More Firms Offer Partner Benefits-Survey
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More U.S. companies have started to  offer benefit coverage for same-sex couples and other  "nontraditional" families, according to a new survey.
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The insurance industry planned to propose a series of steps the companies say would let more individuals obtain coverage.
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Retirees who receive health benefits from their former employers saw premiums shoot up an average of 25 percent this year, a new study says.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is emphasizing areas of its business where it needs to catch up to competitors by tying partner team compensation to specific product deployments, such as enterprise search, a top executive said Tuesday. At the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, COO Kevin Lynch said in a keynote that field leaders for Microsoft partner teams in countries around the world will be compensated more this year for making customer wins in key product areas. In addition to enterprise search design wins -- particularly against Google -- Microsoft will pay more compensation to partner team field leaders in several other product areas where Microsoft is late to market against entrenched competitors, such as the Microsoft Dynamics business applications and Forefront Security product suite, he said. Other product deployments that will earn teams more compensation are: Office Sharepoint Server licensing and growth, including wins against IBM's Lotus Notes; SQL Server revenue growth, in particular competitive wins against Oracle and IBM; Windows Server license and revenue growth, particularly wins against Linux; and unified communications using Office Communications Server 2007, which will be available later this year. "These are the key metrics that your field, the people that support you in the world, what they get compensated on in the next year," Turner said, speaking to thousands of partners Tuesday. Other areas of focus that will win partner field support teams more compensation are customer satisfaction, which remains top of mind at Microsoft to help partners be successful in the field, Turner said. In fact, he offered customers the option of contacting him directly if they come across unhappy or dissatisfied customers that Microsoft could help placate. "We're not going to let our competition outthink, outrun or outhustle us," he said. "We're asking you to take customer service and customer satisfaction to the next level. I want to know if there is something in the way of taking care of a customer and treating them the way they should be treated."
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The longtime partners are expected to announce a new deal that looks likely to cover business services.
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Firms from China and India are most willing to pay bribes abroad to do business, a survey suggests.
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An increasingly organised film industry is seeing the benefits of organisation.
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Just one in three Massachusetts employers plan to extend the same retirement benefits to spouses of gay and lesbian employees now available to other employees, according to a survey of benefit policies conducted after a state court ruling legalized gay marriage.
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The partners will develop new services including a hosted payments system.
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A new study finds that more search marketers are able to measure ROI than could two years ago, and more search marketers' jobs are being measured against both search metrics and overall business results.
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Given the general state of upheaval in the media industry, itâs not hard to appreciate why so many people are looking to form partnerships.
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More companies are helping large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft partners introduced to the company&#39;s software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services.
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Survey of U.S. and European companies finds that less than half consider outsourcing financial functions to be cost effective.
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Investor's Business Daily - National Association of Purchasing Management surveys from the Chicago and Milwaukee regions showed healthy gains in May, the latest sign that the ailing factory sector is recovering. A similar survey in the New York region showed some slight weakness after several months of improvement.
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Dick Cheney would love our 200 growth companies (see p. 180)--they're small and they are (most of them, anyway) adding to their payrolls. The other day Cheney was singing the praises of small businesses by noting that they create seven of ten jobs in this country. This was by way of justifying tax breaks for the sort of people who own small businesses.
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Observers say partnerships between vendors show they are hoping to ignite a spark toward adoption of unified communications infrastructures that some predict could peak in about three years within corporate environments.