Today Gavriella Schuster, CVP of Microsoft’s Partner organization, spoke about our longstanding commitment to partners, and new investments to enable partners to accelerate customer success.
As we shared in our recent earnings, Azure is growing at 76 percent, driven by a combination of continued innovation, strong customer adoption across industries and a global ecosystem of talented partners. I’m inspired by partners such as Finastra, Cognata, ABB, and Egress who are working with Azure to enable digital transformation within their respective industries.
While Microsoft has long been a partner-oriented organization, some things are different with cloud. Specifically, partners need Microsoft to be more than just a great technology provider, you need us to be a trusted business partner. This requires long-term commitment and the ability to continually adapt and innovate as the market shifts. This has been, and continues to be, our commitment. Our partnership philosophy is grounded in the foundation that we can only deliver on our mission if there is a strong and successful ecosystem around us.
In the spirit of being a trusted business partner, I wanted to highlight our key partner-oriented investments and some of the resources to help our partners successfully grow their businesses.
Committed to growing our partners’ cloud businesses
Unlock new growth opportunities. Microsoft has sales organizations in 120 countries around the world. Our comprehensive partner co-selling program allows partners to tap into our global network to expose their solutions and services to new markets and new opportunities. Microsoft sales people are paid to bring the best solutions to our customers, spanning both Microsoft and partner solutions.
The Azure Marketplace and AppSource digital storefronts enable customers to easily find, try, and buy the right solutions from our partners. In March, we will add new capabilities to our marketplaces that enable partners to publish to a single location and then merchandise to over 75 million Microsoft customers, thousands of Microsoft sales people, and tens of thousands of Microsoft partners with the click of a button. This new capability further enables partners in our Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program to create comprehensive, tailored solutions for their end customers. And this is just the beginning. More innovations are on the way, and you can view what’s coming through our Marketplaces roadmap.
“Azure Marketplace has transformed Chef’s business because it has opened up brand new channels and a new lead generation.” – Michele Todd, Chef Software
Technical resources and support whenever and wherever you need it. Whether you’re getting acquainted with Azure, or are further along in developing your solution – there are resources to help you find the answers:
- Find Azure training whether online, in a classroom or at an event near you
- We are committed to providing you with up-to-date documentation and transparency on the product roadmap
- Technical support programs in various levels based on your need
- Community forums supported by dedicated Microsoft technical experts
Cloud migration. I previously wrote about how we’re making it easy for customers to migrate their existing workloads to Azure. For our SI and managed services partners, the approaching SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 end of support also brings new opportunities to provide cloud migration, app modernization and ongoing app management services to customers. Just this migration opportunity alone creates over $50B in opportunity for our partners.
We’ve created the Cloud Migration and Modernization partner playbook and offer the Azure FastTrack program to help you connect with Microsoft engineers as you accelerate this practice. And available this week, new migration content will be launched on Digital Marketing Content OnDemand, a free benefit in MPN Go-to-Market Services.
An open, hybrid, and trusted platform to turn ideas into solutions faster
Build on a secure and trusted foundation. With GDPR and cybersecurity top of mind for customers, partners need a cloud partner that allows them to focus on building their solution, and not on performing security and privacy audits. Microsoft leads the industry in establishing clear security and privacy requirements and in consistently meeting these requirements. And to protect our partners’ cloud-based innovations and investments, we’ve created unique programs like the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program which lets you leverage a portfolio of Microsoft’s patents to protect against IP infringement risks.
Flexibility to deliver hybrid cloud solutions. Azure has been developed for hybrid deployment from the ground up, providing partners the flexibility to build hybrid solutions for customers, using Windows and Linux.
Develop on any platform, with tools that you know and love. With Azure, partners can migrate existing apps to the cloud, implement Kubernetes-based architectures, or develop cloud-native apps using microservices and serverless technologies from Microsoft, our partners, and the open-source community.
New innovations to light up customer opportunities
Analytics and insights. Our customers’ hunger for better insights is creating great opportunities for partners. Azure enables customers to efficiently manage the end to end data analytics lifecycle. TimeXtender is helping customers speed up digital transformation by building platforms for operational data exchange (ODX) using Azure. Neal Analytics created an algorithm for retailers and consumer goods companies that makes inventory data actionable
AI. Azure provides a comprehensive set of flexible AI services, and a thoughtful and trusted approach to AI, so partners can create AI solutions quickly and with confidence. Talview is a pioneer in using artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies to analyze video interviews in multiple formats.
“The Talview platform was previously hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but we shifted to Azure because its AI capabilities were deeper and richer for our needs.” – Sanjoe Jose, CEO, Talview
Internet of Things. Partners use of Azure IoT has become a key differentiator. Willow is enabling its customer thyssenkrupp Elevators to drive building insights and improvements using Azure Digital Twins, that creates virtual representations of the physical world, allowing partners to develop contextually-aware solutions specific to their industries.
“Partnering with Microsoft gives us access to both the best technology platform for designing and developing innovative solutions for our clients, along with the best partner enablement organization in the industry.” – Matt Jackson, VP Services for Americas, Insight
We are thrilled to be on this journey together with you. And, if you’re new to Azure, I invite you to become an Azure partner today.