Last week, we shared our top picks for the best Mac blogs out there. This week, we’re continuing the trend, only this time, we’re listing our favorite blogs and websites focused on Windows: The Office Blogs and The Official Microsoft Blog While neither of these are likely surprising, they are top picks for a reason—Microsoft […]
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Jeremy Grinbaum, regional vice president for France and southern Europe, Box
Box has hired former Microsoft cloud sales exec Jeremy Grinbaum to lead the company’s commercial expansion efforts in France and southern Europe.
Grinbaum, who will be based in Box’s Paris office, has been broad on board as regional vice president for France and southern Europe to drive the cloud storage incumbent’s business in the region, which includes setting up a local sales team.
“We are seeing significant traction in France and southern Europe as businesses in these regions begin to adopt cloud systems to drive efficiency and collaboration,” said David Quantrell, senior vice president and general manager of EMEA at Box.
“We are excited to accelerate our growth in southern Europe, and Jeremy’s leadership and expertise are exactly what we need to drive the adoption of Box’s content and collaboration platform.”
Before joining Box Grinbaum spent the past few years as a senior sales executive at Microsoft, focusing on the company’s cloud services including Yammer and Office 265. He founded a cloud-based collaboration start up in 2007, PersonAll, and has also held senior sales roles at Google, IBM, and TRSB.
“France and southern Europe are moving quickly in the adoption of new technologies. Enterprises are looking for solutions that will allow them to move off of expensive, legacy architecture and create more agile and iterative environments for employees,” Grinbaum said. “I am excited to join this innovative company and play a role in helping organizations transform the way they work.”
Last month Box revealed its quarterly results to the public for the first time, which showed promise. Billings in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 were $82m, a 33 per cent year on year increase. But the company has over the years spent hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering its sales and marketing efforts, accumulating a significant amount of debt in the process, so it’s likely Box’s main focus will be on delivering the return shareholders are looking for from its southern European expansion.
Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure
Fujitsu and Microsoft announced an Internet of Things partnership focused on blending the former’s devices and IoT services for agriculture and manufacturing, powered by Windows software and Azure cloud services.
The move will see the two companies offer a solution that blends Fujitsu’s Eco-Management Dashboard, an IoT service for the agricultural sector, and Microsoft’s Azure database services so that data collected from sensors deployed throughout the operations can be analysed to help firms save money and streamline processes.
The companies said the platform has uses in other sectors and can be tailored to a range of different niche verticals.
“Leveraging the Fujitsu Eco-Management Dashboard solution alongside Microsoft Azure and the Fujitsu IoT/M2M platform, we are able to deliver real-time visualisation of the engineering process for big data analytics to improve the entire production process and inform decision-making,” said Hiroyuki Sakai, corporate executive officer, executive vice president, head of global marketing at Fujitsu.
“We are proud to partner with Fujitsu to enable the next generation of manufacturing business models and services enabled by IoT along with advanced analytics capabilities like machine learning,” said Sanjay Ravi, managing director, Discrete Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft. “Fujitsu’s innovation will drive new levels of operational excellence and accelerate the pace of digital business transformation in manufacturing.”
Fujitsu has been doubling down on IoT this year, with manufacturing looking to be a strong sector for those kinds of services according to anlaysts. In January the company announced plans to expand its two core datacentres in Japan in a bid to accelerate demand for its cloud and IoT services.
The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.
21Vianet and Microsoft have extended a partnership to sell Azure-based services in China
Microsoft and 21Vianet have announced the two companies have renewed their partnership to jointly sell Microsoft’s cloud services in China.
The partnership, which now extends until the end of 2018 and will now include Office 365, will see 21Vianet continue to be the exclusive provider of Microsoft’s Azure-based services within China.
“As China’s premier infrastructure provider and cloud enabler, we are extremely excited to extend this important partnership with Microsoft. Since 2012, teams from Microsoft and 21Vianet have worked diligently and seamlessly in the preparation, public preview and commercial launch of both Windows Azure and Office 365 services in China,” said Josh Chen, chairman and chief executive officer of 21Vianet.
“As the growth momentum for cloud services remains exceptionally strong, we believe this partnership extension marks another significant step in solidifying the cooperation between 21Vianet and Microsoft as well as strengthening our leadership role in China’s cloud computing services market,” Chen said.
Microsoft and 21Vianet originally announced their partnership in 2012. Given the stringent data management measures applied to service providers by the Chinese government as well as local business rules, international companies like Microsoft are required to partner with a local service providers if they are to sell their services on the Mainland. 21Vianet also works with AWS and IBM to rollout their cloud services in China.
“We are very pleased to have extended a successful relationship with 21Vianet, following more than 2 years of close collaboration in bringing Microsoft public cloud services to the Chinese market. Both Azure and Office 365 have strong momentum in the market with broad adoption by both local Chinese companies and multinational corporations,” said Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president and chief executive officer of Microsoft Greater China.
“Customers value Azure and Office 365′s enterprise-grade benefits such as security, flexibility, reliability, scalability, openness, cost efficiency and deployment speed. We remain firmly committed to the Chinese cloud market, and we believe this extended partnership with 21Vianet will serve as a strong foundation for both companies to further contribute to the development of the cloud computing ecosystem throughout China.”
According to CCID Consulting, an IT consultancy catering to Chinese businesses, China’s cloud market is on track to reach $6bn by 2017.
MFA is becoming more prominent among enterprises
Salesforce has acquired Toopher, a Texas-based mobile authentication startup, for an undisclosed sum.
The company, which offers multifactor authentication (MFA) for mobile platforms, was acquired by the CRM giant less than a month after it secured $200k in new investment.
“Today it is with great excitement that we can unveil our ability to super-charge our superpower—because we are being acquired by Salesforce,” the company’s founders Josh Alexander and Evan Grim wrote in a statement on the Toopher website.
“While we will no longer sell our current products, we are thrilled to join Salesforce, where we’ll work on delivering the Toopher vision on a much larger scale as part of the world’s #1 Cloud Platform. We can’t imagine a better team, technology and set of values with which to align.”
Toopher said it will continue to support existing customers.
Salesforce is aligning itself with a number of enterprise IT vendors including Microsoft, PingIdentity and RSA, which have over the past few years moved to acquire MFA vendors in order to bolster the security posture of their offerings.
Given the rise in MFA adoption among enterprises (a recent SafeNet survey suggests 37 per cent of organisations used MFA in 2014, up from 30 per cent the previous year), the performance improvements associated with tight technical integration between MFA and the services they protect, and the fact these enterprises are becoming more and more mobile, it’s not surprising to see some vendors swoop in to acquire the technology outright.
Featured image courtesy of Daze Info. Despite the positive reaction so far to Windows 10, Microsoft isn’t out of the gate just yet—by announcing that the free upgrade to Windows 10 will only be available to Windows 7 and 8 users, they’ve frustrated all of their users who took a risk on Windows 9. Here […]
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Amazon, Box and Microsoft are also offering unlimited cloud storage plans now
Following a move to give unlimited cloud storage to Amazon Prime customers the company has now announced unlimited cloud storage plans for its Amazon Cloud Drive service. The move comes some time after a number of the company’s competitors in the cloud storage space made similar moves.
The company announced two new cloud storage plans – Unlimited Photos Plan, which allows users to store an unlimited number of photos and includes 5GB for other file types, and an Unlimited Everything Plan, which includes unlimited storage for any file type.
The Unlimited Everything Plan costs $60 per year; the Unlimited Photos Plan, $12 per year.
“Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up,” said Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive in prepared remarks.
“With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space—they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music, and files in one convenient place,” he said.
The move may be a sign Amazon is starting to feel the heat from competitors in the cloud storage space. Box, which recently went public, had last year announced that it would remove storage limits for enterprise users of the popular storage suite, with Microsoft following suit with its Unlimited OneDrive storage offering soon after.
Microsoft and close to 50 tech companies and civil liberties associations have renewed calls to reform the US Patriot Act ahead of the expiry of the law’s provisions governing bulk data collection
Microsoft, along with nearly fifty other technology civil rights associations and technology firms have signed an open letter to senior members of the US government calling for reform of the Patriot Act, a cause célèbre for Microsoft among other cloud firms in recent years.
Microsoft has previously criticised the US government’s bulk data collection practices, and the ability of its authorities to act on warrants beyond US soil (particularly when such acts contradict local laws where those businesses operate).
In an open letter to very senior members of the US government including Michael Rogers, director of the NSA, senate minority leader Harry Reid, and US president Barack Obama, the organisations reaffirm the need to end the US government’s bulk data collection practices, and make government and corporate reporting on any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decisions more transparent.
The US Patriot Act Section 215, which currently serves as the legal basis for the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata, is due to expire in June this year.
“We the undersigned represent a wide range of privacy and human rights advocates, technology companies, and trade associations that hold an equally wide range of positions on the issue of surveillance reform. Many of us have differing views on exactly what reforms must be included in any bill reauthorizing USA Patriot Act Section 215,” the letter reads.
“That said, our broad, diverse, and bipartisan coalition believes that the status quo is untenable and that it is urgent that Congress move forward with reform.”
“It has been nearly two years since the first news stories revealed the scope of the United States’ surveillance and bulk collection activities. Now is the time to take on meaningful legislative reforms to the nation’s surveillance programs that maintain national security while preserving privacy, transparency, and accountability.”
Microsoft is among a range of technology companies in support of reforming how American legal entities treat data, both within the context of surveillance activities or general legal proceedings. But US lawmakers have signaled they are prepared to act on longstanding promises to reform the legal landscape. Last month American lawmakers introduced two bipartisan bills that seek to limit the reach of US courts over data stored in cloud services located outside the US, a move welcomed by a broad coalition of technology and telecoms firm – including Microsoft.
I just wanted to take a quick minute to let the readers of our blog know that GreenPages is holding a series of live events around migrating Windows Server 2003 Workloads. The events are free and will be held in Cambridge, MA, Portland, ME, Tampa, FL, and Alpharetta, GA. David Barter, our Practice Manager of Microsoft Technologies, will be hosting the events.
We decided to put these events together because of the impact Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life is having on IT professionals across the globe. As you are probably already aware, the End-of-Life date is July 14th. Needless to say, that is coming up pretty quickly. There are perceived, and often real, challenges involved in upgrading applications. However, there are some serious drawbacks if you do not migrate. First, no new updates will be developed or released after end of support. Not migrating could also cause compliance issues for various regulatory and industry standards. Furthermore, staying put will cost more in the end. Maintenance costs for outdated hardware will increase and there will be additional costs for security measures that need to be taken.
On the flip side, benefits of migrating include reducing operational costs and increasing efficiencies, improving employee productivity, the ability to be cloud ready, and increasing business agility. There are different paths you can take, such as migrating to Windows Server 2012, Azure, or Office 365 as an individual product or as a Platform as a Service.
During the events, David will cover:
You can register here. If there isn’t an event near you but you’re interested in learning more on the topic, I would highly recommend downloading David’s whitepaper. These should be great events (plus you get a free lunch and entered to win an Xbox One)! Below is some more information on event locations.
Portland, Maine
Tampa, Florida
Alpharetta, Georgia
Cambridge, Massachusetts
If you have any specific questions about event logistics, feel free to reach out to Kelsey Barrett, our Marketing and Event Coordinator.
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Ford plans to roll out the Azure-based service later this year
Ford Motor Company and Microsoft have teamed up to create the Ford Service Delivery Network, a cloud-based connected car platform for Ford vehicles the companies said would make it easier and faster to add more in-car digital services.
Microsoft said the service will provide Ford a global platform to enable over-the-air software updates and expand availability of MyFord and MyLincoln Mobile connected services, which ships with features like scheduled remote start, vehicle finder, and vehicle status (fuel or charge level, tire pressure).
The connected car platform will be hosted on Azure-based technology in a combination of Azure and Ford datacentres.
“As consumers shift toward more cloud-based services, the Ford Service Delivery Network architecture is a strategic approach to keep vehicles up-to-date and relevant throughout the vehicle ownership period by making it easy to add or evolve services. Microsoft Azure provides a global common cloud platform that allows Ford to deliver services worldwide and scale quickly to reach its broad customer base,” explained Sanjay Ravi, senior director of worldwide manufacturing at Microsoft.
“This means that Ford can send updates as they become available, ensuring customers will have the latest technology as it becomes available,” Ravi said.
Customer deployment will begin later this year, the companies said.
Microsoft is among a growing fleet of technology firms looking to capitalise on growth of the connected car market. According to global telecoms association the GSMA the size of the market will nearly triple over the next four years to $53bn.