I\u2019m attending this day long event and will try to blog as I go along.<\/p>\n
Morning Introduction<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Conor Whickam, Partner Manager at Microsoft Ireland, opens the day to introduce the agenda. This is meant to be an interactive session. I was a bold boy at one of these this time last year so I\u2019m shutting up. I can hear sighs of relief.<\/p>\n Paul Rellis<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Paul Rellis, the GM of Microsoft Ireland takes over with a keynote. The theme is Microsoft = Productivity. I guess this is a Business Intelligence year. He starts talking about a famous human cannon ball called Armando? The ringmaster was asked why he wasn\u2019t replaced after he died. It\u2019s because he could find a person of the right calibre. *Boom Boom* MS invests in their people and \u201cin their partners\u201d. MS wants partners to invest in their own staff as MS develops their staff.<\/p>\n The message about Azure\/BPOS comes out. Your two options are to install on premise or to install on Azure. It\u2019s a partner event but the hosting partners have already been had their ankles slashed. MS needs to rethink that message. Plenty of hosters are already pushing Linux more than Windows. MS jacks up SPLA licensing costs (going up this year, at the end of each annual contract) while competing with their partners with aggressive sales. CentOS and LAMP will continue to dominate the online market.<\/p>\n State of the Irish Market<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Richard Moore now takes over to talk about the state of the Irish Market. The opportunities include upgrade projects and end of life projects.<\/p>\n On the PC side:<\/p>\n Servers:<\/p>\n Software:<\/p>\n The overall levels are back to 2005 numbers. 2010 will see small decrease or a levelling out.<\/p>\n New opportunities<\/p>\n Exchange:<\/p>\n Office 2010:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Current installation figures are:<\/p>\n Office and SharePoint go hand in hand and drive each others sales.<\/p>\n Server opportunities:<\/p>\n Server 2008 R2 Foundation:<\/p>\n The Irish market is dominated by small companies. Server 2008 R2 Foundation would appear to fit in. However, I don\u2019t know about the fit. The Irish SME is very happy with SBS. EBS has been a flop here.<\/p>\n We now get the pitch on Forefront and how it is a future investment for partners. Again, the Irish SME is stuck in yellow-box land.<\/p>\n Windows 7 Plans: 41% will be running Windows 7 by end of 2011<\/p>\n Now we get the BPOS talk. See my previous posts on the Patriot Act. Many are using BPOS as a complimentary add-on to their onsite installation. For example, some users will use online service, IM will be used, etc.<\/p>\n He reckons there is a niche market for SAM (software asset management). This is related to auditing and licensing compliance. You\u2019ll be as popular as a taxation auditor with IT on the customer site but you might make some money.<\/p>\n Partner Sales + Strategy<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Karl O\u2019Leary (Partner Sales) and Colin Cassidy (Partner Strategy and Program) now take over.<\/p>\n Colin says that their forecasts are usually pretty accurate. Again, I\u2019m asking that MS Ireland takes over running the country. Paul Rellis does more for Irish business than our glorious leader, Brian Cowen. And anyone who can crunch numbers anyway accurately is better than the Department of Finance. <\/p>\n Some boring stuff now. Taking a breather.<\/p>\n MS focusing on virtualisation and Exchange this year when it comes to the partner campaigns:<\/p>\n When you talk about Exchange leads to a conversation about the desktop. That\u2019s Office 2010. That leads to Windows 7 and IE8. Exchange will run on Server 2008\/2008 R2. It might be virtualised and that leads to Hyper-V. This all needs security: ForeFront. ForeFront is developed hand-in-hand with Exchange. Then System Center is used to manage everything. Don\u2019t stop there. Push productivity: Then you have Unified Communications (OCS) and SharePoint. When you do OCS\/Exchange then you talk about mobility, e.g. Smart Phones running Windows Mobile. BTW, there\u2019s something happening with Ballmer next week. <\/p>\n MS Ireland going after VMware compete business with everything they have. There is a pincer movement including HP and Dell. Partners can choose the Bush principle: \u201cYou\u2019re either with us or against us\u201d.<\/p>\n 4,000 Exchange upgrades are out there in Ireland now. 176,000 XP installations with support ending. 14,583 Windows 2000 installations with support ending. That\u2019s business to be had.<\/p>\n Partners Presenting<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Gerry Kerr from CDsoft, Hyper-V and UC are their things. Scott from Nitech are an infrastructure\/dev partner working in BI. A dude, Frasier, from Ergo as well. They are field engineers who also say they do BI. Oh boy, flashbacks of an awful part of the TechEd 2010 keynote. I\u2019m watching the doors to see if people are leaving \u2026 oh there we go \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Gerry says something that I\u2019ve been saying for over a year. Hyper-V wins against VMware when you sell System Center, not virtualisation. It\u2019s the manageability that wins.<\/p>\n Louise Connaughton, EMEA Partner Support Group<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Some stuff about what services you get as a partner. That led into a coffee break which was sorely needed.<\/p>\n The Office \/ SharePoint Launch Wave<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n The 3 pillars of the combined solution are:<\/p>\n MS claims the ribbon is responsible for users using 4 times more features in Office 2007 than they did in 2003. The ribbon is fully deployed in Office 2010.<\/p>\n 2010 Launch<\/p>\n 2010 PR:<\/p>\n Patrick Herlihy Demo<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Patrick is the Exchange\/BI techie in MS Ireland partner sales. He\u2019s now doing a demo of XP\/Office 2003 VS Windows 7\/Office 2010.<\/p>\n Barry McMahon<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Barry (a MS sales person \u2013 Application Platform Lead) now talks about SharePoint\u2019s role in BI. Excel is the most valuable client application \u2013 agreed. I worked in a company where over 50% of business data was in spreadsheets.<\/p>\n Three contexts of BI<\/p>\n Excel (PowerPivot) with SQL enables and empowers that last one. It\u2019s made easier by PowerPivot. Now you have an application. (you can add something called a Slicer to allow data selectivity). That application can be published to SharePoint. Here\u2019s where your MIS department will pull their hair out, worried about application\/data accuracy.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the pitch for WPC10 July 11-15th in Washington DC. MS wants your money.<\/p>\n Lunch<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n They broke us up into 4 groups for lunch so 4 different MS teams could come in to do Q&A sessions. The first one was funny; I was a bold boy last year and we joked about it a bit. I skipped the last one; the speaker\u2019s voice goes through me like a rusty blade.<\/p>\n The rest of the day is being broken into different tracks. I was going to skip the virtualisation track \u2013 there\u2019s nothing I can learn about the MS line. However, they have Citrix in and I\u2019d like to learn what they\u2019re up to. Spoke to some person during the week from Citrix. She wanted to hear my opinion on their message. It\u2019s now my stock answer: \u201cToo much marketing; just tell me what the damned thing does because neither your site nor your presentations do\u201d. So here I am sat waiting for the virtualisation session.<\/p>\n I will do those sessions as different posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m attending this day long event and will try to blog as I go along. Morning Introduction Conor Whickam, Partner Manager at Microsoft Ireland, opens the day to introduce the agenda. This is meant to be an interactive session. I was a bold boy at one of these this time last year so I\u2019m shutting … Continue reading “Microsoft Ireland Partner Community Expert Event”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[62,181,186,191,193,117],"class_list":["post-10393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","tag-exchange-2010","tag-hyper-v","tag-office","tag-sharepoint","tag-system-center","tag-windows-server-2008-r2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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