Microsoft: Big Rebates For Small Business Partners

Microsoft announced that it will give $500 rebates -- or approximately one-third the price of the servers themselves -- to channel partners who sell some type of service around SBS 2000 servers purchased between August 1 and January 31. Other related incentives for partners will include new technical and marketing resources, a hands-on lab and business opportunity event from Microsoft on use and support of Small Business Server.

The new channel incentive program, which comes as Microsoft prepares to deliver a major upgrade on the Small Business Server next year, was announced by Bill Veghte, corporate vice president of the Windows.NET server group, during an address to business partners at the company's annual Fusion conference, located here.

Veghte, who spoke primarily about opportunities around Windows server sales, told partners that since the launch of Windows XP in October of last year, Microsoft and its partners sold more than 30 million units to customers, making it the fastest adoption in the company's history. He also pointed out that in the last 12 months the company and its partners sold more than 2.5 million Windows servers, making up a full 60 percent of all server shipments in the marketplace.

"Together we battled back from very tough times this year. Together we got up from the ropes and delivered amazing results," said Veghte. "We grew between five and six percent in an overall server market that declined by three percent."

Veghte told the partners that moving forward, Microsoft has identified a number of areas where it wants to increase resources and efforts. They include R and D spending of more than $1.5 billion, stepped up efforts to make sure the company's vision is clearer than it has been in the past, investments in partner programs, and an increased focus on long-term customer satisfaction. "The proof is not in units sold but in the satisfaction we are able to deliver together to the customer," says Veghte. "Think about this not as a one or two year relationship but as a 10 year relationship."

To help partners visualize opportunities in the near-term, Veghte listed five go-to-market strategies that business partners can use to increase business today. The first one is server consolidation. Veghte told partners that currently, NT 4.0 is still in use on more than 50 percent of the Windows servers in operation today, giving partners a huge services opportunity to upgrade and consolidate servers. Other opportunities for partners are in secured connected infrastructure, secure reliable clients, connected clients in small business and server solutions in small business.

The SBS upgrade scheduled for next year, codenamed Bobcat, will also include the "Titanium" update of Exchange, as well as SharePoint Team Services 2.0.