In case you missed the earnings announcement late last week, Ingram Micro reported -- like just about everybody else -- quarterly revenue and profit shortfalls, but the big distributor managed to beat Wall Street expectations. So we'll take that as mostly good news.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/20090 comments
OK, so the news here is that Microsoft has decided to make its discount on the Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS (catchy), permanent. Henceforth, the price of BPOS will be $10 per user per month rather than $15 per user per month.
Hey, if it works, it works, although partners might not be thrilled by this cloud pricing strategy if it ultimately causes their referral fees to shrink. The main point here, though, is that the timing of the permanent price cut is likely not incidental.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/04/20092 comments
Now, here's a Microsoft cloud play that could produce some thunder. Microsoft is offering Dynamics CRM Online, its hosted customer relationship management suite, free for seven months to customers of Oracle's and Salesforce.com's competing products.
We've long held that Dynamics is a powerhouse-in-waiting in enterprise software, and we think that's especially true for Dynamics CRM, both on-premises and in a hosted model. So, Microsoft partners, set those wavering Oracle and Salesforce.com customers up with a little try-before-you-buy and see whether they get hooked. (Incidentally, Microsoft is now saying that Dynamics CRM Online turns out to be the cheapest of the three options, anyway).
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/04/20090 comments
There'll be more features and a couple of new high-end versions of the database, but prices are going up. Redmond magazine columnist Mary Jo Foley has details.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/04/20090 comments
OK, so EMC and VMware are mostly the same entity, but now Cisco is on board, not as an acquirer but as a partner. The two-and-a-half companies have come together to combat the IBM-HP datacenter powerhouse. The new alliance will focus on virtualization and storage technology as well as networking for datacenters, which seems entirely reasonable given what each company does. The first product is already here: Vblock, a private-cloud offering.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/04/20090 comments
In 1995, when Major League Baseball returned from a labor dispute that killed the end of the 1994 season, baseball players were suddenly everybody's best friend. Ballplayers signed autographs, posed for pictures and high-fived kids as they never had before. They had a reputation to restore. And eventually, they did restore it...before the steroid scandal hit, of course.
But forget about the steroids for now. Microsoft is emerging from a bit of a "baseball strike" of its own with Windows 7 replacing Vista. One of Vista's big problems was that not many applications worked with it; another was that migration to it, especially from machines that lacked the requisite memory, was difficult. Those and other factors frustrated users (to say the least), so not many people migrated to Vista. That was especially true in the enterprise.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/03/20092 comments
We're not sure what noted irony expert Alanis Morissette would say about this, but it turns out that Microsoft is kind of, sort of paying for part of the city of Los Angeles' switch to Google's e-mail platform. Apparently, Microsoft paid the state of California $70 million back in 2006 after the state alleged that Redmond -- get this -- overcharged for its software. L.A., evidently, has $1.5 million of that money left over and will give it to Google for the city's Google Apps deployment.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/03/20090 comments
When we read the news that Tony Scott would be entering the CIO Hall of Fame, we immediately thought, "Wait, there's a CIO Hall of Fame?" Well, there isn't, really. Iit's just an honor bestowed on certain technology executives by one of your editor's former employers, CIO magazine.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/03/20090 comments
Economic recovery? Not in Walldorf, Germany, mein freund, where SAP reported disappointing third-quarter earnings and saw its stock price tumble this week.
We hate to always be nattering nabobs of negativity, but we here at RCPU feel as though SAP's earnings will be the rule and not the exception for a while to come. This "recovery," if it's even happening, isn't going to be a quick one. So, get used to this kind of stuff.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/29/20090 comments
Come on back, Randy Newman. Google is singing your tune this week. There's little doubt that the nerds from Northern California love the city to the south of them now that they've won a big contract to provide e-mail for the city of Los Angeles.
That's right. Sgt. Joe Friday will soon be filing his police reports via the cloud -- if, in fact, Google's cloud stuff actually works -- instead of using Outlook and Exchange.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/29/20095 comments
They're PCs that don't have the normal boatload of trial software and other stuff loaded on them. You can get them at a physical Microsoft store or at the company's online shop. But, as far as we can tell, you won't find them anywhere else, at least for now.
One funny note on this little story comes from a blogger named Marcus Yam, who did a fine job with his entry on this issue but worried us a little bit with his opening paragraph:
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Posted by Lee Pender on 10/29/20090 comments