsoft Azure cloud as part of an expansive partnership announced Monday that follows a similar VMware-Amazon Web Services deal from a few years ago.
CEOs of Microsoft, VMware and VMware majority owner Dell Technologies Inc. announced the deal at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/29/20190 comments
Ongoing strength in its cloud business and a recovery on the Windows side helped power a strong third quarter for Microsoft, according to the company's latest financial results.
In results released after markets closed Wednesday, Microsoft reported earnings of $30.6 billion, an increase of 14% over the year-ago quarter and well ahead of analysts' expectations. Other headline figures included a 25% gain in operating income to $10.3 billion, a 19% gain in net income to $8.8 billion and a 20% increase in diluted earnings per share to $1.14. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/24/20190 comments
Have you had any problems with Azure consumption overages?
It turns out that Microsoft is counting on customers to end up paying more for Azure than they may have planned to. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/10/20190 comments
A new survey finds a dangerous gap between organizations' perceptions and actions when it comes to Office 365 compliance and security.
In short, those who believe Microsoft is doing a good job with security and compliance may not be taking the baseline steps required to ensure their environments are safe and in compliance -- in other words, they may not be doing the basic things that Microsoft's tools rely on to help ensure protection. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/29/20190 comments
One of the biggest deadlines in the history of IT will be only 300 days away later this week.
We're talking about the deadline for extended support for Windows 7. Once Jan. 14, 2020 arrives, Microsoft will stop sending out free security updates for the operating system, and other types of support will also be shut down. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/18/20190 comments
Just days before the 2019 RSA Conference, Microsoft on Thursday announced the preview releases of two new cloud-based security services: Azure Sentinel and Threat Experts.
Azure Sentinel is a native security information and event management (SIEM) tool that runs in Microsoft's public cloud. Ann Johnson, corporate vice president for Cybersecurity Solutions at Microsoft, touted Azure Sentinel as "the first cloud-native SIEM within a major cloud platform" during a media briefing on Wednesday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/28/20190 comments
A partnership is in the works between Microsoft and VMware to make it much easier for enterprise customers to move VMware workloads into the Azure public cloud, according to a published report.
Citing unnamed sources, subscription technology site The Information on Tuesday reported that the historical rivals are jointly working on the integration and could be within weeks of an announcement. The article attributed the information to "a person with direct knowledge of the project and six others who have been briefed on it." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/27/20190 comments
From the beginning, Microsoft's vision for the Azure Stack involved situations where you're getting your hands dirty.
The Azure Stack is supposed to bring much of the power of Azure cloud computing out to the edge, where users can run full artificial intelligence (AI) or other processing-intensive workloads without waiting to connect to the cloud. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/06/20190 comments
Microsoft reported second quarter revenues on Wednesday that slightly missed financial analysts' targets, but that reflected double-digit growth in strategic business units.
Revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 was $32.47 billion, a gain of 12% over the year-ago period, and below analyst expectations of $32.51 billion. Diluted earnings per share were slightly higher than what Wall Street expected, coming in at $1.10 non-GAAP against predictions of $1.09. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/30/20190 comments
Windows 10 now has a larger market share than any other desktop operating system version, including the previous king of all desktop OS versions, Windows 7.
Net Applications noted that major IT industry milestone in its December 2018 market share figures. With 39.22 percent market share, Windows 10 has a narrow but solid lead over Windows 7 at 36.9 percent. It brings Windows 10 on top for both of the most frequently cited platform trackers (Windows 10 took the lead with Statcounter in January 2018). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/07/20190 comments
In case you hadn't noticed, server sales are booming.
Market researchers at IDC reported Tuesday night that the third quarter represented the highest total revenue in a single quarter for servers ever.
For those of you looking around at much emptier server rooms than you might remember from a decade ago, before the financial crisis and other factors pushed the computer hardware market sideways, it's clearly not the same. As they say, the cloud is just someone else's datacenter, and those someone elses are loading up on hardware.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/12/20180 comments
Microsoft Teams is riding the Office 365 rocket to market share among collaborative chat applications, a new survey suggests.
A Spiceworks survey of its community of IT professionals saw Teams surge seven times in usage share over two years, with the 900 respondents in North America and EMEA projecting another doubling of usage over the next two years.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/10/20180 comments
For the emerging area of Internet of Things (IoT), developers face a confusing array of choices in a few different areas within Microsoft's catalog of Azure services.
To that end, Microsoft Azure MVP and Microsoft Regional Director Eric Boyd offered some guidance on a couple of key architectural questions this week, as part of a session at the Live! 360 conference in Orlando.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/06/20180 comments
Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are popping up all over the stack, sometimes in surprising places.
Pranav Rastogi is one of the people inside Microsoft helping drive those capabilities and technologies across Microsoft's vast array of products. In the keynote for the inaugural Artificial Intelligence Live! track at the Live! 360 conference on Tuesday, Rastogi provided attendees with an overview of what those technologies are and where they're starting to emerge in products.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/05/20180 comments
Artificial intelligence (AI) will come into focus at the Live! 360 conference for Microsoft-focused developers and IT professionals this week in Orlando, Fla.
Live! 360 brings together Converge360's events for one combined conference with each event as a track. (Editor's note: Converge360 is the parent company of Redmondmag.com.) In addition to Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live!, TechMentor, Office & SharePoint Live! and ModernApps Live!, this year the conference is rolling out an entire Artificial Intelligence Live! track.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 12/03/20180 comments
As the tides fall in the tech sector, Microsoft's market cap has emerged as the largest.
Back when tech stocks were on the upswing, Apple and Amazon both drove and benefited from the trend, reaching market caps over $1 trillion, with Microsoft and Alphabet close behind.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/26/20180 comments
An acquisition this week layers some new resources onto Microsoft's already rich capabilities in the area of conversational AI.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced it had signed an agreement to acquire XOXCO, based in Austin, Texas. Like most of the dozen-plus acquisitions Microsoft makes each year, terms weren't disclosed, which usually indicates a fairly small company and a small team.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/14/20180 comments
Symantec Corp. is buying its way into the business of defending Active Directory against reconnaissance attacks.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based security giant bought privately held Javelin Networks earlier this week for an undisclosed amount.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/08/20180 comments
Security researchers at Kaspersky Labs this week provided an update on what personal digital data is worth on dark Web markets.
It's not a new idea; security researchers provide this data every few years. But it's always interesting to hear what data is going for. The upshot -- a consumers' entire digital life is worth less than $50.
David Jacoby, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, spent some time poking around sites where stolen user identities and accounts were on sale, and blogged about it here.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/07/20180 comments
Microsoft's collaborative deal with Walmart is shaping up to be a digital transformation laboratory.
The companies announced a five-year agreement in July that included enterprisewide use by Walmart of Microsoft Azure cloud services and Microsoft 365, the end user package that includes Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) functionality.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/05/20180 comments
Samsung Electronics America Inc. on Friday began selling a Snapdragon-based 2-in-1 mobile PC with LTE support for always-on connectivity.
The Samsung Galaxy Book2 is now available for $1,000 at AT&T, Microsoft.com and Samsung.com. The device will be coming to Sprint and Verizon later this month.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/02/20180 comments
IBM's plan to spend a whopping $34 billion to acquire Red Hat is all about the cloud. This big bet is partially a bet that the cloud gold rush isn't over, with IBM locked in a distant third place.
On Sunday, Big Blue unveiled its acquisition bid for Red Hat at a price that represented a 63 percent premium over Red Hat's share price.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/29/20180 comments
Microsoft beat Wall Street estimates for both revenues and earnings in the latest financial quarter, and its stock price was riding more than 5% higher at mid-day Thursday in the wake of the previous evening's report.
While financial analysts on the Microsoft earnings call Wednesday evening were positive overall about the quarterly results, they asked CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood repeatedly about the growth rate for Microsoft Azure and came at the issue from many different angles.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/25/20180 comments
Most of the headlines Bill Gates makes these days relate to his philanthropic work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or to his default role as a public intellectual. He's frequently quoted on topics ranging from technology trends to global health to economics to environmental issues to his current reading list.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/22/20180 comments
Paul Allen went on to do many significant things in his life, but the achievement that provided the springboard for so many of the rest of his activities was the fortune he amassed as the co-founder of Microsoft.
Primarily, Microsoft is associated with the other co-founder, Bill Gates, whose personality, drive and talents formed the company's identity, and who remains involved in the company's direction on a part-time basis.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/18/20180 comments
The Microsoft Surface is becoming a factor in the U.S. PC market, according to market researchers.
Gartner this week published its preliminary quarterly results for PC unit shipments in the third quarter of 2018.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/12/20180 comments
Just four days after releasing the latest version of Windows 10 and other "version 1809" operating systems, Microsoft is issuing a recall.
"We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating," Microsoft said this weekend in a statement on its support site. As of Monday afternoon, Microsoft had not released a new update.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/08/20180 comments
Microsoft on Tuesday refreshed three devices in the Surface hardware line, teased Surface-branded headphones that integrate with Cortana, and revealed a new consumer financing program for Surface buyers.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/02/20180 comments
Just in time for the expected unveiling of some new Surface hardware on Tuesday, the current generation of Microsoft Surface devices got an "all clear" from the editors of Consumer Reports.
Microsoft's Surface lineup suffered a black eye last August when the nonprofit consumer research agency revoked the "recommended" designation from several Surface devices, including the fifth-generation Surface Pro, the Surface Book in 128GB and 512GB editions, and the Surface Laptop in 128GB and 256GB versions.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/01/20180 comments
SQL Server 2019, Azure Sphere, in-use encryption in Azure and a major Azure IoT initiative called "digital twin" headlined a bounty of new technology previews from Microsoft for customers and partners to test and evaluate.
The batch of preview releases came during the Microsoft Ignite conference this week in Orlando, Fla. While the preview technologies aren't yet supported or touted as production-ready, their delivery marks the key milestone when a product goes from slideware to something concrete. (For coverage of technologies hitting general availability at Ignite, see this roundup.)
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/27/20180 comments
A slew of products and technologies are advancing into the general availability (GA) stage this week at Microsoft Ignite, including the latest version of Windows Server, strategic Internet of Things (IoT) offerings and a number of Azure services and features.
Kicking off its flagship IT conference Monday morning with a keynote by CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft released details on more than a dozen major products, services and frameworks. While Microsoft's product cycle has kept pace with industry trends to become more fluid in recent years, GA is still a key milestone that signals a product will be fully supported in production environments.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/24/20180 comments
A challenge with artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality is often figuring out how to apply the somewhat futuristic concepts to everyday business problems. Microsoft is trying to move that process along within the context of its business applications suite, Dynamics 365.
On Tuesday, Microsoft showcased five new apps for Dynamics 365 that embed within everyday business tasks either the AI capabilities that increasingly permeate the Azure cloud or the mixed reality promise of the Microsoft HoloLens visor-based computer or Windows Mixed Reality immersive headsets from OEMs.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/18/20180 comments
A new Microsoft service aims to fix the compatibility issues that tend to come up for organizations when they migrate applications to Office 365 and Windows 10.
Dubbed Desktop App Assure, the tool will be delivered as a component of FastTrack, Microsoft's internal migration desk for moving customers to its cloud platforms.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 09/06/20180 comments
If you're waiting longer to refresh the PCs in your organization, you're not alone.
According to new forecasts released this week by IDC, lengthy refresh cycles are contributing to a gloomy outlook for personal computing devices.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/31/20180 comments
The long-promised public play date between Alexa and Cortana is here.
The digital voice assistants' corporate parents, Amazon and Microsoft, first unveiled that they were working on getting Alexa and Cortana together a year ago.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/15/20180 comments
Microsoft is consolidating a number of ports for Azure Stack in a move that should significantly reduce the hybrid cloud platform's attack surface and simplify network integration.
Starting with a forthcoming release, Microsoft will collapse port requirements for various Azure services running on Azure Stack from 27 different ports to just one. The services will communicate via Port 443, the standard port for HTTP over TLS/SSL.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/13/20180 comments
As Microsoft steadily shifts its focus to the cloud and ramps up release cadences for all of its code, the future of Windows is a pressing question.
At the TechMentor conference this week in Redmond, Wash., a panel of expert speakers gazed into their own crystal balls to assess the future of the operating system, both for end users and in on-premises servers. Their lively discussion touched on controversies surrounding the Windows 10 update cycle, looked ahead to features coming in Windows Server 2019 and exchanged best bets for IT pros to keep their skills current.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/09/20180 comments
If you've turned away from OneDrive or stopped paying attention to Microsoft's file hosting service, it may be time to take another look.
Stephen Rose, senior product manager for OneDrive for Business, provided an update on the service's roadmap during the main keynote at the TechMentor conference (pictured above), being held this week at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. The TechMentor conference is hosted by Redmondmag.com's parent company, 1105 Media Inc.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/08/20180 comments
The smallest of Microsoft's "Surface" family of 2-in-1 devices is now available in the United States and Canada, three weeks after it was first announced.
The Surface Go is being sold in Microsoft Stores, Best Buy and through reseller partners. It sports a 10-inch screen, weighs 1.15 pounds, is a third of an inch thick and runs a 7th Generation Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4415Y. The unit ships with Windows 10 S and a 30-day home trial of Office 365 Home, and its ports and jacks support USB-C, Surface Connect, Surface Type Cover, headphones and a microSDXC card.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/02/20180 comments
Customers who don't want to follow Microsoft into the cloud for their Office productivity products will be paying more for that on-premises option starting next quarter.
Microsoft announced several licensing changes this week that will go into effect on Oct. 1.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/27/20180 comments
The countdown clock is starting on a standard desktop configuration.
Much like it beat a drum around the end-of-life deadline for Windows XP, Microsoft is now starting
to warn customers and partners that a popular desktop configuration's time is limited.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/25/20180 comments
Microsoft has wrapped up its Inspire conference this month in Las Vegas, where it combined the annual partner event with its annual internal sales event, Microsoft Ready. Here are top quotes from Inspire keynotes that hit the key themes of the show, which marks the start of Microsoft's fiscal year.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/23/20180 comments
Microsoft's latest fiscal year earnings are in, and it's official: Microsoft is now a $100 billion company.
According to financial results released after markets closed on Thursday, the company earned revenues of $110.36 billion for the full year ended June 30, a 14% jump compared to the $96.57 billion in revenues the previous year.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/19/20180 comments
In his keynote at Microsoft Inspire on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella detailed the Microsoft products and tools he uses to stay productive.
There used to be a regular saying that Microsoft's IT department was the company's first, best customer.
The idea was the department was always at the ready to dogfood technical previews and beta versions of Microsoft's enterprise software and services. Using the software to run a 100,000-person company with nearly $100 billion in revenues and global-scale operations is a great way to kick the tires and prove the scalability of new software.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/18/20180 comments
Microsoft will highlight new features and programs around Azure and Microsoft 365 during the Microsoft Inspire 2018 partner conference that kicks off on Sunday.
In advance of the partner conference, which runs most of next week and will be co-located in Las Vegas with the Microsoft Ready internal sales conference, the company on Thursday made dozens of product and partnering announcements.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/13/20180 comments
Microsoft on Tuesday began taking orders for a new, slightly smaller and slightly less expensive Surface device that will start shipping Aug. 2 in several markets, including the United States.
Panos Panay introduced the Surface Go in a blog post Monday night. "Starting at $399 MSRP, it represents a new entry point for the Surface family, while keeping the premium qualities that have come to define it," Panay said.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/10/20180 comments
Cryptocurrency is still at the frontier of cybercriminal activity, but the vehicle to exploit it is taking a different form.
That's the conclusion of a new annual report from security researchers at Kaspersky Labs.
Preparing a third annual report on ransomware, Kaspersky noted that year-by-year, double-digit increases in ransomware didn't continue during the most recent study period of April 2017 to March 2018. After an April 2016 to March 2017 period when ransomware was the most significant security story of the year, the trend petered out in this last year.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/05/20180 comments
One of Microsoft's most innovative contributions to productivity is on hiatus.
Since late last year, Microsoft has been talking about "Sets," a way to group related information from different applications into one project, and has included the feature in Insider Preview builds of Windows 10.
The technology essentially creates tabs within a window related to the same project. For example, if a user opens a Word document for a research project, Sets allows the user to create additional tabs from other programs within that window. One tab could be a Microsoft Edge browser page, another could be a PowerPoint deck, et cetera.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/02/20180 comments
That long-awaited USB-C dongle is coming to the Microsoft Surface.
A little over a year ago, Microsoft's Surface chief Panos Panay told technology news site The Verge in an interview that the dongle would be coming.
Now The Verge is reporting that a rather large dongle to connect USB-C devices will be available starting on Friday. According to the report, the dongle will cost $79.99, will be available for commercial customers and will plug into the Surface Connect port.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/26/20180 comments
Brian Krzanich is out as CEO of Intel after an investigation into a past consensual relationship with an Intel employee.
Intel announced Thursday morning that Krzanich, 58, was resigning his post and his seat on the Intel board. Chief Financial Officer Robert Swan was named interim CEO effective immediately, and Intel has begun a search for a permanent CEO.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/21/20180 comments
Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled big feature changes -- on a slow timetable -- for the Office user experience, including a simplified ribbon, new colors and icons, and a search overhaul.
The changes will roll out in stages over the next few months, starting with Web versions, and will be exclusive to Office.com and Office 365. Apparently remembering the significant user backlash that accompanied the original rollout of the Office ribbon, Microsoft is taking care to present the changes as a work-in-progress that will be tested with initial user groups and modified as necessary, rather than blasted out to the billion-plus monthly users of Office.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/13/20180 comments
Since Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stepped back from full-time involvement at the company where he amassed one of history's largest fortunes, he's become arguably the world's most influential philanthropist and social change-minded investor.
Now a company partly owned by Gates, Carbon Engineering, along with a team of researchers from Harvard University, are reporting a key tech breakthrough in a critical area of climate technology called direct air capture.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/13/20180 comments
Any enterprise customer of Microsoft's that isn't using GitHub already can expect a big push toward that software development and version control platform shortly.
Microsoft announced a deal on Monday to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The transaction has been approved by both companies' boards and is expected to close before the end of the year.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/04/20180 comments
With a month to go until the end of Microsoft's fiscal year, the executive shuffles continue in the Windows business.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a huge shift in a March 29 memo that revealed a reorganization whose headline departure would be the head of the Windows and Devices Group and longtime Microsoft veteran Terry Myerson. Myerson was to stay at Microsoft for a while to help with the transition.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/01/20180 comments
Security researchers on Wednesday called on users of small office/home office (SOHO) routers and some NAS devices to reset to factory defaults in order to partially protect themselves against destructive malware dubbed VPNFilter that has spread to an estimated 500,000 devices in 54 countries.
Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, which conducts broad industry research for vulnerabilities beyond just Cisco hardware, also called for ISPs who provide routers to customers to reboot the devices on customers' behalf and to work with Talos and other security professionals to update all devices when a patch is available.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/23/20180 comments
A standard reaction to a private company sharing fairly specific financial results on a regular basis is to assume that they're trying to attract a buyer, but Veeam Software's co-founder insists that's not the case.
"What are the reasons for us to sell? We are fast-growing, we have a great market. There is not a single reason. And we don't have venture capitalists. They don't need the exits, they are not pushing us for the exits," said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam's co-founder and senior vice president for marketing and corporate development, during an executive roundtable at VeeamOn 2018 on Monday. The show runs through Wednesday in Chicago.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/15/20180 comments
Microsoft Build 2018, the company's flagship developer conference, wrapped up this week in Seattle with a lot of news. With dozens of announcements, including 70 new capabilities in Azure and more than 100 new features for the Bot Framework, it's impossible to capture even all of the important ones. What follows are 11 key moments from the three main keynotes that highlight important themes of the show.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/11/20180 comments
"Graph" is one of those terms that Microsoft has been throwing around for a few years now, but that can be difficult to define.
There was the Office Graph, the current Microsoft Graph, the LinkedIn Graph and other graphs. What is Microsoft talking about?
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/08/20180 comments
Five months after they were supposed to be working together, Cortana and Alexa shared a stage on Monday for a joint demo.
Cortana, Microsoft's intelligent assistant that operates primarily from Windows 10, and Alexa, Amazon's assistant whose main platform is Echo devices, were featured calling upon one another's services during the opening keynote of the Microsoft Build 2018 show in Seattle.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/07/20180 comments
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday unveiled a fourth-generation version of the company's discontinued Kinect motion-sensing device, which was originally designed for gaming but is being repurposed with more advanced technologies for artificial intelligence, Azure, edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/07/20180 comments
Twitter made a costly admission on Thursday afternoon. The company's stock took an after-hours hit as investors digested a company Tweet and blog post revealing that Twitter had discovered an internal bug that resulted in user passwords being stored unencrypted on an internal log.
Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal encouraged the service's 330 million users to consider changing their Twitter passwords on all services where they've used it. Agrawal said the move came "out of an abundance of caution" and emphasized that Twitter has no reason to believe the passwords ever left company systems or that they were misused.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/03/20180 comments
Satya Nadella says he's never seen a database scale as quickly as Cosmos DB.
"In less than a year, Azure Cosmos DB, the first globally distributed [and] multi-model database, exceeded $100 million in annualized revenue," Microsoft's CEO told investors last week on the company's Q3 earnings call. While annualized revenue doesn't mean Microsoft has pulled down $100 million on Cosmos DB yet, it does mean that it's recently ramped up to a pace of more than $8.3 million a month.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/30/20180 comments
Microsoft reported earnings on Thursday of $0.95 per share on revenues of $26.82 billion.
The third-quarter (January through March) figures beat analyst expectations of $0.85 per share and revenues of $25.77 billion, but the company's stock still fell in after-hours trading following the news.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/26/20180 comments
Microsoft hearts Linux and all, but the company is reaching a new level.
In a slew of security news this week, Microsoft unveiled an operating system product -- not an internal system, but an operating system product -- that it will release with a Linux kernel.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/17/20180 comments
Microsoft outlined a major new security vision this week called Azure Sphere that aims to secure the billions of devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) from device hardware to software to cloud, and gives Microsoft a central role.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/17/20180 comments
Gartner and IDC this week both released their reports on the worldwide PC market. It's a tale of two markets -- with neither of the stories being very happy.
Let's start with the better news. That would be from IDC, which found evidence of a flat market. That's right, this was the good news. IDC reported that worldwide there were some 60.4 million PCs sold in the January-to-March period.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/13/20180 comments
Adam Kujawa, director of Malwarebytes Labs, has a strong reaction to the amount of cryptomining malware his company saw in the first quarter of 2018.
"Cryptomining has just gone insane," Kujawa said in an interview about Malwarebytes Labs' new security report covering the January-to-March period. "It's all over the place. We've never seen a mass migration to the use of one particular type of threat so fast by so much of the cybercrime community as we have seen with cryptominers."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/09/20180 comments
Even though Microsoft has lobbied consistently for the CLOUD Act, the speed with which the federal legislation went from bill to presidential signature took even the technology giant by surprise.
In a lengthy blog post Tuesday, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith admitted that passage of the CLOUD Act, which stands for Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, on March 23 was a "bit of a shock."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/04/20180 comments
A new training module in Microsoft's Professional Program gives tens of thousands of people a chance to brush up their AI skills.
Announced Monday, the Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence will consist of 10 parts, each of which is supposed to take eight to 16 hours to complete. Attendees can either audit the courses or pay in order to get a certificate of completion.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/02/20180 comments
Officials from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security are warning network managers to be on the lookout for password-spray attacks.
Password spraying occurs when an attacker tests a single password against multiple user accounts at an organization. The method often involves weak passwords, such as Winter2018 or Password123!, and can be an effective hacking technique against organizations that are using single sign-on (SSO) and federated authentication protocols but that haven't deployed multifactor authentication.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/28/20180 comments
Security patches from January to protect Windows 7 from Meltdown opened up a different, gaping security flaw in the way the operating system protected memory, according to a security researcher who specializes in direct memory access (DMA) attacks.
Ulf Frisk revealed the vulnerability on Tuesday on his personal blog in a post called "Total Meltdown?" The patch was intended to address the Meltdown flaw in Intel, IBM POWER and ARM-based processors that emerged in January and theoretically allows a rogue process to read all memory on a system.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/27/20180 comments
Does Microsoft have a shot in the race to be the first trillion-dollar company?
Apple, Amazon and Alphabet (Google) have been front-runners in investor speculation about which company could be first to reach the psychological milestone of a trillion-dollar market capitalization.
Attention around the question peaked near the market's recent top in January and has settled considerably as stocks have fallen since. In addition, Facebook, which had been a little further back in the market cap sweepstakes, has completely worked its way out of the conversation in the midst of its recent storm of controversy over data privacy that has severely affected the stock price.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/26/20180 comments
Microsoft has been steadily incorporating more and more of its enterprise intelligence chops into its business applications, and Dynamics 365 looks poised to be one of the effort's biggest beneficiaries.
At Wednesday's Business Forward event in Amsterdam, Microsoft unveiled details and highlights of the upcoming Spring '18 release of Dynamics 365. "We're unleashing a wave of innovation across the entire product line with hundreds of new capabilities and features in three core areas: new business applications; new intelligent capabilities infused throughout; and transformational new application platform capabilities," said James Phillips, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Business Applications Group, in a blog post unveiling the changes.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/21/20180 comments
Intel's massive effort to protect all of the chips it has released in the past five years against Spectre and Meltdown is now finished.
The company announced its completion of the microcode updates on Thursday, adding that it has also redesigned the processors being released later this year to offer additional protections.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/15/20180 comments
In a flaw described by one non-affiliated security expert as "fascinating," security researchers found a logical flaw in the Credential Security Support Provider (CredSSP) protocol used by Remote Desktop and WinRM and affecting all supported versions of Windows.
Preempt Security reported the flaw to Microsoft last August and Microsoft released a fix this week as part of the March Patch Tuesday release. The flaw, CVE-2018-0886, was rated "important" by Microsoft, which is a middling severity designation in Microsoft's scale, largely because the new flaw is not an initial infection vector.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/14/20180 comments
Microsoft on Monday marked the one-year anniversary of rolling out Microsoft Teams by introducing a raft of new features coming to the teamwork hub through this calendar year.
Microsoft launched Teams on March 14, 2017, as an answer to Slack, and more recently has disclosed that Teams will merge over time with Skype for Business. By launching Teams as a component of Office 365, Microsoft quickly exposed the new platform to the cloud productivity suite's broad base of 120 million users. Microsoft did not provide an update on Monday for how many users Teams has, but the company did report that 200,000 organizations are now using Teams.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/12/20180 comments
Kali Linux, the distribution dedicated to penetration testing and a favorite of hackers wearing white, gray and black hats all around the world, just hit the Microsoft App Store.
What that means is that Windows 10 users can now quickly download and install the distribution for free and be running the powerful security testing platform in a matter of minutes.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/07/20180 comments
The server business was booming in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to market research from IDC. PCs and smartphones, not so much.
IDC released a slew of reports this week recapping the most recently completed quarter, now that most of the publicly traded vendor companies have released their quarterly financial reports, with all those reports' attendant clues.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 03/02/20180 comments
In a lively one-hour discussion ranging from privacy rights to latency issues to robots conducting overseas seizures, U.S. Supreme Court justices sparred with lawyers from Microsoft and the U.S. government in oral arguments on Tuesday.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/28/20180 comments
Microsoft attorneys will make their arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday in their final opportunity to sway an e-mail privacy case that is central to the willingness of international customers to trust U.S.-based cloud providers with their data, among numerous important legal issues.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/26/20180 comments
Tying together various threads uncovered by themselves and other security companies over the last few years, security researchers at FireEye have concluded that a series of attacks represent a discrete cyber-espionage group operating on behalf of North Korea.
FireEye named the group APT37 in a report released this week, "APT37 (Reaper): The Overlooked North Korean Actor." The report connects APT37 to other attacks dating back to 2014, including the recent zero-day vulnerability CVE-2018-4878 that was disclosed on Feb. 1. Successful exploitation of that Adobe Flash Player vulnerability could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/21/20180 comments
Peter Bauer's perch offers a commanding view of one of the greatest migrations in the history of IT -- the movement from on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers to Office 365.
Bauer is chairman and CEO of Mimecast, which provides e-mail security and data security products. Much of the company's business involves layering security and archiving onto Microsoft Office 365, and the company has been building a business on the Microsoft cloud productivity trend for years.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/14/20180 comments
In the great debate over whether the robots will save us or destroy us, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is staking out a more activist position.
Nadella revisited the artificial intelligence issue in a speech at The Economic Club of New York on Wednesday. "I feel like sometimes we in tech, even, abdicate control: '[AI] is going to happen tomorrow and our best case is that we're going to be domesticated cats or whatever,'" Nadella said.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/08/20180 comments
Now that Windows 10 has surpassed Windows 7 for the first time in global usage statistics, it's not just the latest round of Microsoft's reigning OS passing the torch to the newest release. This time it marks the ascendance of the new model of Windows.
"This is a breakthrough for Microsoft," said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen in a statement this month about the handover of the lead. StatCounter, a Web analytics company, tracks operating system, browser and screen resolution information for 10 billion visitors each month to more than 2 million sites worldwide.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/07/20180 comments
Microsoft's strong financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year were once again a result of the company's relentless focus on transitioning to cloud.
The company released results after markets closed on Wednesday evening showing revenues of $28.9 billion, a 12% increase over the year-ago quarter, and operating income of $8.7 billion, a 10% bump. Net income was a loss of $6.3 billion, due to a $13.8 billion charge the company took related to the tax bill that Congress passed in December.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/02/20180 comments
Office 365 administrators who enjoy torturing their own users will have a new toy to play with this quarter. The Attack Simulator for Office 365 Threat Intelligence is expected to enter a public preview any day now, according to a recent update of Microsoft's Office 365 Roadmap.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 02/01/20180 comments
A Symantec Norton survey released this month estimated that close to 1 billion people were affected by cybercrime in 2017.
Norton's exact figure is 978 million people, determined from a mammoth survey of 21,549 people in 20 countries (counting China and Hong Kong as separate countries) that was conducted in October. To reach such a massive number, Norton took an expansive view of cybercrime. Respondents were counted as victims if they answered that they had been hit by any of 20 different types of cybercrime.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/29/20180 comments
Former Citrix CEO and longtime Microsoft senior executive Kirill Tatarinov is joining the board of directors at Acumatica, a Bellevue, Wash.-based cloud ERP company.
On Acumatica's board, Tatarinov will be advising his former Microsoft colleague, Jon Roskill, who joined Acumatica as CEO in 2014 after capping a long Microsoft career with a stint as Microsoft's channel chief.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/25/20180 comments
The massive Equifax breach dominated the security headlines last year, but Microsoft security experts are contending that Petya and WannaCrypt are representative of a dangerous new category of cyberattacks that emerged in force in 2017.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/24/20180 comments
So is Metalogix for sale, or isn't it?
Metalogix's SharePoint tools competitor AvePoint on Tuesday launched a Metalogix switch campaign with a blog post from Chief Revenue Officer Chris Larsen asserting that Metalogix was for sale.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/18/20180 comments
It's certainly been a rough start to 2018 for Microsoft's virtual assistant.
- Even inside Microsoft, Cortana's been getting some rejections. On Jan. 5, Microsoft discontinued a public preview of an integration between Cortana and Dynamics 365 that the company had previously promoted. The preview had put Dynamics 365 in Cortana's notebook, and Cortana had prompted users with relevant information about sales activities, accounts, opportunities and meetings.
- Cortana was supposed to be besties with Alexa right now. Microsoft and Amazon had announced back in August that people would be able to use Cortana on Windows 10 PCs to access Alexa and to use Alexa on the Amazon Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices to access Cortana. The two would become like a team of assistants, allowing Alexa to handle managing Cortana specialties like booking meetings or accessing work calendars when a user was near an Echo, and allowing Cortana to control Alexa specialties like shopping on Amazon.com or controlling smart home devices from a Windows 10 PC. The integration was supposed to be done by the end of the year. But the companies missed the deadline and have not provided a new target date.
- Alexa is elbowing its way onto Windows territory. During CES last week, Acer announced that it would be bringing Alexa to some of its Aspire, Spin, Switch and Swift notebooks starting in the United States in the first quarter of 2018, with broader availability coming in the middle of the year. Other OEMs have discussed Alexa integrations, as well.
- CES buzz in general was heavy on Alexa, with some Google Assistant thrown in. It was the second big Alexa year in a row for CES. Cortana, on the other hand, did not make any kind of splash at the show. Apple Siri was also a non-factor. Microsoft did try to generate some Cortana CES buzz by highlighting some reference designs from Allwinner, Synaptics, TONLY and Qualcomm.
- Outsiders haven't been bothering to teach Cortana many new skills. As All About Microsoft's Mary Jo Foley pointed out in mid-December, Cortana is seriously lagging behind Alexa in the skills department. Microsoft released the Cortana Skills Kit in May 2017, and take-up has been slow. Alexa had 25,784 skills to start 2018, according to Voicebot.ai. Cortana had just 230 as of mid-December. The enthusiasm level is reminiscent of Microsoft's efforts to get modern apps for Windows 8 and apps for Windows Phone -- a slow, late start.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/16/20180 comments
Microsoft SharePoint users surged into cloud deployments in 2017, according to a new survey.
"The SharePoint and Office 365 Industry Survey" released this week by SharePoint tools suppliers Sharegate, Hyperfish and Nintex included responses from about 450 IT professionals and SharePoint administrators. What makes the survey interesting is that the same three companies surveyed a random sample of their combined client pools in 2016, as well, providing lots of data points for comparison.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/10/20180 comments
Intel will release updates for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities by the end of January for all chips released in the last five years, CEO Brian Krzanich said Monday.
"For our processors and products introduced in the past five years, Intel expects to issue updates for more than 90 percent of them within a week, and the remaining by the end of January," Krzanich said.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/09/20180 comments
Reports have been bubbling up this week that vendors and open source teams are hustling under embargo to fix a major security flaw affecting Intel processors over the last decade. The rumored software fix could seriously slow down both personal systems and public clouds.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/03/20180 comments
Yes, we know most passwords are lame, and we've known it for years. A look at the worst passwords of 2017 confirms the depressing reality:
- 123456
- password
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 12345
- 123456789
- letmein
- 1234567
- football
- iloveyou
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/02/20180 comments
Ray Ozzie was a quiet presence in Redmond, but he left deep footprints throughout Microsoft's global operation that will last for years.
Ozzie is stepping down as chief software architect and preparing to retire, according to an employee e-mail that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent out Monday.
"He will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization -- bringing the great innovations and great innovators he's assembled into the groups driving our business," Ballmer wrote. "Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 10/19/20100 comments
The markets and the Fed aren't the only ones saying the recovery is slowing enough to cause concern. Warning signs are flashing all through the small business and IT markets.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released results of its latest Index of Small Business Optimism on Tuesday. See the full PDF here.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 08/11/20100 comments
Another Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is in the bag. Here are 11 key takeaways from the 2010 WPC:
1. Microsoft wants partners to be "all-in" on the cloud. Nearly everything was about cloud computing. That was a little weird for partners coming in from countries where BPOS and other offerings haven't rolled out yet, but pretty compelling for U.S. partners.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 07/19/20100 comments
The IAMCP, which now stands for the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners, is coming off its first national meeting, held last month in regional offices and remotely throughout the country. The gathering featured a keynote from Cindy Bates, Microsoft vice president of U.S. Partner Strategy. As one of the top two Microsoft partner executives nationally, the Bates keynote was a good vote of confidence for the IAMCP's first national event where my colleague Jeff Schwartz attended the New York presentation (see his report).
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 06/03/20100 comments
A shout out to our sister publication for government IT consultants, Washington Technology, which ran a piece this month about the famous Los Angeles-Google deal. Writer David Hubler goes into a lot of depth about Computer Sciences Corp.'s role, partnering with Google to implement the messaging system. The system is eventually supposed to cover 30,000 public employees. If the implementation is a success, it will be another major case study supporting a cloud mail system, as opposed to on-premise, like Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise, which is the system the Google setup will replace. Of course, if it doesn't work properly...
Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/24/20100 comments
Big Blue made a major customer acquisition move today in buying Sterling Commerce, according to an analyst. IBM is buying the Dublin, Ohio-based electronic data interchange (EDI) software company from AT&T for $1.4 billion. Analyst Ray Wang told RCP's Jeffrey Schwartz that by processing large volumes of transactions between B2B trading partners, Sterling actually brings IBM a lot of high-value customers among large banks, telcos and retailers.
Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/24/20100 comments
The slow rollout of the new Microsoft Partner Network passed a milestone today with the launch of the new competency structure and the new Action Packs.
Any partner with a Microsoft competency and specialization under the old system was supposed to be automatically transitioned into a new competency, with an e-mail notification. For some partners, the new competency name won't be much of a change. For example, the Security Solutions competency with a specialization in Identity & Secure Access will now go by the competency name Identity and Security. The ISV competency goes to, wait for it, ISV. For others, though, the new competency name is a lot different. Partners with the competency/specialization combo of Information Worker Solutions/Office Solutions Development are now in the Portals and Collaboration competency.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/24/20100 comments
Former high-ranking Microsoft executive Maria Martinez has landed at Microsoft's archrival in the cloud CRM space, Salesforce.com, less than a year after she retired from Microsoft.
Martinez was announced Wednesday as executive vice president of Customers for Life, Salesforce.com's department dedicated, obviously enough, to customer retention. She'll report to Frank van Veenendaal, president of worldwide sales and services.
Martinez left Microsoft last July as corporate vice president of Microsoft Services, a position of special interest to large Microsoft partners. That role at Microsoft sets the company's services strategies, including how aggressively or gently Microsoft treats partners when going after consulting service business. The Microsoft post's responsibilities include management of Microsoft Consulting Services.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/06/20100 comments
In my column for the April issue of RCP, "Looking out for the Little Server," I shared my concern that the stand-alone server category may suffer from benign neglect as the industry focuses on data-center blade designs that serve the cloud.
The column prompted a server solution specialist and Microsoft licensing expert with a major distributor, who asked that he not to be identified by name, to respond with some interesting observations:
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/19/20100 comments
Partners often don't think of opportunity when it comes to Microsoft's management technologies that are branded under the System Center umbrella. But Microsoft is making a major marketing push to get partners involved with two System Center products that were released to manufacturing today. The products are System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on 04/19/20100 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 11/10/20091 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 11/10/20090 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 11/10/20090 comments