Posted on: August 18, 2017
Microsoft Inspire certainly lived up to its name this year. Tens of thousands of Microsoft partners gathered together earlier this month in Washington DC in order to share new and exciting ways to boost their businesses as a whole while working to help the many customers who look up to Microsoft and its partners for guidance as they navigate new technology options. Because cloud technology is still such a major buzzword in the tech sector, it’s only natural that a primary focus of Inspire was various cloud-based solutions that work to enable digital transformation.
Growing Cloud Opportunities for Microsoft Partners
Back in 2016, Microsoft kicked off an Azure co-sell program that offered up complete and comprehensive support for partners in the sales and marketing sectors. As the first of its kind in this industry, Microsoft was, for the first time, able to fully align its massive global salesforce behind its many partners. As such, the program closed an astonishing $1 billion in annual contract revenue for Microsoft Azure Partners in the first six months alone, and then went on to generate $6 billion in pipeline opportunity for Azure partners and over 4,500 partner deals.
Why is this so significant? It should be noted that Azure is currently the one and only global, public cloud that is able to provide Microsoft partners with these types of incredible benefits. Microsoft’s own powerful (and highly knowledgable) team is, therefore, able to dedicate time to helping Azure partners provide the best experiences for new users. This collaborative partnership is made through the public cloud experience and is a complete game changer – for Microsoft, its partners, and end-users alike. Everyone benefits from start to finish.
Over the next year, the Azure co-sell program will be expanded upon for the better. Microsoft will be making a number of additional investments into the program while simultaneously working to create a growing number of dedicated Channel Manager roles as a means of further supporting partner marketing efforts. Ultimately, this will make it easier for their solutions to be able to reach new consumers while still being fully integrated into the Microsoft co-sell ideal.
On top of everything else, partners will be able to more easily modernize customer experiences and existing business applications, while also building new business applications. As Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps, and Microsoft Flow become more accessible to partners like Uncommon than ever before, users will be able to benefit from improved partner knowledge and experience. These tools are considered by Microsoft to be “building blocks” that add and improve sales automation, backend functionality, development time, and development costs, so they’re excited about helping partners in ways that will allow for increased access to go-to-market support, and for increased opportunities for reaching a massive consumer audience via cloud technologies.
Last, but certainly not least, it was announced that Microsoft will be introducing a preview of Azure Managed Applications. With this powerful tool, partners will have the ability to deliver managed solutions via the Azure Marketplace within the cloud. This streamlines both acquisition and deployment times and experiences for customers while connecting partners to a wider global audience via the cloud.
As Microsoft partners, the team at Uncommon Solutions is feeling very inspired and excited by the discussions at this year’s Microsoft Inspire. We’re committed to staying on top of the latest technological trends and updates, and are thrilled with Microsoft’s dedication to expanding upon and growing the partner cloud experience. As Microsoft continues to pave the way for smoother and more seamless cloud communications and integrations, we will be able to offer even better services to our customers like you. Stay tuned for further updates, or reach out to our team for more information today.
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