Last month I was in Las Vegas for Microsoft Inspire 2018, the annual premier partner event. We at STAEDEAN were in good spirits as we achieved 2018/2019 Inner Circle status for Microsoft Dynamics for the 11th time. In addition to a celebratory recognition event, the days spent at Inspire were packed with numerous partner meetings and learning sessions. Sathya Nadella’s corenote session was especially refreshing as it indicated tremendous opportunity for growth and scope for transformation, in store for Microsoft and its partners.
Here are my top 3 reasons why I think Microsoft Inspire energized partners:
#1. More opportunities to serve our customers
"As we look forward, the opportunity for us to serve our customers in this new era of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge is far greater" -Satya Nadella
Microsoft will be offering new programs and resources that will help partners to optimize solutions and ensure they reach the right customers with unmet and often unidentified needs. One of the initiatives is that Microsoft will be providing free training to its partner network to enable them to get the most out of the cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 and other business applications like Power BI. Further, partners will also be rewarded with 10-50% more incentives than before on acquiring new customers for business applications. Ultimately, we as partners in the ecosystem will be enabled and equipped to assist organizations with their digital transformation outcomes.
This aligns with our vision at STAEDEAN in propelling our customers to succeed with digital disruption. With continued support from Microsoft, we will continue to enable organizations to become digital leaders through our products like Connectivity Studio and the newly released Master Data Management Studio.
#2. Focus on co-selling
We've built over 28,000 solutions, services and applications with you this past fiscal year. We have generated over 3 million leads out to partners and jointly developed over 100,000 co-sell opportunities. And, get this, we have landed over $5 billion in partner sales. That's your sales, not Microsoft's sales, $5 billion..." - Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft
Microsoft will be rolling out additional co-selling incentives for Dynamics 365. Through these co-selling incentives, the company’s salespeople that co-sell with an ISV partner will receive a 2-times multiplier in quota retirement.
For us, value-added resellers and systems integrators can close more deals and deliver a better result for their customers by adding cloud applications and software solutions to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations.
#3. Power of digitization
"When you think about business processes, in particular, the one thing that is going to be true is more things are going to be digitized. As we see the power of IoT and other tools that are going to be used, every workflow is going to be automated" -Satya Nadella.
Microsoft has made its mission to provide powerful and easy-to-use IoT solutions across cloud and edge to enable its partners to move quickly from an idea to prototype to production, smoothly.
This announcement is especially applicable in the manufacturing space. By making smart use of the IoT, mobility, the cloud, their back-office ERP,PLM, and other systems, machine manufacturers can create a superior customer experience. With Microsoft working towards people-centric experiences, we are following its legacy and footsteps.
In conclusion, Inspire 2018 was a truly dynamic event which truly energized partners to be BIG winners this year and in the years ahead.
Luciano Cunha
