More than 250 solutions providers have gathered in Dallas this week for the 2009 HTG Summit and Q2 Peer Group Meetings. And during tonight’s sessions, one thing became clear: Despite the rise of open source, Microsoft’s partner program is showing no signs of a slowdown.
Sure, Red Hat and nearly a dozen partners last week launched the Open Source Channel Alliance. And Canonical this week is launching Ubuntu 9.04 — a Linux distribution upgrade that has been certified for roughly 45 server configurations from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Sun Microsystems and other hardware providers.
Still, Microsoft remains firmly entrenched in the channel. And the company still knows how to command attention in a room full of partners. During tonight’s HTG gathering, Microsoft served as a guest host of sorts and briefed partners on Windows 7, Windows Server Foundation, ResponsePoint and several other small business-oriented technologies.
Opportunity Calls
Everyone in the room was engaged, and plenty of solutions providers were taking notes — especially about ResponsePoint, a small business IP phone system that seems to appeal to traditional VARs and managed service providers.
Say what you want about growing momentum for Asterisk — the open source IP PBX. But tonight’s channel crowd was in Microsoft’s corner.
Meanwhile, Microsoft seems prepared to deliver the first Windows 7 Release Candidate in May. And during the HTG Summit gathering, there was surprising little — if any — talk among solutions providers about the Vista debacle. Instead, the entire evening was a reminder that Microsoft’s channel relationships run deep.
Very deep.
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I hope you don’t call this “journalism”: this is just advertisement.
Rafael: The nice part is readers are allowed to criticize The VAR Guy.
rafael: The piece is about a a meeting of Microsoft’s cheerleaders sponsored by Microsoft… What else could the Var Guy report but cheering ? Good journalism is reporting the facts, all the facts… and reporting a lot of cheering at cheerleader convention is just that : facts.
Truly good journalism not only describes, but explains.
Is that all I need to know? Which companies were present? Was any big company absent? What was discussed? Was there any debate, or just presentations Microsoft? What was there supposed to happen?
Can you analyse the phrase you wrote “Microsoft’s partner program is showing no signs of a slowdown”, or it’s only that, and you can really be sure of it based only on a Microsoft-sponsored meeting?
Some criticism, please.
As it is, this report could have been summarized in just one line.