Bits & Bytes

The BitTitan Blog for Service Providers

07/28/2019
Grady Gausman
ignitepreview_dh

Inspire 2019 Recap: Here’s What You Missed

Microsoft’s annual global partner conference wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. As in previous years, Inspire featured major announcements from the Redmond giant and its vast network of partners, including BitTitan.

We know not everyone can (or wants) to make a trip to the Strip, so here are the top pieces of news from BitTitan and Microsoft that present new opportunities for partners in the coming year.

 

BitTitan Announcements at Inspire

Introducing Teams Capabilities to MigrationWiz

To keep pace with the growing adoption of Microsoft Teams, BitTitan now supports the migration of Teams instances from one Office 365 tenant to another. This includes the migration of Teams, Channels, Conversation History, User Permissions, and Files: the key components of an organization’s Teams instance that enable them to be productive on day one in a new environment.

Learn more about our Teams migration capabilities in this feature spotlight or check out a short demo of these projects in MigrationWiz.

Teams-Demo

 

Debuting Hybrid Exchange Migration Management

For many organizations, moving completely from an on-premises Exchange server to Exchange Online may not be an option. A coexistence scenario is often a middle step toward a 100% cloud environment, but the configuration and management of such coexistence has always been highly manual and conducted mostly through the Exchange Admin Center (EAC).

At this year’s Inspire, BitTitan showcased new hybrid Exchange management capabilities within MigrationWiz to automate this manual pre-migration work and simplify the handoff from service provider to end customer.

Currently in beta and set to be released this fall, BitTitan is currently accepting applicants to our pilot program. Reach out if you would like to learn more or be an early member of this program.

 

Presenting Voleer: Codeless Automation for IT

The third piece of news from BitTitan is actually a new product!

Voleer is a powerful, first-of-its-kind platform to help centralize and automate the day-to-day needs of engineers, system administrators, and front-line helpdesk technicians. It provides a vast library of automated templates that can be launched in the cloud or on-premises and supports the creation and hosting of your own custom templates based on your existing business processes or scripts.

Many of the Voleer features are free – sign up today at https://www.voleer.com.

 

Microsoft Announcements at Inspire

Internal Use Rights Are Here to Stay (For Now?)

In the weeks leading up to Inspire, Microsoft announced that the internal use rights for reseller partners – providing free product licenses and access to certain services – would be ending. After an uproar from partners ahead of the event, Microsoft backtracked and reverted the changes, which reportedly cost the company nearly $200 million annually.

It was a good decision ahead of the largest partner event of the year. Not much would have been accomplished with a rightfully angry crowd and the reversion allowed Microsoft to focus on other important topics at the event. Skepticism remains about the longevity of this decision and whether the company will seek to make this change eventually, especially given the losses it takes on providing free licenses. Analysts we spoke to at Gartner earlier this week say it’s a wait-and-see situation but would be surprised if Microsoft did pull this benefit entirely.

 

Teams Daily Active User Count Disclosed

The collaboration arms race between Slack and Teams reached new heights at Inspire with Microsoft disclosing a DAU figure of 13 million. Slack’s last public statement on DAUs was 10 million in January 2019 before IPO’ing in April.

Microsoft has often hailed Teams as the fastest-growing application in company history. This is driven by strong Office 365 adoption, consistent and major feature additions, as well as an aggressive auto-install program for Office ProPlus users. With Teams adoption growing, the need to migrate in tenant-to-tenant scenarios will also proliferate. Read more about that business opportunity as a service provider here.

Additional Partner Specializations

Specializations are a great way for partners to differentiate themselves. Knowing this, Microsoft introduced the following advanced competencies:

 

 

  • Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Azure

 

 

  • Linux and Open-Source Databases Migration to Azure

 

 

  • Data Warehouse Migration to Azure

 

 

  • Modernization of Web Applications to Azure

 

 

  • Kubernetes on Azure

 

 

See a trend? Migrations to Azure – along with the introduction of Azure Lighthouse – were a central theme at this year’s event. This article from Tom Talk’s blog offers a good overview of those updates.

 

Missed us at the show?

That’s okay. Whether you’d like more information about our announcements at Inspire or want to discuss an upcoming migration project, we’re ready to talk. Contact us today to get that conversation started.

 

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