Vijay's perspective » Q3 SBSC PAL Conf Call
Vijay, one of the UK's SBSC PALs, joined the quarterly call with Microsoft Corporate this week and here's his update:
Yesterday was the Q3 SBSC PAL Conf Call with Microsoft Corp and as I’ve been given the go ahead from Andrea Russell you can check out the Agenda and Presentation Slides on Slideshare .
The key points from my side were :
An early view of the Next Generation of the Partner Programme and what that means to SBSC. This is still subject to change and some tweaking but the slides lay out the current thinking. This is unlikely to be implemented before Oct 2010 and then only in phases as it can’t be done overnight. It’s an overhaul of the entire Microsoft Partner Programme whether you are SBSC, Certified, Gold and with whatever competency you currently have. There is a general raising of the bar and SMB will be slightly lower than the rest. So, SBSC changes to a SMB focus and within that there will be various levels with different requirements and associated benefits. It’s a recognition that not all SBSC Partners want to engage on the same level.
The next SBSC Toolkit will contain System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Andrea is still negotiating whether this will be Workgroup or Enterprise Ed. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it is the latter. I asked for SCVMM as part of the feedback requests we get as PALs for what should be in the SBSC Toolkit. The same goes for the Demo Showcase VMs which were in the last Toolkit. I had pestered Andrea for the Demo Showcase VMs for ages until one day she managed to corner the Product Group in the Redmond Corridors and then there was no escape for them (…or so the story goes :-)).