Happy February 1st!

I, for one, cannot believe we’re already one month down for 2011.

The good news? Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 -- our yearly Microsoft partner confab -- is one month closer! And, after you’ve spent the day watching the thermometer travel between 30° and 45°, as well as take in all the news about the crazy winter weather across the U.S., a conference in Los Angles is looking like a mighty good idea!

Speaking of good ideas, perhaps I should formally welcome you to my new blog: Welcome!

You may remember me (queue my classic Phil Hartman voice from his days on “The Simpsons”) from such blogs as http://blogs.technet.com/ianhamer where I shared my Redmond insights around topics spanning Windows Server networking technologies, my life living on a bus for a week ahead of TechEd Berlin 2009, and most recently Exchange 2010 email archiving and discovery goodness.  Well, I’ve been in my most recent role, leading our Exchange Partner Marketing team, for nearly a year, and my team thought it would be a neat idea if I started a brand-spanking new blog to share the great stuff, you, our Exchange partner ecosystem, have been up to.

So, here it is!

After taking about a year off from blogging…I’m back!

My plan is to share not only the great things that we, the Exchange product management group based in Building 31, get to do in collaboration with our resellers, system integrators, ISV and hardware partners, et al, but also provide a glimpse into my team and how we’re getting ready for things like WPC2011, the Office 365 launch, or even the start of the 2011 Major League Soccer season (perhaps the latter is mostly about how I am getting ready for MLS First Kick on March 15th at Qwest Field here in Seattle).

For example, I hope you had a chance to read Julia White’s posts around the great work our Lotus Notes migration partners are doing to help make it even easier for former Notes customers to realize the benefits of Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online.

Or, how about the recent joint release we did with our partner HP regarding some pretty cool optimized hardware solutions for Exchange 2010. Don’t fret, there will be a lot more on the HP E5000 in the coming months.

At the same time, I really hope we can use this blog as a place to hear from you directly and solicit feedback around how my team can serve you better.  I think this is more important than ever as we think about migrating customers off Exchange 2003 to the latest release, making the journey together to the cloud, and driving new services, software and hardware offerings around the Exchange platform.

I hope you’ll stick around and stay tuned for more great stuff from me, and the folks from my team, as we ramp-up for a great 2011 and beyond!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

As I mentioned in my very first post earlier this week, I’d like to use this blog to give you a glimpse into the team that’s here on the Redmond campus passionately supporting your businesses as you seek out opportunities to resell, implement, support, and/or extend Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online. I thought the best way to do this, was to grab my Office 2010 launch gift (a pretty killer digital video camcorder) and shoot a short intro of each of the folks on my team.

First up: Michael van Dijken, who’s my lead for our system integrator (SI) and hosting partners and programs. Michael’s been at Microsoft for nearly 7 years and joined the Exchange Partner Marketing Team last summer.  In fact, his first official days on my team was at WPC2010 in Washington, D.C..  Talk about getting deep in a new role right out of the shoot!

One fun fact: the Exchange Product Management Group (and many of our sister teams) have a number of folks called Michael.  In fact, our hallway has several.  So, we’ve gotten to the point of simply giving every Michael a nickname to better distinguish each of them.  For Mr. van Dijken, he’s know best as “VanD” (or “Van D”, “Van-D”, and once “Vandy”…all of which reminds me of my days trying to get the correct spelling of IPsec across all of our MS content and collateral).

Without further ado, here’s Michael:

Happy Friday!
Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to present the Exchange Server session at the latest Redmond edition of Microsoft Partner 101. Since I had only 30 minutes to speak on a number of potential topics around the Exchange business, I decided to prioritized my pitch to cover the considerable partner opportunity there is to help our mutual customers move from Exchange 2003 to our latest release (which, by the way, is 100% aligned with one of our key business priorities for FY11). Now, this probably sounds like a new release “motherhood and apple pie” statement, but you don’t have just take our word for it.

We continue to hear – from numerous sources like our field, partners, and third-parties – that there is a LOT of excitement behind Exchange 2010.

Heck, it even won an InfoWorld 2011 Technology of the Year Award just last month.

And, as one of our partners shared with me on a recent call, “customers really want to get their organizations to this release!”

Having these Exchange tidbits in my back pocket means I get to open my presentations on Exchange Server 2010 by sharing some of these business momentum fun facts:

• 60% of organizations with Exchange 2003/2007 plan to upgrade in the next year: Okay, we’ll start with our research first.  As you’ve likely heard from one of our recent posts about the waning Lotus Notes install base, we do a lot of research into the state of email across businesses.  In one such study conducted last year amongst our mid-to-large sized customers in the U.S., we asked folks on earlier versions of Exchange, “Hey, do you expect to upgrade to Exchange 2010?” and “If so, when?”. Well, we had a resounding response that two-thirds are ready to move, and move soon! These folks will be looking to you to get them there.  And, think about the fact you not only have a chance to move them to a new release, you can help them design their an updated HA/DR/Backup strategy utilizing new mailbox resiliency features like the Database Available Group, and help them remove those aging, old school voicemail systems by rolling out integrated Unified Messaging.
  
• 76% of respondents plan to move to Exchange 2010: According to “The Exchange Report” (a Computing whitepaper commissioned by Mimecast in September) 76% of the 250 IT decision makers at some of the largest organizations in the U.K. are ready to move.  Their biggest motivation? 65% of them said “the new features were behind their upgrade decision”.  When you add to the fact we rapidly responded to customer and partner feedback on the initial release of Exchange 2010, with an action packed SP1 last August, you don’t need to speculate for long that customers are ready to have discussions about the product. Even Windows IT blogger Paul Robichaux has called 2011 the year of the upgrade in his Fearless Predictions for the 2011 Exchange Server World. Another data point comes via Scott Lowe of TechRepublic who shared in September 2010 his results of a poll where “54% of the 433 respondents’ organizations have the newest version of Exchange in their future (11% have already made the change).” Neat!
  
• 301% risk-adjusted ROI with a breakeven point (payback period) of 7.4 months after deployment: Talk about a compelling story to land with your Exchange 2003 customers!  This stunning stat comes by way of Forrester Consulting’s “Total Economic Impact of Implementing Microsoft’s Productivity Platform”.  Granted, this is inclusive of more than just email, but when you think about how much Exchange 2010 can help you land and light-up Office 2010, Lync, and SharePoint 2010, it’s one heck of a pitch to walk your customers through.  But wait, there’s more: you can share that upgrading to Exchange 2010 could yield 48% ROI with a payback period of less than six months per the “Total Economic Impact of Exchange 2010” just on its own.
  
• The only vendor to receive a “Strong Positive” rating in the Gartner MarketScope for E-mail Systems: This June 2010 Gartner report is another fantastic conversation starter and best if followed up with another report from June 2010 where Microsoft is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wireless E-Mail.
  
• SP1 shipped: While I’m the first to stand up and say the RTM release was the most thoroughly tested version of Exchange (thanks in part to our Live@EDU program enabling use to roll out code to millions of mailboxes before we even reached beta), we know there is a warm and fuzzy feeling about having the SP1 on hand before deploying.  And, as history has shown before, there is a tremendous bump in interest and implementation in the 12-18 months following the availability of the service pack.  Translation: the time is now and all the pieces are in place!  Especially when you look at the number of improvements we made, based on your feedback, around the archiving and discovery features as well as Outlook Web App, Voicemail, and more! (BTW, you can see some semi-classic footage of me talking through the archiving updates when we shipped the beta of SP1).

I could go on and on, but there’s a ton of Microsoft news out there today (like the long list of new features coming to Windows Phone 7 this year!), so I’ll save a few more (hopefully) motivating tidbits about why the proverbial iron is hot for a future post.

That said, it would be great to hear what you’ve been experiencing and what can my team do to help make this opportunity even easier for you to tap.

Happy Valentine’s Day!
Ian

The recently disclosed HP E5000 Messaging System for Exchange Server 2010 (or, as we call it around the hallowed hallways of building 31: “The E5000”) is one of the really cool projects my team gets to work on this year. Taking the best of what our two companies do–delivering the hardware and software solutions your customers rely on each and every day to power their businesses–and combining it to “radically simplify the delivery of Exchange Server 2010 innovations” is a pretty powerful value prop for you to land with your customers.

There’s a whole lot more to come regarding this “killer app” of a solution from HP and Microsoft.  In the meantime, check out what one of our Exchange MVPs, Mr. Tony Redmond, shared on the E5000 in a recent blog posting:

“[I]t’s a really well put-together Exchange 2010 server based on solid and well-known hardware components that is easy to deploy and run. The E5000 will probably not feature in many large-scale Exchange 2010 deployments, but I bet that it will be a success in its target market of 500 to 10,000 seat implementations, especially for Exchange 2003 customers seeking to deploy Exchange 2010 and achieve high availability in an easy and cost-effective manner.”

That bit about being a great fit for existing Exchange 2003 customers is spot on.  We know that there are a lot of our customers still hanging on to Exchange 2003 (see my previous post). Considering these folks will (very, very likely) need to upgrade both their server gear (to a 64-bit rig) and their Windows Server install, why not help them make the leap in a single bound? Oh, and add to that the fact they’ll likely be going from an average mailbox size of 150 MBs (that’s right) to a lovely large mailbox powered by Exchange 2010, you can’t go wrong with recommending the E5000 when you call upon these guys.

So, Exchange SI partners (especially HP/Microsoft Frontline Partners), get ready for the E5000!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing