Sun, Microsoft to announce expanded partnership
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The fruits of their initial pact haven't exactly taken the tech world by storm, but the two companies are planning to announce a broader pact on Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Companies that advise customers to purchase Microsoft's new and expanded line of Forefront security software will have extra financial incentives from the vendor through an expansion to the company's security partner program. Microsoft said ThursdayÂ itÂ would offer higher financial payouts to members ofÂ its Security Software Advisor (SSA) program. Microsoft's security channel partners can now earn as much as a 30 percent margin by advising companies to buy select products in Microsoft's security portfolio. Microsoft also has expanded the number of deals that are eligible for financial benefits from the vendor, the company said. More information about the expansion to Microsoft's SSA program, which was launched in July, can be found at this Web site. There are about 1,700 partners currently in the program. Microsoft has recently expanded its line of enterprise security products, which is a fairly new business for the software vendor. Companies that are trying to build their customer bases in a market where they have not traditionally played typically use partners that have more experience selling into that market. Some of the products included under the SSA program are Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server, Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Security for SharePoint. Microsoft launchedÂ Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Security for SharePoint earlier this month; those products are aimed at protected Microsoft's messaging and collaboration products against malware, spam, inappropriate content and unwanted files. Last month, Microsoft released a public beta of Forefront Client Security, an antivirus protection product for laptops and server OSes.
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Japanese electronics maker NEC Corp. and U.S. software company Microsoft Corp. announced plans Wednesday to expand their business partnership in the networking and server businesses.
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Microsoft plans to reduce the price its partners will pay for its newest customer relationship management software, code-named Titan, the company&#39;s latest foray into software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM.Microsoft has enrolled partners throughout the world to sell Titan, whose formal name is&#160;Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Those partners will pay 40 percent less for subscription licenses for the on-demand version, the company plans to announce on Tuesday at Convergence 2007, Microsoft&#39;s European customer conference for its Dynamics business applications.Partners will now pay 40 percent less than they&#39;re paying for the previous version of the software, Dynamics 3.0. Those charges vary by country and currency, said Mark Corley, senior director of Microsoft&#39;s CRM channel strategy.Partners pay licensing fees to Microsoft based on the number of seats they&#39;ve installed for their clients, said Bryan Nielson, director of worldwide product marketing for Dynamics CRM.&quot;We give the software up front, and they pay us per use per month based on actual usage,&quot; Nielson said. &quot;They are only paying for what they use.&quot;CRM pricing models vary, but some software vendors require their partners to pay up front regardless of how many seats they sell, Nielson said. But the 40 percent price drop for partners doesn&#39;t mean that end customers will see a commensurate saving.Partners will have the power to set their own pricing. &quot;The drop in cost to partners should theoretically allow partners to reduce the price to customers,&quot; said a Microsoft spokeswoman.An executive with a Microsoft CRM partner in Europe, who wished to remain anonymous, said Microsoft&#39;s previous prices had been a bit high, but a lower price should help hosted CRM become a more attractive options for smaller companies with lesser IT funds.Some businesses liked that Microsoft CRM is delivered through familiar products such as Outlook, but were concerned about configuration difficulties, he said. &quot;Hopefully, going forward with version four there will be a product that will not only compete on price but can be configured and managed through the partner network,&quot; he said.Dynamics CRM 4.0 was supposed to be released around June or July, but Nielson said it will be released by year-end. In general, Titan delivers customer-relationship information through applications such as Microsoft&#39;s Outlook e-mail program, the Internet Explorer browser or its Office productivity suite.Microsoft is offering three versions of Titan, all of which are variations on the same code base. It&#39;s offering a SaaS option, where the applications and data are hosted on the partner&#39;s IT infrastructure. The partners use Titan as a base and then build specific enhancements onto the software for certain industries, such as real estate, Nielson said.The second option is on-premise, where the CRM software and data is on the end-customer&#39;s infrastructure. The last is Dynamics CRM Live, which is SAAS but hosted on Microsoft&#39;s infrastructure. That option will only be available in North America, although Microsoft said it plans to roll it out worldwide.The success of Salesforce.com Inc. over the last few years awoke other large software vendors such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft to invest in hosted offerings.Although Microsoft is not a huge player yet in hosted CRM, the company &quot;is taking SAAS more seriously that any of the on-premise players,&quot; wrote David Bradshaw, principal analyst for Ovum, in a recent analysis.Part of that seriousness has been making Titan multitenant, which means that partners can host CRM applications for multiple companies on one server and one application stack. That&#39;s more profitable for partners, wrote Warren Wilson, also an Ovum analyst, in another analysis.Also, sharing the same code base between the hosted and on-premise products saves partners from having to build multiple versions of an application, he wrote.Microsoft has also said that Titan will support multiple currencies and languages on the same server, which wasn&#39;t possible with its previous product, Dynamics 3.0, released in December 2005, although some partners created their own multitenant versions.All of the new features mean that &quot;Titan will give Microsoft a potent set of capabilities in the on-demand market and position the vendor to compete much more effectively,&quot; Warren wrote.&#160;
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Microsoft said the company hopes to strike a Linux pact with Red Hat similar to the partnerships it has forged with Linux vendors.
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Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have rescheduled the phase-one rollout of their interoperability pact to October as the companies weigh additional areas of cooperation.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun will start selling its lineup of 64-bit PC servers preinstalled with the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft within 90 days, the two companies said today. The two longtime rivals also said they will cooperate on technical development of Microsoft's server operating system on Sun Fire hardware as well as making Sun's Solaris Unix operating system fully manageable under Microsoft's recently introduced System Center Virtual Machine Manager software.                                                     "Management interoperability is part of our management strategy," said Andrew Lees, corporate vice president for the server and tools marketing and solutions group at Microsoft. The moves could help Sun boost sales of its servers, which have been hurting ever since the bursting of the dot-com bubble saw the rise of cheap PC servers running either Linux or Windows. "People who might not have in the past considered a Sun server for Windows will now consider it," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. Sun has been making aggressive partnership moves. IBM said last month that it would sell PC-based servers and blades using Solaris. For Microsoft, the tie-up could help the company compete in the hot virtualization market, where it is No. 2 to market leader VMware. Sun has long had its own virtualization technology, called Solaris Containers. Today's announcement, the companies said, is an expansion of an initial technical cooperation agreement signed in April 2004, during which Microsoft also paid Sun $1.6 billion to settle lingering antitrust and patent disputes. "What we have had has already produced good fruit, but we are looking forward to a significant expansion," Lees said. Sun will also build an interoperability center on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. The companies will also expand their Internet Protocol television partnership, which involves Microsoft's MediaRoom IPTV and multimedia platform and Sun's server and storage systems. Sun launched its Sun Fire servers two years ago as its first foray into the fast-growing PC server market. The servers run less-expensive but powerful AMD Opteron processors and start at prices of less than $1,000. The Sun Fire servers already support Windows Server, along with Red Hat Linux, Novell's Suse Enterprise Linux, VMware's ESX virtualization system, and Sun's own Solaris operating system, according to Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing at Sun Systems. That allowed customers who had volume-license agreements with Microsoft to send their image DVDs to Sun and have the company preinstall Windows Server, Sieker said. But with this agreement, Sun will now officially be able to ship servers preinstalled with Windows Server to any customer or channel partner, she said. Windows Server will still be unable to run on Sun Fire servers using Sun's own Sparc64 chips, she said. Sun will continue to support and resell Red Hat and Suse Linux on its Sun Fire servers, she said. Future versions of those servers will also use Intel processors. Asked if Sun's latest alliance shows its intent to compete more directly with Linux and VMware, Sieker said, "We are responding to strong customer demand for this.... It's a complex marketplace out there." Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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SAN FRANCISCO - As Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ready an early December unveiling of the first step in their highly publicized technology collaboration, industry observers are questioning whether the former foes will fail to address industry standards, particularly the work being done by the Sun-backed Liberty Alliance consortium.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Datacomm White PaperFind out how Crate & Barrel expects to save $180,000 by moving to VoIP, compared to a traditional PBX.
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DECEMBER 06, 2004  - The progress report that Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. issued last week on their joint initiatives left some IT managers and analysts wondering when or if the
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With Sun Microsystems set to detail its plans for Solaris 10 on Monday, Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz spoke with Computerworld about what the company has up its open-source sleeve.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems and global management consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture are expanding their existing relationship to cover joint development work around identity-enabling, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite applications. The two companies announced Wednesday at Sun's product launch in New York that the first fruit of this collaboration will be the establishment of an Accenture Innovation Center for Sun Solutions. The center will employ engineers from both companies to develop identity-enabled SOA offerings based on Sun's infrastructure software and its Solaris operating system. Joint teams of Sun and Accenture developers will focus on coming up with custom services for individual customers as well as work on repeatable offerings suitable for all of the vendors' users. Over recent years, Sun has been placing greater stress on its identity management offerings. On Monday, at the Digital ID World conference in Santa Clara, California, Sun unveiled its Java System Identity Manager 7.0 software suite, due to ship in the fourth quarter of this year, which will combine user provisioning with identity auditing. User provisioning is the process to set up, update and remove user access across systems and applications, while identity auditing analyzes IT systems for any identity control violations and alerts compliance officers of the violations. Accenture in July committed to a three-year, $450 million SOA initiative, which will include building a new research laboratory and developing SOA applications for specific industries. The Accenture Technology Lab for SOA Innovation will initially concentrate on meeting the SOA needs of health-care companies as regards an electronic prescription project. Sun and Accenture plan to work together on enabling technologies and offerings for particular markets. They're developing on how best to provide secure access to a company's IT system for a wide range of users including a firm's employees, its partners and customers. The two vendors will also collaborate on ways to simplify and speed the delivery of SOA-focused secure, composite applications built on Sun technologies to users. Sun and Accenture have also created an executive team to look at what other potential areas the two companies might work together on in future.
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Besides unleashing Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to turn the spotlight on new storage hardware and software offerings as part of its quarterly product launch.
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Taking an intentionally cautious tone, Microsoft and Sun executives said Wednesday that the first eight months of their 10-year partnership have yielded small, but significant progress.
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Microsoft&#39;s (Quote, Chart) dominance on the desktop may turn out to be Sun Microsystems&#39; (Quote, Chart) gain in the end. A letter to Sun Microsystems&#39; COO Jonathan Schwartz by the European Commission (EC) this
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The industryâs latest allies -- Microsoft and Sun -- have supported the publication of Web Services Management (WS-Management), a Web services specification that provides a common way for enterprises to access and exchange management information across
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The co-creator of Microsoft&#39;s Xbox is ramping up to launch a new online subscription gaming platform with the help of Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart), the companies said.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O has agreed to acquire closely held SevenSpace Inc., adding to Sun&#39;s managed services offerings, the network computer maker said on Monday.