Security titan Symantec is opening up its deal-registration program, appropriately
dubbed the Opportunity Registration program. (We just love when the name of
something describes what the thing is.) Primarily, the re-tooling of the program
gives Silver Partners the opportunity to receive a discount on approved registrations;
that perk was previously limited to partners at a higher level in the program.
"We realized these are partners that are really key to our mid-market,
and some of the deal sizes are large enough that they should qualify,"
said Julie Parrish, vice president of Symantec's Global Channel Office.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/05/20080 comments
Of course,
this
is only really important for those of you who don't already use Firefox.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/05/20080 comments
Steve Ballmer's talking retirement...but don't hold your breath. Ballmer's
days of daytime television and cross-country RV trips are still
a
decade or so away
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/05/20080 comments
It's like the humidity that hangs in the air on a summer afternoon. Kind of
annoying but mostly non-threatening, and it's surely nothing that would actually
produce a rain cloud and ruin a cookout or a picnic. Right?
And then those clouds start to roll in, heavy and gray, slowly eating blue
from the sky. A few warning drops fall and then BAM! Cloudburst, rainstorm,
and you're scrambling to get your burgers and baked beans into the house before
everything gets all soggy.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/05/20080 comments
At some point back in the late '90s -- we're thinking 1998 or so -- Quark put
out an acquisition bid for competitor Adobe. Adobe was struggling a bit at the
time, and although Quark's bid ultimately (and obviously) failed, there were
rumors that Adobe might be ripe for the picking.
Your editor covered the story for a different publication (again, obviously,
as RCP didn't exist back then) and wrote some snappy prose, we'd like
to say. But one competitor -- we honestly don't remember who, but please step
forward if you're out there -- won the battle for best lede (first sentence)
in an online story about the whole Quark-Adobe matter. He wrote: "When
blood is in the water, sharks will gather."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/04/20080 comments
Somebody at Microsoft -- namely honcho grande Kevin Johnson -- finally realized
that the company's "Live" branding means...well, nothing, really,
and is just a little bit confusing.
So, Johnson and Microsoft's marketers are out to fix
the company's online branding, and he's left us with a mildly funny quote
to boot (from this
PC World story):
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/04/20080 comments
It's not those nasty hackers from outside the company CIOs worry about, but
instead
those
disgruntled employees inside
, a new survey reveals.
So, whatever you do, try to keep your employees, um, gruntled.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/04/20080 comments
A couple of months ago, RCPU brought you
the
tale of Avistar
, a maker of video-conferencing software that was facing
potentially fatal challenges of 29 of its U.S. patents from none other than
Redmond itself.
Back then, we held -- as we do now -- that Microsoft was just trying to put
a struggling company out of business and snake its stuff in order to bolster
Redmond's own growing unified communications capabilities. Of course, not
everybody shared our take, but we've stuck with it.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/03/20080 comments
Along with pretty much everybody else in the world, your editor got a live
demo last week of Microsoft AX 2009, one of Redmond's Dynamics Enterprise Resource
Planning suites, which is
generally
available this week
.
Other bloggers and commentators have mentioned how the latest version of AX
looks like a showcase for the Microsoft technology stack (which it
does indeed, Mary Jo Foley) and how AX might be moving Dynamics closer
to SAP's market territory -- something we've suspected and written about
for a while now.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 06/03/20080 comments
RCP
Editor in Chief Scott Bekker says that Dell's latest earnings release
shows that the one-time direct-sales stalwart is still approaching the channel
with hat in hand
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/03/20080 comments
OK, so we restrained ourselves from giving this entry the "Sounders get
a kick out of Microsoft sponsorship" headline. But
the Wall Street Journal didn't
.
Between
NASCAR
and soccer, we figure Microsoft has covered the American demographic spread
pretty well. And, yes, this is the second entry with a soccer reference in as
many days. We're fans here at RCPU -- get used to it.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/29/20080 comments