This year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference will be in Houston. In July. One word: Ugh.

And, interestingly, insiders say preliminary numbers show that more than half (60%) of attendees will be from outside the U.S. That’s a first, to my knowledge and is at least partially attributable to the incredible shrinking dollar.

Note to vendors: If you’re gonna drag people into triple-digit heat and humidity, make it cheap.

As for news: Look for Microsoft to talk up repeatable solutions in SMB markets. And don’t forget SaaS and the mega-billion dollar question of how partners fit into Microsoft’s software plus services game plan. That’ll be a big theme.  Read more »

Earlier this week, a partner asked Microsoft the following question: If Software Assurance expires on Small Business Server 2003, will the client lose the right to install SBS 2003 on new hardware?

Seems like a simple enough question, right? Wrong. On the Microsoft SMB Community Blog, it takes Microsoft senior manager Eric Ligman nearly 650 words to answer.

Read more »

Microsoft’s new Dynamics AX 2009, now available, targets multinational companies. This release lets companies combine multiple time zones and currencies in a single ERP instance. — something that should suit mid-sized and even large companies with sites in multiple countries, according to Kees Hertogh, Microsoft Dynamics product manager.

Also new: Bi-directional support for Arabic languages. That means that PC screens in Arabic-speaking offices will read right to left with the appropriate character set while other offices can retain their screen look-and-feel. Read more »

Has there ever been an economist willing to say we’re in a recession while the recession is actually happening? My own personal barometer of the economy (my husband who is a contractor) continues to have a very bizarre spring. After months of denial and a sort of lag factor, it appears that IT buyers are more nervous, too.

The CDW IT Monitor, which the reseller publishes on a bi-monthly basis, shows that slightly fewer businesses are planning to increase their IT budgets in the second half of 2008. That would be 50 percent vs. 54 percent in February. The data show that 8 percent are planning to cut their IT spending, compared with 6 percent.

CDW derives its monitor report from an online survey of about 1,000 IT decision maker reflecting all sizes of business and government agencies. You can spend some time with the complete findings here.

Generally speaking, there was less shake-up among the bigger respondents, which CDW postulates is due to the fact that budgets have already been approved (although who’s to say they can’t be cut!) CDW notes that at midsize companies, a sub-index tracking planned IT investment slipped 7 points from February to 70. There was also a 10 percent decline in the number of businesses that said they would hire IT staff in the next six months; 21 percent reported plans to hire, off 10 percent.

The good news is that the strategic value that survey respondents place on technology actually improved slightly: 83 percent reported said “yes” to notion that IT is “effective in achieving corporate mission and goals.” That was up 1 percentage point from 83 percent in February. So, that means demonstrating how technology can solve a business need is the way to make the case for a sale. Have at it.

Heather Clancy is a technology journalist and business communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. She can be reached at hclancy@swotmg.com.

On Tuesday, Microsoft is opening up beta test its small business and mid-sized business server bundles.

Early test versions of Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (previously known by the code name Centro) will be online Tuesday with a preview of Small Business Server 2008 to surface soon thereafter, said Joel Sider, senior product manger for the Windows Server Solutions Group.

Both products are due by year’s end.

The company also unveiled pricing for the mid-market bundle. Windows Essential Business Server Premium Edition (with Windows Server, Exchange Server, Forefront Security for Exchange, System Center Essentials management, Forefront Threat Management Gateway aka the new ISA Server) will list for $7,163 per server. All prices include five CALs. Additional CALs will list for $195 each.

The standard edition, which includes one less Windows Server license, will list for $5,472. ($81 per extra CAL.)

Microsoft has raised prices for Small Business Server.

The current SBS 2003 R2 Standard Edition lists for $599 and the premium edition was $1,299.  The new standard SKU will list for $1,089 with additional CALs $77 each. Premium is now $1,899 with each new CAL $189.

Sider said the price change reflects “additional value going into the server” and that per-CAL pricing has fallen. Before users had to buy a five-pack CAL license minimum for $489  but can now add CALs incrementally. “You can also buy a mix of premium and standard CALs –only buying CALs for the users needing to touch the premium servers. And, the CALs now extend to other servers on the network,” he noted.

As before SBS is for up to 75 users with a “sweet spot” of 10 to 50 users; EBS ranges up to 300 users.

As for another burning question surrounding the product family — that of naming conventions — Sider said there is no plan to change what some partners say is confusing branding.  Let it be noted here that “confusing” is a cleaned-up version of what some partners are calling the branding.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

SAP named Leo Apotheker co-CEO Wednesday. He will share CEO-ing duties with Henning Kagermann until the latter leaves the company next year.

Apotheker had been deputy CEO. Kagermann’s contract expires in 2009 and he said today he will leave at that time.

In the second half of 2008 “Leo and the new team will be the ones who will do the budget and start thinking beyond 2010,” Kagermann told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.

In a prepared statement, SAP co-founder and supervisory board chairman Hasso Plattner said Kagermann had requested Apotheker’s appointment.

SAP also named its very first COO by promoting Erwin Gunst to that post. Gunst had been president of the company’s Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

The moves were decided by SAP’s supervisory board, which also appointed Gunst, Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe corporate officers effective July 1.

SAP is the ERP software leader, but faces big challenges as it tries to navigate from being an enterprise-only provider to wooing and winning smaller accounts. There it relies on its five-year old PartnerEdge program to penetrate accounts that would normally not hit its radar. In coming down market, SAP now must compete with erstwhile ally Microsoft for those smaller accounts

It also faces a lawsuit filed by Oracle over SAP’s TomorrowNow Unit’s business practices. Worse, a major customer, Waste Management Inc., has sued SAP calling the company’s $100 million software implementation in its shop a “complete failure.”

This is not the kind of press any company wants, especially in a tight economy.

Some interesting tidbits from today’s call: Apotheker said the company will continue its move into the mass market. “It’s our intention to move more and more into the volume business.” Hmmm. Volume. Isn’t that Microsoft’s mantra? Interesting…

Apotheker was asked whether SAP would step up its marketing rhetoric even as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appears to be dialing down  his. The reporter referred to a recent call in which Ellison barely crowed about Oracle’s BEA Systems acquisition. Apotheker appeared to shrug it off: “As to Larry keeping quiet in a conference call, maybe he had a sore throat.”

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

If you’ve ever worked for a small company, you know how painful office telephony can be. Case in point: At my last gig, I inherited the desk and phone of another reporter who had left the company.

No one in that office knew how to change the voicemail options and phone calls to the telephony provider went unreturned for days. Finally I  had to call the reporter — now with a competitor — and beg him for his password so that I could get into voice mail and change the configuration. Luckily, he was a mensch.

Sadly, that is not an exception to the rule when it comes to small businesses.

 Microsoft Response Point is supposed to remedy that situation by making it a no-brainer to move extensions around and reprogram options. 

This week, the company will tout Response Point Service Pack 1 that will  add outward-facing VoIP capabilities to the year-old small business phone system.  

The full Response Point system – Microsoft software bundled with D-Link, Quantas or Aastra hardware — plugs into a company’s LAN and from that point promises easy and flexible phone management.

It can work with traditional analog or VoIP lines or a combination, says Jason Harrison, president of Harrison Technology Consulting, a Nashville, N.C.-based small business specialist. Harrison’s been a fan since the inaugural release.

Microsoft will talk up SP 1 at its annual Small Business Summit this week. SP1 should be available as a download to existing customers and make its way into new hardware this summer.

The product competes with small business phone systems from Avaya, Digium and others.

One Microsoft talking point will be integration with Outlook email and Business Contact Manager. In theory, that will enable it to suck up all a user’s contact information and the user can then, click a button, speak the name of the client, and the system will place the call. It uses the company’s Speech Server technology.

The outbound-VoIP capabilities means companies can easily assign new phone numbers (and discard them if needed.)  The previous release has internal VoIP capabilities and some partners say SP1 is adding features that had been promised in the initial release.

The target market is companies with up to 50 employees.  Harrison says the outbound VoIP-essentially direct SIP trunking is done within the server

“The fact that it works with VoIP and non-VoIP lines is a plus for smaller customers who may want to try out VoIP,” Harrison said. For his company the product opens up all sorts of telephony-oriented doors

“This is an area we haven’t been involved with before. This product lets customers try VoIP and add it as they want,” Harrison noted. 

He sees integration work opportunities with ResponsePoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, and Microsoft Office Accounting. With that amalgam a partner can create system in which an “inbound call prompts a popup toast that identifies the customer from caller ID, Outlook does a cross check, and you click on the toast to bring up all the data about that customer or prospect,” Harrison said.

The software also will give D-Link partners an entrée into voice applications.

Hardware/software solutions from all three partners list for about $2,500 for base unit and four or five desktop phones with slight variations depending on the OEM partner.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Ouch.

Not only is Oracle’s worldwide channel chief flying the coop, he’s swooping into the nest of the enemy.

Doug Kennedy has taken an executive position at the Redmond, Wash. software giant, several sources close to Oracle have confirmed.

He will be working in Microsoft’s business-applications push, one source said. [Friday morning update: Kennedy has taken a General Manager position within Microsoft’s applications group, a well-placed source said. Microsoft has not returned calls for comment. An Oracle spokeswoman confirmed Kennedy’s exit but said she was unaware of his plans.]

In some ways, timing could not be better from Redmond’s point of view: Microsoft Convergence, the annual Microsoft Business Solutions user conference, kicks off next Tuesday in Orlando. Microsoft will use the show to play up its CRM Live push and will trot out Steve Ballmer and Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions for the assembled masses of MBS partners and customers.

In many ways luring Kennedy is a great move for Microsoft and logistically it’s a no-brainer for Kennedy himself, who lives in the Seattle area. Kennedy was senior vice president of worldwide alliances and channels and reported directly to Oracle president Charles Phillips.

That Kennedy left just months after his North Americas counterpart Rauline Ochs exited tweaked some Oracle partners. Ochs, however, went to Safeco, a large and long-time Oracle customer whereas Kennedy crossed enemy lines.

One insider said the executive suite at Oracle is humming. “There’s talk about a non-compete. They’re p@#$@d,” this source said.

Kennedy who spent 16 years at Oracle, witnessed first hand the vendor’s multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar applications arms race during which it bought PeopleSoft (which had just bought J.D. Edwards); Siebel Systems, Retek, i-Flex and other companies.

Fasten your seatbelts. This could get bumpy.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

HP brought in NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young to speak to the partner faithful bright-and-early Wednesday morning. And he did not disappoint. Some 1,000 or more partners were in Las Vegas for the annual partner conference and a pretty good number showed up for Young.

Peering out at the darkened hall, Young noted the obvious: “A 9 a.m. talk at Caesar’s Palace and there are people here? Was attendance mandatory?”

Young said his speaking gigs are relatively easy given the prevalent jock stereotypes, and the low expectations they engender.  ”If I can string two sentences together, people think, ‘Hey! Not bad.”

Who knew that aside from his Super Bowl MVP and top quarterback rankings Young is also a lawyer? And a big philanthropist? Not me, but then again, baseball’s my game.

Young followed printer kingpin Vyomesh Joshi who issued a call to arms to a pretty fair subset of the 1,100 partners in attendance for his 8 a.m. keynote.

“If you’re in hardware, get into supplies. If you’re in hardware and supplies, get into services,” Joshi said

Joshi, often known as VJ, painted a picture of a whopping $280 billion market for printing and imaging from the home devices to huge commercial printers that use ink by the liter.

The Scitex wide-format machines that print signs for Times Square and similar venues soak up liters of ink. “Not ccs, liters. I love liters,” Joshi joked to the early morning crowd.

Conversely , he also touted HP’s recycling and green printing efforts.

He estimated the worldwide enterprise printing and image market to be about $53 billion. In that segment, HP reserves 900 named accounts for its direct focus. He cordoned off about 4,000 accounts in “named territory” accounts and the additional 8 million SMB accounts which the company hopes to attack with partners.

“We will be consistent and clear. We will not go after those 4,000 accounts, we’ll provide the names and help plan for them but for those 4,000 accounts we need your help.”

The vast majority of printing remains analog. Translating all of that to digital “where HP can play” is a huge opportunity. And for that to happen, partners need to help HP persuade IT departments to network all their printers and copiers, he said. That infrastructure work is another opportunity for VARs.

Joshi then gave way to the former San Francisco 49er great .

Ensuring attendees left on a high note, Sheryl Crow played Wednesday night. Some of us couldn’t be there — flying out of lovely 70-degree-and-sunshine-Vegas weather back to the frozen Northeast tundra. But according to second-hand accounts, Crow was stellar.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com

Hewlett-Packard has logged robust growth but could do better, especially in the U.S. and in SMBs, HP CEO Mark Hurd said Monday.

Kicking off HP’s annual Americas Partner Conference (APC) in Las Vegas, Hurd (hoarse with a cold) also disputed the notion of some partners that the company wants them to be exclusive to HP while HP continues to play the partner field.  

It was clear (as if there could be any doubt) that Hurd has heard the partner complaints: a balky rebate program; lagging storage lineup; channel conflict.

Bottom line, he reiterated, is that HP partners need to sell more HP gear into their accounts. That means an HP partner who sells servers should try to sell servers plus (HP) storage plus (HP) switches. You get the idea.

HP is working to resolve these issues he said, acknowledging that the company can be challenging to work with.

“I’m not going to tell you to be exclusive [but] I also don’t want to be a loss leader [in cases] where our brand goes out in a  Proliant with someone else’s memory. We don’t make much margin on low, stripped units…frankly we created some of this problem ourselves” when HP stressed unit sales in figuring out partner remuneration.

The goal is fatter, more margin-rich solution sales. And thus HP echoes similar themes from IBM, from Microsoft, from Oracle.

All of these companies want to widen their footprint in existing accounts while adding net-new customers.

Some partners see these tactics as one-sided in the vendor’s favor, if not a one-way street

HP has grown from $80 billion in sales in 2004 to $105 billion in three years. Hurd said outside analysts expect the company to hit the $111 to $112  billion mark this year.

Sixty-nine percent of HP’s business comes from overseas, and Hurd wants to see the company increase strength in the U.S.

And the bulk of its sales has been and will remain through the channel.

But HP faces its own risks. Partners frustrated with what they see as non-competitive storage offerings signed on with EqualLogic for its iSCSI storage expertise only to see Dell buy that company and are now faced with the prospect of Dell as a vendor partner. Still, with Dell making channel friendly noise, some are disposed to give it a try.

A few partners said they had hoped HP would buy EqualLogic and are now hoping it’ll make another move on Lefthand Networks or another iSCSI player to bolster its storage.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.