There's a new SDK for this touchy computing model, which users are still getting a feel for. (Insert your own line about hands-on experience.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/12/20090 comments
OK, we're not here to argue the EU's contention that Intel and Microsoft are nasty monopolists that must be punished, although we're pretty sure we disagree with the vast majority of it. What we don't understand is why the "competition" folks in Europe have to choose right now to try to cripple a couple of companies that help drive the worldwide economy.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 05/12/20090 comments
Here's another first for Microsoft. Shortly after the company reported its first revenue shortfall, it's now issuing its first bond offering.
Microsoft people say that the company doesn't need the money. In other words, this isn't a desperation move. All Redmond is doing, the folks there say, is taking advantage of the company's good credit rating to offer a bond at a time that makes sense given market conditions.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 05/12/20090 comments
Ingram unveiled new
Seismic services
at its conference in your editor's hometown of Dallas this week. It's a bit of a rough time for Ingram, as it is for everybody, but the company's most recent financial numbers did manage to beat Wall Street's expectations despite showing a big (but obviously not unexpected)
drop
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Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/20090 comments
So, it's going to be possible to run virtual XP inside Windows 7. Neat, huh? Yeah, but only if your system specs allow it -- and
a lot won't
, apparently.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/20092 comments
First of all, friends, bravo to you. It's fairly rare that your editor actually takes the time to read his own blog posts online (there is just so much to do here -- seriously), so it was a very pleasant surprise to notice this week that the comments sections after a bunch of
these posts
have been getting a pretty good workout. Your thoughts e-mailed to
[email protected] are always appreciated, and we promise to get better about running them here, but we also love it when you get some conversations of your own started in the blog entries themselves. So, thanks, and keep up the good work.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/20090 comments
Next on the list of Microsoft partners' favorite third-party programs is one from Redmond's still sort of new rival,
VMware
.Â
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/07/20090 comments
This week, lots of folks celebrated Cinco de Mayo, which is as good an excuse as we can think of to down some cervezas and devour some Mexican food, not that we ever need an excuse to do that.
Of course, Cinco de Mayo isn't Mexican Independence Day, as many Americans think it is. Cinco de Mayo celebrates a Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862; Mexican Independence Day actually occurred about a half century before that battle. (A kid who grows up in Texas as the son of a Spanish teacher just knows this stuff.)
Confused? Well, that's normal -- Mexican history is actually fairly complicated, not unlike (segue...here it comes...) the five announcements Citrix released on the first day of its Citrix Synergy conference, which happened to be on May 5. That's right; Citrix put out cinco press releases for Cinco de Mayo. Unfortunately, that's where the "cinco" similarities end, and Citrix has, thus far, provided neither cerveza nor Mexican food. Alas.
For the record, five press releases is way too many for one editor's feeble mind, so we're just going to focus on a couple that seem like the most interesting. They go together like cerveza and Mexican food. The first announcement concerns Citrix Dazzle, which is a "self-service app store for corporate employees," or so said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Citrix, on a conference call with the press this week.
The idea behind Dazzle is that applications such as Microsoft Office sit in a corporate datacenter rather than being installed on individual clients. Users just go out and use them when they need them; the apps and the information within them rest on a server. Wasson described Dazzle as a "lightweight storefront that sits in front of existing XenApp and other delivery products" and allows IT folks to expose [applications] in a much more elegant way." Lovely!
Partnering with Dazzle is Citrix Receiver, which, despite the disappointment of not having been chosen in the recent NFL draft, still manages to be useful. Receiver is a free software client that "makes accessing virtual desktops for virtual apps as easy as turning on your TV set," Wasson said, and pushes out application updates automatically so IT folks don't have to.
The Dazzle-Receiver combo doesn't just work on PCs, either. It works on the Mac OS and, yes, even on the iPhone. Download Citrix Receiver on any compatible device (and there are lots of them, with more to come), and you're a URL away from using any app in your company's arsenal without downloading the app at all. The app is running in the company's datacenter using Citrix's XenApp infrastructure; only Receiver resides on the client.
This sounds for all the world to us like the "internal clouds" we keep hearing about. Instead of having applications and data reside in some third party's datacenter, they sit in an on-premises, corporate datacenter, but users still use applications as a service rather than running them on the client. It's kind of a do-it-yourself Software as a Service model, and the idea is to reduce the burden on IT of having to constantly update and manage applications on users' computers. It's also easier, in theory, to track which users are running which applications and how often, and purchase virtual licenses accordingly.
We're guessing that VMware and probably even Microsoft can offer a similar experience (although, to be honest, we don't know for sure -- but we're sure they'll tell us at some point), but the Citrix offering is nicely branded and packaged and seems to present to partners a pretty good opportunity for implementation revenues. After that, if this thing works the way it's supposed to, the system should mostly take care of itself, but we're guessing that partners might be able to pick up some maintenance revenue along the way.
We like the cloud here at RCPU. We like it almost as much as we like cerveza and Mexican food. OK, that's not true, but we are fans of the cloud model. What Citrix is offering is intriguing because it doesn't require outsourcing but still offers and easy-to-manage (supposedly), service-oriented model. That's why we chose those two press releases from Citrix's Cinco de Mayo selection. The others, plus some that came out after Cinco de Mayo, are here if you really want to get into the spirit of the holiday.
Have you set up an internal cloud for a customer? Are you hearing a lot of buzz about this model? What did you do for Cinco de Mayo? Reveal all at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/20090 comments
Service Pack 2 and development kits for SharePoint Server and SharePoint Services
came out late last week
(just in case you missed them). SharePoint is massively popular, but it's not alone in the collaboration market. Oracle is at least trying to ramp up a competitor with
Beehive
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Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/20090 comments
Microsoft partners like some third-party partner programs more than others. One of them is the program at
Lenovo
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/20090 comments
It's a possibility, apparently, as
another round
of previously announced cuts begins.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/05/20090 comments
First off, a note totally unrelated to anything else in this entry: It has been a long time -- way too long -- since we've run reader e-mails here at RCPU. So we're going to get back to that next week. But despite having received some great responses thus far, we still need your input on all sorts of issues: Microsoft downgrades, Oracle buying Sun, the power of netbooks or whatever else crosses your mind. Send your thoughts to
[email protected].
This hasn't been the most exciting news week of all time, but we do, at least, have some channel news to offer. Distribution giant Tech Data revealed this week that it has made some acquisitions in Europe, including buying part of a company with the ominous name Man and Machine.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/20090 comments