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by Mark Romic @ Fully Managed™ Last Thursday, March 18th, Microsoft continued its Partner Connect Tour here in Vancouver at the Fairmont Waterfront as the second stop of a four-part tour across Canada. The Tour brought out a number of BC-based partners to hear Microsoft's direction and strategy, to be introduced to a number of faces at Microsoft Canada, and to also provide feedback on a variety of points. The Vancouver portion of the tour was considered to be extra special because the keynote speaker was none other than Allison Watson, Corporate Vice President of the Worldwide Partner Group. With Redmond, WA in such close proximity to Vancouver, it was easy to have one of the senior-most executives at Microsoft come speak to BC partners about Microsoft's global strategy.
Prior to her keynote, Allison held a roundtable discussion with 3 local partners who have openly adopted the Microsoft Online Services offering and have had tremendous success with it thus far. This panel included Chris Day, Fully Managed™ CEO, who walked away from the discussion impressed. This was a great opportunity for the leader of Microsoft’s partner channel to dig into the minds of Canada’s forward-thinking leaders. The conversation centered on how the software-giant can do better with its recently unveiled Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), while extracting the keys to their success in adopting Microsoft Online Services.
This was definitely the theme to Allison's keynote, as she described Microsoft's forthcoming push of cloud services. While many have criticized Microsoft for being slow to create a cloud strategy, succumbing to Google's push with their Apps product, Allison reminded the audience that the cloud is not new to Microsoft. For years Microsoft has been providing cloud services to the consumer market for years with search (Live / Bing) and email (Hotmail) to name a few. However, with the launch of their Microsoft Online Services, Microsoft finally has a formidable product to slay the push from a number of competitors led by Google.
Allison elaborated on the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), explaining in greater depth the bundle that features Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications (instant messaging), and Live Meeting. She emphasized the suite of online services available will only continue to grow, they’re betting 90% of their 2011 R&D budget on it! With that many billions going into their cloud, it’s easy to predict that it won’t be long until Microsoft is dominating the SaaS industry as well.
Next up was the Canadian team. Led by Neil Tanner, the new Vice-President, SME Solutions & Partners (SMS&P), the team went through a number of new solutions for partners to profit from. Feeding off of Allison’s momentum, Rob King, Canadian Director of Partner Strategy & Marketing, led an interactive session with the audience about the cloud. Despite some concerns surrounding the lack of data centers in Canada, Neil and Rob managed to convince most (if not all) of the partners in the room to at least try their cloud services before ruling them out.
The session wrapped up with presentations from Roy Gowler, a Solutions Channel Development Manager and Core IO (Infrastructure Optimization) Champion, and Jason Brommet the Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Office. Roy focused on the conversations partners need to be having with clients, namely, “What is your plan for Windows 7?” With so many businesses long overdue to move from XP, and others begging to get off of Vista, it’s a logical conversation starter. This leads into the discussion of Server 2008 R2, as they’re “better together”, which unlocks a number of efficiencies and includes Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualization platform. Jason’s focus (in the limited time he had) was on the upcoming launch of Office 2010, and the increased functionality it’ll provide for all those who adopt it. It was quite surprising to see how few partners had actually downloaded the BETA, but Jason did a great job to convince them all to give it a shot before it comes to market.
For the first time in years, Microsoft has partners and its own team energized about the road ahead. Their newest suite of 2010 products leave no doubt who is the king of enterprise-grade software solutions. The positive changes don't just end there; the Microsoft team is doing a lot more now to engage partners than ever before, looking for feedback on how to make partners more successful in selling their solutions. It's changing perceptions around the partner community about Microsoft's direction and ensuring that the partnership remains a prosperous one.
