Innovation for Partners in the UK : innovation

Structured Search

ukpartner — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:38:24 GMT

Ardentia Search was an early adopter of Windows Presentation Foundation and enrolled in the UK ISV Early Adopter Program (aka Touchdown). We had the good fortune to work with Ardentia Search throughout the development and migration from Java to .NET 3.

A few months ago we set up a briefing with Ardentia Search and Philip Howard of Bloor Research. Philip recently wrote an interesting article about structured search and included Ardentia Search in his analysis. You can read the article here.

To see both video and paper case studies from Ardentia Search, visit www.innovate-uk.com.

- Paul

Technorati tags: WPF, Ardentia Search, Search

Hold up, I don't even know what SaaS means

ukpartner — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:29:00 GMT

Everyone on our team is thinking about SaaS and what it means to our partners. This is a particular area of interest for Eric, who has the architectural background and ~~painful memories~~ learning from the ASP-days to make sense of it all and ensure we're providing sound advice to our partners.

I recently posted that SaaS is not the future but Software + Services is a candidate. Every time I talk with partners I'm reminded that they have a business to run and can't always afford to be on the latest trend. Software + Services (aka SaaS), however, is really starting to cross the line from "nice to know" to "need to know".

This Wednesday I'll be hosting one of our larger UK partners for an Envisioning Session in the UK Microsoft Technology Centre. I'll cover three topics:

What does People_Ready Business really mean
Software + Services (SaaS)
User Experience Matters

The bit I've been stuck on is SaaS. How can I get everyone up to a level playing field in the first few minutes so we can have a healthy discussion about SaaS? Videos tend to work well for this sort of thing, so I started searching around YouTube and found this one. It's not bad so I might just use it.

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- Paul

Technorati tags: SaaS, S+S, MTC

Real World WPF videos

ukpartner — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:25:00 GMT

If you are developing with Windows Presentation Foundation, check out our new series of screencasts and videos on Channel9, known as Real World WPF. The UK MCS User Experience Team and a number of UK partners have been working on WPF for over 12 months and this Real World WPF series is intended to show some of their work and capture/share some of their learnings. We hope you find them useful and there will be more to follow.

post by Nick Page

5-minute guides to AJAX, Expression, Live, WPF, and WPF/e

ukpartner — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:05:17 GMT

About 3 months ago our team made a great acquisition - Andrew Shorten.

Andrew has been helping developers, partners and customers leverage the Internet as an application platform over the last 8 years; from designing & building web-based solutions for enterprise customers at Fujitsu, through to evangelising about the importance of user experience and smart client technologies at Macromedia/Adobe. Andrew believes that experience matters and nowhere is this more important than when accessing services, applications and content online – he is excited by the opportunities that “Web 2.0” and rich Internet applications present to deliver applications that people actually want to use and which deliver real business benefit.

One of the great things about having someone with this experience is they can relate first-hand the strengths, weaknesses, and unique opportunities Microsoft's client / web technologies present for custom development agencies.

In light of this, Andrew put together a series of quick 5-minute guides to several Microsoft technologies from a non-Microsoft perspective. Check them out:

- Paul

Technorati tags: AJAX, Expression, Live, WPF, WPFe, Adobe

Web 2.0 Mashup Competition

ukpartner — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:18:33 GMT

James has just announced a Web 2.0 mashup competition. If you're a developer looking to experiment with Web 2.0 and various complementary services - BT has built a sandboxed environment for you to give it a go, with a $25k price to boot.

www.networkmashups.com

The First UK Innovation event for 2007

ukpartner — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:48:33 GMT

Software partners that view Innovation as a key ingredient to success should stop by on January 18th. We're holding our first software partners Innovation day in 2007 and will run through both commercial and technical aspects of innovation - and how Microsoft can help.

Registration is quite full, but if you register soon you should still be able to secure a spot.

Click here to register.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Innovation, UK, ISV

Innovation = Profit?

ukpartner — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 14:25:13 GMT

You're a developer, architect, maybe even CTO at a software company. You're constantly challenged to decide should we innovate, increase support in existing products, change our roadmap, start from scratch...

You've got a lot on your mind, it's not easy. I know because I go out with my team to speak with lots of partners and am starting to really understand the many challenges you face.

A recent paper released by IDC helps provide justification for those that work a bit harder, innovate a bit faster, and work with Microsoft a bit closer.

The software industry is facing growth rates of 7.7% up to 2010 but competition and customer expectations are increasing. It's not easy, but we're trying really hard to help technical people innovate and stay ahead - this paper shows those efforts are paying off for our partners.

Read the paper here.

Technorati tags: ISV, Partner, UK, Innovation

What is Innovation?

ukpartner — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Technically speaking, it's the introduction of new things or methods.

Innovation is a topic I've debated with many people, including professors at Instituto de Empresa (translated), colleagues, and in my own head. It's a tough one, who innovates and who doesn't? Does innovation matter if you're profitable and forecast growth? Is innovation too risky for established companies? People often debate if Microsoft innovates and to me that question is irrelevant. Microsoft is a platform company and well over 90% of our business is done through partners. In some cases we make the call to step back and deliver the end product (XBox, Zune, etc) but most of the time we bank on partners delivering innovative products into the market.

So the real question is not does Microsoft innovate, but does Microsoft enable their partners to innovate?

You might ask, does innovation even matter? I think the FT says it best:

Innovation used to happen by chance, if it happened at all.
Not any longer. Today, the world's most forward-thinking companies see innovation as an engine for growth and, therefore, something that must be strategically managed and securely harnessed. It is the new currency of competition. It is the key to organic growth and wider profit margins. It is, in short, the Holy Grail of business in the 21st Century and companies must keep innovating if they are to keep growing. [link]

So why is our team focussed so heavily on partner innovation? We see it as the key competitive advantage to software partners and we want to do everything possible to ensure Microsoft's partners are successful today and tomorrow. To put it even more bluntly, your success is our success.

What do you think: does Microsoft enable our partners to innovate?

post by Paul Murphy

What is this blog? This will be a technical voice to the 4,000 independent software vendors (ISV's) and 6,000 custom development software (CDS) partners in the UK. The target audience for this blog will be developers and architects within those organizations and our goal is to provide you with specific resources and insight to help you and your companies succeed with innovation.