Sandra Glaser Cheek – Director, Client Services Last week I sent my three kids back-to-school after an 82-day long weekend. Phew. Multiple trips to Target and Staples for school supplies usually mark the end of summer for me. But now, in hindsight, working closely with VMware for the past couple of years, it seems the [...]

A Candid Conversation with Kevin O'Brien from Oracle Beth Vanni, Director, Market Intelligence Kevin O'Brien, Oracle's senior director, ISV and SaaS Strategy, Worldwide Channels & Alliances, and I recently sat down to discuss issues that relate to cloud services partners, in conjunction with the Amazon Consulting series of publications, Ecosystem of the Cloud. Kevin outlined [...]

A Candid Conversation with Robert Fuller from Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni, Director, Market Intelligence I recently sat down with Robert Fuller, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Rackspace Hosting, Inc., a global provider of infrastructure and hosting services. We discussed his views of the evolving cloud and services market. Some of the topics we [...]

A View from CompTIA Breakaway 2010 Beth Vanni, Director, Market Intelligence, Amazon Consulting I love the CompTIA Breakaway event. Despite the fact that it's often scheduled in really hot places in August (this year, San Antonio ' 105+ every day), it's such a great place to get a reality check on what issues solution providers [...]

Partner VP Ross Brown Lays Out FY11 Plan Beth Vanni, Director, Market Intelligence, Amazon Consulting As the man responsible for making the top Microsoft partners successful, Ross Brown, V.P. of Worldwide Partner Sales, has a clear set of priorities. In an impassioned keynote to nearly 400 partners at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this month, [...]

Highlights of Microsoft's 2010 Partner Conference Beth Vanni, Director, Market Intelligence, Amazon Consulting How can a company that literally owns the desktop and has one of the largest ISV communities not be actively talking about the cloud? It's clear that after much criticism of its somewhat divided 'Software + Services' strategy and its late entry [...]

Beth Vanni – Director, Market Intelligence Where has the time gone? It's the end of July already and with many company's fiscal year's more than half-way over, it's a great time to sanity check progress toward your channel development goals for the year. ??We reflect here on what many of you have told us were [...]

Diane Krakora – CEO, Amazon Consulting Microsoft jumped on the cloud bandwagon (albeit 18 months later than most other software companies) in a big way at WPC. There were a couple of different messages at the show' Infinite Possiblities' was the main theme, and the Window's 7 team is promoting 'We Win with Partners' but [...]

Partner willingness to adopt vendor's methodologies and IP is not a 'one size fits all' strategy Beth Vanni – Director, Market Intelligence In our recent research focused on the hot topic of engaging the next generation of services-centric partners, we found some interesting results in the area of partner enablement, which forced some reading between [...]

You've come a long way, baby As Allison Watson bid farewell to the Microsoft worldwide partner community today, I can't help but be a little nostalgic about her 8 years at the helm of WPC and the partner program. Maybe it's because I've seen the changes she's been through in the last 8 years, or [...]