Microsoft World Partner Conference Day 1

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Day Three Cisco Partner Summit

Diane Krakora gives insight and perspective on day three of Cisco’s Partner Summit in Boston

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Second Day from Cisco Partner Summit with Diane Krakora

Highlights and perspective on the second day of Cisco’s Partner Summit

• Technology Vision Day
• Data Center Announcements  (code name California)
• Small Business Pro Services

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First Day from Cisco Partner Summit with Diane Krakora

Let’s hear it for Diane’s First Video Blog – Made possible by the generous gift of Flip Video cameras to all Partner Summit attendees!

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VMware reaches for the sky, um, I mean the cloud

Sandra Glaser Cheek

I recently attended VMware’s well-attended Partner Exchange conference in Orlando, FL. The primary focus of the event was to introduce how VMware partners can take advantage of new VMware technology to help start moving customers to the compute cloud – more specifically the internal or “private cloud” The company also unveiled new partner initiatives aimed at making it easier for solution providers to work with its technology and the next generation partner program.

Rick Jackson, CMO of VMware, kicked off the conference by talking about VMware’s primary focuses:

1. Get customers 100 percent virtualized. This includes introducing them to the newly announced vSphere product line.
2. Working with partners to help customers build cloud infrastructures.
3. Virtual desktops – “a necessary component of getting customers into a 100 percent virtualized environment.”
4. Working with reseller partners, solution providers and technology partners, to manage virtual platforms.

Tod Nielsen, VMware’s new COO followed with a presentation of VMware’s vision of cloud computing. And it’s not the big external clouds you would expect – Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. VMware believes that there is a place for all business, large and small to have their own data centers. And that these businesses will likely utilize external clouds to outsource some needs, but there will also be a need for a private/internal cloud. “At the end of the day, what customers want are internal clouds, which have similar tools and resources as those available on external clouds… and they will want a private cloud which allows them to have internal clouds while, at the same time, taking advantage of external clouds.” The vSphere suite of extensible management products was next unveiled.

Who Drives Partner Growth: Channel Sales Managers vs. the “Community”

Beth Vanni

The buzz about the power of social networking is almost inescapable.   At today’s Channel Focus North America conference here in San Diego, Luanne Tierney, the VP of Cisco’s Global Channel marketing function shared a great story about the power of “community collaboration”.  Her company’s CTO recently tailored her technology roadmap presentation within ½ hour before she presented it to a very important group of Cisco’s biggest customers.  But more interesting was that she did that from her hotel room based on feedback she was getting from a dozen loyal Twitter followers.  Talk about tapping into the “community” and responding!

As usual, this Channel Focus conference tries to understand trends in channel development and enablement.  Which partner types are vendors investing in?  How are their channel programs driving growth?  Well, this year’s conference is really conflicted around the topic of how to impact partner growth.   There are two very divided camps – one that is struggling with all the age-old issue of the Channel Sales Manager role and how they drive partner engagement, loyalty and growth.   The other group is focused completely on the stimulating and vendor-independent power of partner “communities”  as a means for partners to expand their associations and grow.

IBM and Radical Simplicity? Real Change for Big Blue’s Mid-Market Strategy

Observations form the IBM Influence Summit – Greenwich, CT (Nov 5-6)

Beth Vanni

Can it really be true? More than five IBM executives sharing a common vision of the mid-market opportunity? Everyone’s slides truly aligned on the their view of the market and how they’re investing? Multiple real-life examples of IBM acting in a highly personalized, solutions oriented way with small to mid-size businesses? A common fervor across the business units and geographies for becoming “radically simple” to do business with?  I could almost not believe my ears!

Yes, we’ve heard it before as a statement of intent. For years. And, no doubt, IBM has had many initiatives in the past focused on the non-enterprise markets. In fact, at this past Spring’s Leadership Conference in Los Angeles, Rich Hume, then two days in the job as GM of the company’s business partner community, declared his plan to apply significant resources to partner engagement in the mid-market.  At the same event, the Lotus Foundations bundle was announced as well.  But, as I sat at the IBM Influence Event in Greenwich, Connecticut, two things hit me right between the eyes: IBM has been really listening to customer and partners and they’ve got new fire in the belly about how to succeed in the mid-market and growth markets.

Microsoft’s Evolutionary Forces

By Diane Krakora

At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Julie Bennani, VP of Global Partner Programs, identified not only how the partner program was going to evolve over the next several years, but also why it must evolve.   Many of the solution providers and even some of the other vendors I talked with at the conference thought Microsoft was the industry channel leader.   They have certainly had a good run for the last 5 years.

Bennani explained that Microsoft launched their partner program just 5 short years ago.  It certainly seems longer than that to me. 

Evolution not Revolution – Microsoft’s Partnering Strategy

By Diane Krakora

As Alison Watson, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group, laid out the high level next generation partnering strategy at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, I was impressed with the partnering machine that is the organization that spends billions — that’s with a B — on partnering every year. They certainly turn out a mountain of programs, initiatives and confusion.   So, during Watson’s keynote at WPC, I ended up expecting more radical ideas and innovative initiatives and yet wanting less for the sake of simplicity.   

Microsoft…Is 12% Enough?

By Diane Krakora

Microsoft is attempting the well-worn strategy of trying to change the game by changing the name. Instead of adopting the growing industry norm of calling applications that are built and deployed in the cloud as “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS), Microsoft is trying to change the category and increase their significance by calling their offering Software + Service.