Microsoft Partner Network – Out with the Old; In with the New

Great Live Meeting from Microsoft this afternoon on the new CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scheme.  Thanks to Daniel Langton for that.

It shed more light on the shift from the old Microsoft Gold Partner scheme to the Microsoft Partner Network which was unveiled at WPC.  The slide below summarised the shift:

Microsoft Partner Network

Great also to see that the new competencies have been defined.  These are available at https://www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/competencies/default.aspx.

Microsoft Partner Network Competencies

We look forward to finding out more detail!

Microsoft WPC Day 3: “Compete to Win” Today & the Vision for Tomorrow

Picking up on Bob Muglia’s “seize the day” theme from yesterday’s Keynote, Kevin Turner (Microsoft Chief Operating Officer), urged the assembled partner network to “respond with urgency” to the current economic “reset”.  

Turner’s line was that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, unveiling a twofold strategy which comprises:

1. Innovation now to benefit in the longer term; and
2. Growing our market share, relative to the competition, in the short term.

For Turner, point 2 served as a launchpad to blast into Microsoft’s competition, his targets ranging from Google to VMware, from Linux to OpenOffice.  The latter two received the harshest treatment, with Turner referring to “the fraudulent perception of free.”

It wasn’t all negative though.  Turner buoyed up the audience with the competitive advantage offered by Microsoft’s tremendous innovation drive – the fact that it had invested $9.5 billion on R&D in FY09, with the same amount forecast for FY10.  The tangible outcome of this investment was clear for all to see in the assembled Microsoft product stack, with more to come in Windows 7 and Office 2010.   Special praise was reserved for Sharepoint – “the hottest single product in the history of Microsoft, the fastest product to $1 billion.”

Earlier in the day, Stephen Elop  had painted an inspiring and optimistic vision of the future.  The pinnacle was the ‘Productivity: Future Vision’ video, which you can view below:

It picked up on a theme started by Steve Ballmer on Day 2 – the move to more “natural” and human-centric interfaces with the technology we all use.  Microsoft Surface is only the beginning of the shift towards a much more tactile relationship with the technology which serves us.  The days of the humble mouse appear to be numbered!

Watson’s Day 3 Keynote included a session with Bill Buxton (Microsoft Principal Researcher), Microsoft’s very own mad professor.  Buxton provided some fascinated insights, explaining that there is typically a 20 year gestation period for new products; anything emerging in the marketplace today will have been in gestation for 10 years, and will take a further 10 years to reach full maturity.  So, we all need to seize the day – the future has already started.

Microsoft WPC Day 2: Tenacity to Beat the “Reset”

Steve Ballmer was his usual forceful and belligerent self when delivering his keynote to the WPC 2009 audience.  “Tenacity” was the buzzword, and the means to overcome the current global economic slowdown, which Microsoft describes as an “economic reset” – not a recession or a depression, but a cooling off after a sustained period of overheating.

Steve Ballmer at WPC 2009

According to Ballmer, it will be IT which will stimulate the “renewal of growth”.  He painted an optimistic image of productivity and innovation, underpinned by the Microsoft product stack – with Windows 7, Office 2010, Silverlight 3 and Internet Explorer 8 all leading the charge.

Interestingly, it was the first real time IE8 was mentioned.  Geoff Colvin (Editor-at -Large, Fortune Magazine) picked up the theme, interviewing Ballmer live on stage, by asking Ballmer where the future platform is.  Inevitably enough, Ballmer urged partners to “stick with Window and Internet Explorer and its plugin, Silverlight”.

Colvin pressed on, referencing the bundled-browser ‘anti-trust’ legislation which Microsoft had fallen foul of in the EU.  Ballmer responded that whilst Microsoft’s hands were tied, the OEMs were free to put Internet Explorer on the machines before they ship.  Go figure!

The earlier Day 2 Keynote, delivered by Bob Muglia (Microsoft President Server and Tools), urged delegates to “seize the day”.  Muglia focussed on Microsoft’s extension of service “into the cloud” – representing a flexible provision to partners to cater for customers’ requirements, whether within a traditional datacentre, a virtualised datacentre or a public or private cloud.

Muglia acknowledged that “SPLA licensing is a bit complex right now”, which will have been music to the assembled partners’ ears.  According to Muglia, SPLA Essentials represents a much simplified model.  I’ll let you know how we get on with it.

Microsoft WPC Day 1: Harmony Partially Restored after Keynote Bumnote

Microsoft was “jazzed” that its partners were able to join them in New Orleans.  So said the banners which adorned the lamp-posts throughout the main streets of the city.  And the keynotes kicked off with a live performance by Microsoft’s assembled house-band – Playing for Change.  

Allison L. Watson (Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group) bounded on stage, high-fives all round to the band, only to see the opening keynote strike something of a bum note.  She went to high-five Grandpa Elliot, the beardy old blues guy, only to find that her gesture was not reciprocated. 

Grandpa Elliot, Playing for Change

It turns out that, unbeknownst to the visibly flustered Watson, Grandpa Elliot is completely blind, and was totally oblivious to poor Allison’s approach.

Composure regained, Watson announced the launch of the Microsoft Partner Network, which will see the retirement of the Gold Certified Partner scheme with a tiered scheme which encourages partners to develop their current competencies into “advanced” competencies. 

She went on to speak of a “friction free” computing experiences, as Andy struggled to get his wireless connection working in the presentation hall.

Bill Veghte made reference to a new report published by IDC this morning – this claims that for every $1 of license sale made by Microsoft this translates into $18 of revenue made by Microsoft partners in selling their services on top of the Microsoft product stack.

This starts to make compelling listening, particularly when Stephen Elop stated that Sharepoint has now made $100m in licence sales.  All was not quite so plain sailing when his live demo of Office Communicator failed in front of a large and expectant audience – it’s encouraging to see that even Microsoft’s top execs are afflicted by the same gremlins as we mere mortals from time to time.

Also encouraging was another emerging theme from this morning’s keynotes – implied rather than explicit – that Microsoft is taking a much more open and embracing stance to developing its technology to operate on non-Microsoft software and hardware.  Elop made references to surfacing Excel Services in Firefox and Safari browsers (when once this would have fallen flat with all kinds of ActiveX exceptions had you tried to run any kind of native Microsoft technology in a competitive browser).

In the same vein, Elop was quite happy to undertake a demonstration of new Microsoft technologies, live, on-stage with an Apple iPhone.  This takes us back to Microsoft’s original vision, which was flashed up onscreen prior to the start of Veghte’s keynote – to put a computer on every home and on every desk.  One thing which has always intrigued me about this vision is that – directly – it has nothing to do with selling software, and that is what Microsoft are all about.  Indirectly though, it’s all about selling software – you won’t get very far with your hardware if you haven’t got any decent software to run on it.  And that’s where Microsoft comes in.

In recent years, Microsoft has perhaps become somewhat fixated on the competitive threat, but this course of action was abruptly halted by the legal suit which forced it to stop shipping the Internet Explorer browser as a part of its operating system.  It looks like the natural development of this has been for Microsoft to embrace competitive technologies, and bring it back closer to its original vision.  What does it matter if the hardware in someone’s home is an iPhone? You can still run Microsoft software on it.  What does it matter if someone is using Firefox browser?  You can still surface Visio or Excel applications in it.  Notably absent from today’s keynotes was any reference to Internet Explorer version 8 – it was conspicuous by its absence.

Picking up on his earlier theme, Elop concluded with a live demo of Microsoft software on an Apple iPhone – a competitor’s hardware, but running Microsoft’s technology.  Unfortunately, the gremlins were once again not smiling on him.  He was affected by the same wireless connectivity problems which were still afflicting an increasingly frustrated Andy, and the demo had to be abandoned.  “Friction free” computing?  We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet!

Microsoft WPC Day 0: Straight off the Bat with “The Win-Win-Win”

The formal start of Microsoft WPC was preceded by an Enterprise Partner Group day on the Sunday, at the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

An early theme emerged from Darci Kleindl’s presentation – which can best be summarised as the “win-win-win” (my description and quotation marks, not hers): At the heart of any engagement involving the Microsoft Partner ecosystem, the customer gets the solution it needs, Microsoft gets a license sale, its partner gets to sell services into the customer.  We all go home happy.

This theme was further developed by Ross Brown, who announced some encouraging news.  Historically, Microsoft’s Partner Account Managers (PAMS) have been incentivised on a regional basis.  They had a list of key accounts operating in their geography, and were targeted with developing those relationships, and rewarded on those accounts alone.  However, it emerged from Ross’s session that this is soon to change, with PAM recognition and reward far less strongly tethered to the region in which they operate.

Company Net has always benefited from a rich and fruitful relationship with Microsoft Scotland, particularly when Microsoft manages the account from its Scottish office.  Recent engagements with William Grant & Sons, Turner Group and the Miller Group have all been testament to this fact – with the ‘win-win-win’ strongly in evidence. 

However, Company Net also has longstanding relationships with enterprise customers including BP and Disney, customers which Microsoft manages out of UK and US, and not out of its Scottish office.  This has historically made the “win-win-win” more difficult for partners such as Company Net, where the partner’s own agenda is not as cleanly aligned as it could be with that of its local, regional Microsoft partner.  So the announcement on Microsoft’s change in its PAM reward structure is welcome news for the benefit of all involved – Microsoft, the customer and the partner.

The formalities over for the day, we headed out to Zephyr Field to watch the baseball.  New Orleans Zephyrs were hosting Omaha Royals.  New Orleans lost.

New Orleans Zephyrs batting against Omaha Royals

Omaha Royals batting against New Orleans Zephyrs

Andy at Zephyr Field for the Baseball