IAMCP educates partners on opportunities after end of Windows Server 2003

International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners India (IAMCP), West Chapter recently organized a partner meet to educate its members about business impact and opportunities after the end of Windows Server 2003 support. The association explained the partners various avenues of earnings to their customers.

Suresh Ramani, president of IAMCP, West Chapter said that partners could play a crucial role in convincing their respective customers the benefit of upgradation.  He said the service support would be the major source of earnings for partners.

“Partners need to see that are they spending enough time in educating their customers. It is not a sudden change. Microsoft has got ten year support cycle. Therefore, we need to tell customers that it was a planned thing which was supposed to happen”, said Ramani.

Explaining the implications of not moving from Windows 2003 Servers to the upgradated versions, Ramani said that by not doing so the organizations would face serious security threats and would also miss out the latest features and support.

“Security threats which were there in 2003 are different from security threats in 2015. The new product takes care of the new threat scenario. This is the pitch partners need to use while asking their customers to go for upgradation”, he said.

Microsoft will end support on Windows Server 2003 from 14^th July 2015. It means that Microsoft will no longer issue security updates for any version of Windows Server 2003.

Satabdee Hait, Partner Technical Specialist in Microsoft said that the company along with it’s partners is heavily engaged in the upgradation process and almost 90 percent upgradation has already done.

“If any organization is still running Windows Server 2003 in its datacenter, they need to take steps to plan and execute a migration strategy to protect its infrastructure. By migrating to Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft Azure or Office 365, it can achieve concrete benefits, including improved performance, reduced maintenance requirements, and increased agility and speed of response to the business”, Hait said.

Hait also explained the partners the steps to execute the entire process of upgradation. He said that the SMB was the critical segment where partners play very important role to take the upgradation process forward. He said that Microsoft team and partners as an extended arm of Microsoft are making the customers aware of implications of not upgrading the old version.