Posts tagged Microsoft
Microsoft Dynamics Tries to Ease Enterprise Customers Onto the Cloud
Feb 10th
The Next Web is having “a chuckle” at the expense of customers Microsoft is catering to with its enterprise resource planning products.
And after spending an hour talking with Fred Studer, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Business Solutions Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg Thursday, we can say it’s probably an unfair chuckle at both Microsoft and its customer base. “I bet they still use IE6,” Alex Wilhelm writes in his post.
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Which may indeed be true. Because something tech journalists – myself included – forget far too often is that the business owners who make everything from our lunch to automobiles don’t geek out on this stuff the way we do. Small- and medium-sized businesses look at every tech purchase as an expense that eats away at the bottom line, and even the largest business, given the current state of the economy, wants an immediate return on investment.
So tech journalists and Microsoft can make declarations about the cloud being great, the place only a fool would avoid, but it’s up to tech journalists and the companies that make those cloud-enabled products to show them why they’re losing time and productivity by doing things the way they have always done things. And remember, Microsoft made a lot of those on-premise technologies a lot of companies purchased a decade or more ago, so they have to be extra tactful in convincing companies about what can be a radical shft.
Breaking Down The Microsoft Dynamics Strategy
At the risk of oversimplifying, Studer and Ehrenberg are tasked with anticipating problems for a wide range of businesses, then figuring out which tools from Microsoft’s ample shed they can apply to solving those problems. For example, they were the ones who leaked news to ReadWriteWeb that a workplace version of Kinect would be available next month.
The two are clearly focused on Cloud-based products that are more affordable and easier to implement, but that is not all the division is working on. But they also want to introduce those products to customers with on-premise products with gentle nudges as opposed to simply demanding that they change. The strategy, as outlined by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, includes moving all four of the Dynamics ERP products to the Azure, offering exclusive tie-ins to other products with the cloud versions of its ERP products and eventually releasing new products on the cloud before the on-premise versions are released.
“We think our history of building on-site solutions give us an advantage. The shift isn’t going to be immediate,” Studer said. “People are going to exist on-premise and on the cloud for a long time to come, and that is building into the things we do well.”
Studer and Ehrenberg outlined some of the problems they are addressing, some of the possible solutions and gave a sneak peak of some of the topics they’ll be discussing at next month’s Convergence 2012 conference in Houston.
ERP Needs To Be Better At Predicting Business Trends
Ehrenberg said ERP has been good at analyzing past business trends, but it needs to get better at predicting what will happen tomorrow. We talked about restaurants and grocery stores that still may be using a spiral-bound notebook to record daily sales and weather figures on any given day to help them make food orders for the same day the following year.
One small chain of convenience stores Microsoft Dynamics has been working with had a women who was doing just that for about 20 stores in the chain and used about two dozen data points, ranging from weather forecasts to local sports team schedules.
Dynamics was able to build a machine-learning model of the women’s system and analyze 200 days of historical data. The Microsoft model was better able to adapt, finding new information to pull into the model (like a sports team’s schedule that was affecting sales but not being accounted for), while eliminating other data points that didn’t matter.
Other models can be tailored for other businesses. Retailers rely on foot traffic, something that may be affected by city sidewalk construction projects. A convention schedule from the local Chamber of Commerce could also be rolled into the model.
“We’ve done the science,” Ehrenberg said. “Now we’re working on ways to turn it into a product.”
Giving Little Guys A Fighting Chance Against Wal-Mart And Amazon
The cloud, Studer said, will let small retailers share inventory: with other small retailers.
There’s a good chance you’ve done something like this in the past year. You’ve vowed to support small, local businesses. Maybe you’re buying a newly-released book or an oil filter for your car, or a set of socket wrenches. You head to the local book shop, auto parts dealer or hardware store, only to find the item is out of stock. The shop owner can order it for you, but…
You soon find yourself walking across the parking lot of a big-box retail store, or you find yourself driving home to order the item online. Chances are it’s cheaper than you would have paid at the smaller store, not to mention it’s in stock, and that’s enough to temper the guilt you’re feeling about not buying local. And maybe the next time you need a similar product, you don’t even bother with the well-intentioned trip to the small store first.
That’s been the plight of small retailers for more than a decade: bigger stores have bigger inventories, and online stores have unlimited inventories. Price isn’t even a factor if you don’t have the product to sell, but Studer thinks the cloud may offer smaller stores a novel to at least compete with bigger rivals on inventory control.
“You come in looking for a certain auto part and, using the cloud, I can look it up and say that I don’t have it, but the guy down the street has what you’re looking for,” Studer said. “Yes, I’m sending you down the street to a competitor, but at least I’m not putting you in the habit of going to Amazon or Wal-Mart first.”
The point is translating the benefits of cloud-based, ERP products into something that is easy to understand, easy to use and easy to implement for businesses outside of the tech sector. Microsoft Dynamics believes that allowing companies to choose on-premise products, if that is what they are most comfortable with, and then transitioning them at their own pace is crucial.
“There’s a value in having that choice,” Studer said. “We really want to provide customers with a lot of flexibility.”
Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.
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Microsoft Sides with Apple in FRAND Licensing Fracas
Feb 10th
The term “reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing” or “RAND” (which may or may not include the “F” for “fair,” depending on one’s whim) was evidently coined long before any group of people came to a mutual decision upon what constituted “reasonable.” At any rate, the debate over what’s reasonable and what’s “F” has now gone full-throttle, with Google’s revelation Wednesday that it perceives prospective partner Motorola Mobility’s (MMI) definition as reasonable enough, and that it’s 2.25% of retail sale price minus subsidies.
That might not sound like much, but if you compound all the essential patents for which a manufacturer may need to obtain a license just to produce an ordinary smartphone, the sum total may become quite a chunk. That’s the argument Apple made to European telecom regulators last November, in a letter revealed only last Tuesday. With Apple and Google now on the record, Microsoft could not afford to be left out of the discussion.
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So late Wednesday, it published a brief statement in support of FRAND terms, with the “fair” included, for the licensing of patents that are essential to adopting an industry standard. The general complaint is that companies should not have to be levied unreasonably just so their products can support the standards that consumers dictate they must support.
To Fair or Not To Fair
Microsoft’s statement reads in part, “The international standards system works well because firms that contribute to standards promise to make their essential patents available to others on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. Consumers and the entire industry will suffer if, in disregard of this promise, firms seek to block others from shipping products on the basis of such standard essential patents.”
This language has the advantage of appearing to place Microsoft in the same camp with Apple, which raised the issue in the first place, while at the same time adopting terms that could be comprised as not necessarily in opposition to Google.
Apple’s letter to ETSI Director-General Luis Jorge Romero Saro, dated last November 11, does not single out Google or Motorola by name. Nevertheless, it was clear to most, and it was probably clear to Romero Saro, to whom Apple was referring.
“It is apparent that our industry suffers from a lack of consistent adherence to FRAND principles in the cellular standards arena,” wrote Apple Vice President and Chief Legal Counsel Bruce H. Watrous, Jr. He went on to stipulate the three pillars of what Apple considers fair licensing (again, with the “F”): 1) a royalties rate that takes into account the total amount that manufacturers would end up paying all their licensors in royalties; 2) a common base price, or fair market average, against which this rate would be applied, as opposed to the actual sale price of each item; 3) a commitment never to seek injunctions against anyone entering into a FRAND agreement.
Google’s response to that letter, made to various MMI licensees and then made public, literally promised to make a “binding and unconditional commitment” to continue issuing licenses on RAND terms (without the “F”) on one condition: that the licensee refrain from seeking an injunction against MMI.
The Hidden Hook in the Grant Back
That might have been the end of it, had Microsoft VP and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner not written a lengthy blog post explaining the otherwise brief Microsoft official statement.
“Firms benefit from having their ideas included in new standards, and in exchange for this, firms usually make a promise: that if they have any patents they have that are ‘essential’ to implementing a standard, they will make these patents available to all,” Heiner wrote. “This system works really well, almost all of the time.” Taking the first big pick-axe swing at the dam, Heiner added that most of the time, Microsoft does not actually find itself licensing its own patents to others, when those patents apply to standards.
He then alluded to one of the big underlying issues in this whole debate. Again without singling out Google or MMI by name, he stated his company’s position that “patent holders should not seek to block shipments of competing products just because they implement an industry standard – a license on reasonable terms is always available. That also means that such patent holders should not require other firms to license back their patents, except for patents that are essential to the same standard.”
The practice here is something called a grant back, and it’s rooted in the notion that a licensor will always be granting licenses to its own competitors. Those competitors will always seek to improve the technology it’s being allowed to use, because that’s all part of obtaining a competitive advantage. The right to improve is something the open source community has already worked out in great detail. A grant-back clause, however, would effectively license any improvements back to the licensor, and bar the licensee from seeking an injunction on the use of those improvements.
It’s what some legal sources have called “open source, except closed.”
Google’s letter to MMI licensees explicitly allows for grant back clauses, saying that Google’s final offer of RAND terms “may include a reciprocal grant back license for Google’s products to the licensee’s Essential Patent Claims for the same standards, also on RAND terms.”
The typical weapon of retaliation against someone who improves upon a standard, in either direction, is a motion for injunctive relief. That’s something which Apple stands firmly against, and Heiner’s blog post puts Microsoft in Apple’s camp for this reason. “Seeking an injunction,” Apple’s Watrous wrote, “would be a violation of the party’s commitment to FRAND licensing.”
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Microsoft Will Launch Kinect For Workplace Next Month
Feb 9th
Microsoft wants its popular Kinect to be a game changer for more than just video games.
The company plans to introduce the first version of Kinect authorized for use in the workplace next month. The product will be marketed through its Microsoft Dynamics division, which develops enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications.
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The work place version of its motion-detecting input system for Xbox 360 will have a wide range of uses in several different industries, according to Microsoft Business Solutions Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg and Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Fred Studer. The two mentioned the commercial version of Kinect during an interview Thursday, that was granted as a sneak peak of the company’s Convergence 2012 conference in Houston in March.
Ehrenberg outlined a scenario where workers on a warehouse floor or in a manufacturing plant are wearing safety gloves that make it difficult for them to operate computers and other systems that may be used to track inventory or confirm that certain steps in the manufacturing process are complete. Kinect’s motion-detection technology, he said, could be adapted to allow accurate input through a gesture which does not require glove removal.
“Or what about food service? You’ve been in the store where the worker wearing gloves makes your sandwich, then has to remove the gloves to operate the cash register,” he said. “We all see a lot of things in the workplace that don’t make a lot of sense and can be improved.”
The original Kinect was released on Nov. 4, 2010 and after selling 8 million units in 60 days, the Guinness Book of World Records named it the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history.
“We mention it to companies and they think ‘Why? It’s a toy’,” Ehrenberg said. “But it doesn’t take us long to show them it has a place in the workplace.”
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Microsoft, 24/7 Want To Better Serve Your Customers
Feb 7th
In a world envisioned by a partnership between Microsoft and 24/7 Inc. announced on Tuesday, you’ll someday receive a text message that your flight has been canceled, call a customer service number and be able to view flight options on your tablet as you discuss rebooking your travel with the customer service agent on the other end of the line.
It seems pretty basic, considering all that we’re capable of doing in tech. But as anyone who has been put on hold for tech support, received a robo-call about suspicious activity on their credit card, or tried to deal with sudden travel changes can attest, dealing with customer service still seems to be stuck very much in the pre-Internet age.
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That’s where the Microsoft and 24/7 partnership comes in. Together, they will develop a Pedictive Experience (PX) paltform capable of handling 2.5 billion online and telephone customer service interactions each year.
“From speech to touch to gestures, consumers expect and demand more natural and intuitive ways to interact with technology,” Zig Serafin, general manager, Online Services Division at Microsoft, said in a statement. “This same demand will change how consumers interact with businesses, and it creates an inflection point for how people will expect businesses to provide customer service. “
The firms say not only will they help companies link customer service over multiple platforms, but they’ll help companies figure out what your preferred platform is and make it easier for you to get the fixes you need.
“All of us are quickly coming to expect companies to communicate with us in proactive, more natural and intuitive ways, and on the devices we use in our daily lives,” Serafin wrote about the deal on Microsoft’s official blog. “We should expect businesses to reach out to us when we need service, and to do so in a way that anticipates how we want to be communicated with; whether that’s through our smartphone, our PC or through our TV if we happen to be in the living room.”
Of course the deal isn’t all about altruistic good will to consumers: the market for customer service applications like the ones proposed by Microsoft and 24/7 is huge and expected to grow. The announcement also follows a long-building trend of Microsoft working to offer more, specialized b-to-b solutions.
The deal also includes the shuffling of some Microsoft employees, as well as Micrsoft taking an unspecified ownership stake in 24-7, according to ZDNet.
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Microsoft Defines the New Mobile Business Experience on iPad
Feb 6th
In 1984 and for a few years thereafter, Microsoft got its hands dirty in graphical computing by producing a few surprisingly mediocre applications for Macintosh, starting with a port of its otherwise decent spreadsheet called Multiplan. By the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, many of us felt the company would never again premiere a software concept on a machine bearing an Apple logo.
Sometimes I have a lot of fun being proven wrong. In the company’s first major demonstration in decades that one of its major software products need not be leveraged upon Windows, this morning Microsoft took the wraps off its latest Dynamics CRM for Mobile. And although it promises to provide native apps for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Android starting in Q2, there’s no escaping the fact that the headline attraction has all the earmarks of iPad. It’s the device that CxOs want, and therefore it’s the one that any business software platform must target.
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While analysts tend to conclude that Dynamics CRM leads in overall market share for on-premise CRM applications (with about three-fourths of that market), that’s like saying Ford is the market share leader among automobiles parked in garages. Where CRM has already headed is to service-based cloud delivery, and Salesforce.com hasn’t just led it there, it transplanted it there. Microsoft’s transition plan for Dynamics to the cloud began six months ago, and had already been criticized as late to the game.
Microsoft’s strategy for besting Salesforce at this late stage of the game is clever, banking on centralized management as a guiding theme. It perceives a need for both CxOs and administrators to adjust and tailor their services, so that they feel less like they’ve relocated their offices to LinkedIn headquarters, and more like their software is responding to their needs and demands.
The first plays in this strategy involve the distribution of so-called industry solution templates to major market segments, the first four being: life annuity insurance sales, non-profit organizations, health plan sales, and wealth management. The non-profit template, for example, “showcases Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s capability to manage constituents and donors, track donations, pledges and volunteer hours,” according to a Microsoft white paper released this morning (PDF available here).
The typical difficulty that administrators face with mobile applications is publishing multiple versions for different target devices. In a worst-case scenario, businesses end up with subfolders or even subdomains where, for example, the BlackBerry view is distinguished from the iOS view. Then when a developer publishes to one view first, the other one lags behind and waits its turn.
The revised, browser-based Dynamics CRM portal (above) does not look so much like an iPad app, but Microsoft did make sure to mention that it’s been tested and proven to work with Safari, the browser of choice for iOS and Mac users.
This morning, Microsoft emphasized its publishing model for the Q2 update of Dynamics CRM Mobile will enable one view that may be subscribed to by all four classes of supported devices. That way, administrators become free to set up tailored, policy-driven custom views around the roles certain users play in an organization, not whether they use a BlackBerry today and an iPad tomorrow. “Administrators also have the ability to remotely wipe devices of CRM data should a device be lost or stolen or the employee moves to a different organization,” the white paper reads.
The distribution model for this latest Dynamics CRM Mobile could give us a preview of what we could see later this year for “Office 15″ and Office 365. The anchor for Microsoft’s service is the server software, which does leverage Windows and does give businesses the option of on-premise or service-based (cloud) deployment. End users of the Dynamics CRM Mobile will be charged $30 per user per month. Conceivably, the next version of Office (tailored for Windows 
could present businesses with an even flatter end-user fee (perhaps with per-month or perpetual license options), that’s reduced when the business opts to serve Office to its employees on-premise or via cloud.
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Google, Microsoft, Facebook Teaming Up to Fight Phishing
Feb 4th
Google, Microsoft and Facebook are teaming up with banks and security vendors to create The Domain-based Authentication, Reporting and Conformance group (DMARC) group, which seeks to develop a platform that can weed out potential phishing messages.
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Pot (Microsoft) Calls Kettle (Google) Black on Privacy
Feb 2nd
Did you know Microsoft truly puts people first? Instead of having horrible, evil products like Gmail, Google’s search engine, Google Docs, or Google Chrome, Microsoft saves us with Hotmail, Bing, Microsoft Office 365, and Internet Explorer 9.
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Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options
Feb 2nd
Microsoft announced their January 2012 adCenter release update. The update includes three major additions to adCenter: (1) adCenter increased the ad description length by one additional character from 70 to 71. They did this to help with import issues from other advertising products. (2) There is a…
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Microsoft Will Pay Nokia “Billions” To Use Windows Phone
Jan 26th
Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter to adopt the Windows Phone operating system, according to Nokia’s fourth-quarter earnings report released Thursday.
That was the first in a series of so-called “platform support” payments believed to eventually total billions of dollars. To date, Microsoft and Nokia have been quiet about the deal’s specifics – perhaps because it appears as if Microsoft is paying Nokia significantly less than its paying other cellphone manufacturers.
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“Our broad strategic agreement with Microsoft includes platform support payments from Microsoft to us as well as software royalty payments from us to Microsoft” Nokia said in its results today. “We have a competitive software royalty structure, which includes minimum software royalty commitments.”
Slashegear’s Chris Davies is suggesting Microsoft’s Nokia arrangement is less than that it has struck with other cellphone makers. LTE, for example, is reportedly paying about $27 for each phone it sells with Windows Phone.
“Over the life of the agreement both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars,” Nokia said.
Windows Phone has gotten rave reviews, but Microsoft could struggle to get developers to create apps for the phone. By some estimates, Windows Phone could pass Apple’s iOS in market share by 2015.
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Can Microsoft Rally Developer Enthusiasm For Windows Phone?
Jan 23rd
The great thing about being a Wall Street analyst is few people ever go back to check and see if the bold predictions you made months or even years ahead of time actually come true.
Still, a report released by IHS in the wake of Microsoft’s earnings announcement last week is worth a closer look.
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Wayne Lam, IHS’s senior analyst for wireless communications, is predicting that Windows Phone will be the second most popular mobile operating system by 2015, eclipsing Apple’s iOS and coming in second to Google’s Android. Lam attributed the rapid market share gain to the strength of a product line being developed by Nokia that uses Windows Phone.
“Combined with Nokia’s efforts to drive the development of the Windows Phone ecosystem, the Lumia 900 and its successors will help Microsoft to reclaim its No. 2 ranking in smartphone operating system market share by 2015.” Lam wrote.
To do so, Microsoft would need to jump from its current market share of 2% to 16.7% in four years. Windows Phone has gotten loads of praise from reviewers and tech writers, but the company does face some hurdles, including a lack of apps when compared to the number of apps available for iPhone and Android.
Based on comments after the release of its earnings Thursday (which topped Wall Street analysts’ estimates), Microsoft seems to be positioning itself to make Windows Phone more developer friendly. To date, developers have been far more interested in working on applications for iOS or on Web-based platforms.
“I would say one of the things [we] talked about at CES last week was just how important it is for us to work on and with developers to create a really vibrant developer ecosystem,” said Bill Koefoed, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations, during the call with analysts.
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