Remarks by Jon Roskill, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group
Washington, D.C.
July 13, 2010
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, once again, Jon Roskill.
JON ROSKILL: All right. Good morning, everyone. Sorry, we had to find a clicker there. So, every time I see our consumer offerings I get so excited. They’re just getting better and better, and richer and richer, and you see from the Website stuff that Brad has demoed, the phone to the Kinect demo we’ve just seen. And I can’t wait to see the karate games that are coming out. It will be really cool to be up there seeing yourself on the screen.
So with that, what I want to do, though, is switch gears and get back to the business side of things. And what I want to do now is take us to a section that we’re going to land some of the biggest news we have for the whole show, which is around how we together are going to make the transition to the cloud. And we’re going to do it in a way that makes highly profitable — you highly profitable. As you heard yesterday, we’ve sold now over 4 million copies of BPOS and we did that with 16,000 partners, 40 million copies of Microsoft Online all up.
So, we’ve got some very powerful momentum right now, but I hear questions from partners about whether it’s the right time to move. That brings me to a quote. To improve is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often. To improve is to change; but to be perfect is to have changed often. It’s a quote from Winston Churchill. Now, you heard yesterday that I’m British, and I’ve lived here since I was 3, so I don’t have the accent. But, my grandfather was a British naval historian. And he opened something called the Churchill Archives at Cambridge University, which makes this Churchill quote both personally interesting and professionally relevant to me.
Churchill speaks to the point that it’s important for everyone in this audience, which is that we need to continue to seek and improve, and that only constant change will allow us to rise to our highest potential. I would challenge each of you in the audience to keep Churchill’s notion of change in your mind as I show you what we have in store for you to transform your business.
Today’s speech, we’re going to focus in on three things. The first will be the partner opportunity. We’re going to lay that out for you. The second will be advice from partners who have already walked the path of change that we’re going to go through. And third, I will show you the means of change that Microsoft is providing you. So, to start, let’s start with opportunity, and I have a short video of some partners and their customers who have already embraced this opportunity. So, let’s go ahead and roll the video.
(Video segment.)
So, there’s opportunity there because customers are moving. So, partners start by asking, “How should I strategize my transition?” Let me give you a few quick examples. It needs to start with Windows 7, because if you don’t have a proven dynamic operating system, you don’t have a platform to access the cloud to begin with. So, with 180 million units of Windows 7 sold to date, it tells you we’re on to something here.
Now, next, let’s talk about productivity. Office 2010 alone represents a great opportunity for many of you, but then you add in Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Office Communications Server on top, throw in Dynamics CRM, and the opportunity gets humongous. But then, you think about wrapping all of that with the new online services versions of that, and our ability to be able to offer the choice of on-premise and off-premise, customers get quick and easy deployments, low operational overhead, and again, that power of choice.
Next, let’s talk about Core IO. Windows Server 2008 R2, System Center and Forefront are great for customers who want and need an on premise solution. But, there’s a huge opportunity for partners in the cloud here as well. Solutions such as doing work such as identity and security, and they can integrate the on premise and the off premise world using products like System Center and Forefront.
Next, what about developers? Today, the majority of our developers are using Visual Studio, some variation, and that makes them so they’re already ready for tomorrow, they’re already familiar with the tools that have been extended to work with Azure and with SQL Azure. And, of course, you can’t forget Windows 7 development with Silverlight.
And how about SMB? Anybody out there excited to do stuff with small business? (Cheers.) Well, there are millions and millions of companies out there that would love to have best-in-class enterprise messaging, enterprise CRM, enterprise desktop management, all without having to own it and manage it. And so, the Online Services, Intune, Windows 7, Windows Phone, that’s a combination that they’re going to be able to bet your business on, and they’re going to be able to bet their business on the through-partner model.
So the opportunity all up is huge, many, many billions of dollars, and then the 10X multiplier is what the partners put on that, and we’re into gigantic numbers. And the customers are moving, we see that. We’re all seeing that. When you look at the solutions we’re offering, there’s ample room for partners of all types to play and create innovative and differentiated business models.
So, the path, how do we get from today’s world to tomorrow’s world? And that brings us to the second pillar of today, and what I would like to do now is invite up seven of our partners that have already made the transition up onstage to help describe how they’ve done that. So, come on up, guys. (Applause.)
So, I’m going to go ahead and start over here with Chris from Brazil, 2S solutions. They’re an SI vendor down in Brazil, and you have a few Brazilian fans out there, all right.
CHRIS KNOTT: Thank you, Jon.
JON ROSKILL: So, why don’t you tell us about what you’ve been doing for the last year?
CHRIS KNOTT: As you mentioned, Jon, we are a systems integrator in Brazil, focused on mid-market customers, helping them to reduce costs in their current environments and in the datacenter.
We have already migrated our solutions, our core services and customer offerings to the cloud, and we are becoming a clear leader in the cloud in our market.
What we have found is that if you make the cloud commitment early, you have great benefit in the future.
Just to mention an example, BPOS was launched in Brazil last April, but we started investing since October of last year.
As part of those investments, we created a dedicated presales team of engineers to discuss cloud concepts with the customers and show them the value of Microsoft solutions. After that, we worked with the Microsoft Brazil local team to create a competitive message to deliver it to fight against some other cloud competitors, such as Google, and targeted 100 accounts to do that kind of speech.
After that, we did 45 BPOS trials into those accounts, and, as a result of those trials, we have won five BPOS deals until now in just three months. One of them is a midsized customer that’s 800 BPOS seats that we sold. It’s actually a church that we led into the cloud. (Laughter.)
The other one is — thank you, guys. The other one is a big airline company in Brazil that we implemented 12,000 BPOS seats. It’s a whole messaging infrastructure for the pilots and the staff.
For the future, we will keep our investments on BPOS and Azure solutions, and as we keep growing in the cloud.
With that, all I can say is that we are all in, Jon.
JON ROSKILL: OK, well, thank you very much, Chris. That’s exciting.
CHRIS KNOTT: Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.)
JON ROSKILL: OK, now Fumitoyo Kawano from Fujisoft, and they are a large reseller and managed service provider in Japan. So, tell us about what you guys are doing.
FUMITOYO KAWANO: Sure, thank you, Jon.
We previously were working with Google the past two years, with somewhat mixed results. We then analyzed the Microsoft cloud-related market opportunities and found it to be much greater. As a result, we have opened Microsoft’s solution and cloud center in-house.
One key element in the cloud engagement is that, in working with our clients, we encourage them to consider the Microsoft premise version of their software as the baseline, against which they evaluate the cloud offering. If the solution they are considering cannot match the functionality that their users are accustomed to, it is probably not a good business choice for them. Increasingly, this finds the Google solution falling far short of expectations.
In the cloud center, we set up a demo in the way of putting the screens of BPOS and Google side by side, so that customers can exercise to the extent they want.
In just about every case, the customers convinced themselves that the Microsoft solution is better and the best for their business. In that way, we won 20 BPOS engagements in less than two months.
Looking forward, we expect to win up to 50. Well, I was told 100 BPOS new customers in fiscal year ’11, and this is against some growth in mid-market.
JON ROSKILL: Well, good. Well, congratulations.
FUMITOYO KAWANO: Thank you. (Applause.)
JON ROSKILL: I think you can do even better.
FUMITOYO KAWANO: Sure.
JON ROSKILL: The opportunity is there.
OK, Ken Lamneck from Insight, a global reseller. Tell us about what you guys are up to.
KEN LAMNECK: Yeah, so we’re a global LAR for Microsoft, and, in 2009, we adopted a cloud first strategy. And in order to embed that into the organization, we focused on three things. The first and most important was cloud aggregation, to really provide the cloud environment for our clients to get a single user logon, and access multiple cloud applications. So, it simplifies it greatly, as well as provides single monthly billing to our clients.
The second was cloud services. So, we put a specialized group of services in place to really help the clients migrate from the on-premise environment to the cloud environment, and this, of course, really enables them now so we can provide 24/7 remote management, deployment and migration, and all the BPOS services, as well.
The third piece if what we call Inside License Advisor, which really provides our clients a cloud-based asset management tool where they can basically look at their software, as well as hardware, in one environment, one tool that works with all the tools that they have in place.
So, I know that you’re very much, having worked in the past with you, into results. So, what have the results been for us? Well, we’ve been at this for about five years, and what we really found was our European clients were early adopters. So, we basically have today 650 clients on the cloud. We’re managing 195,000 seats in the cloud. And you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft is the fastest growing piece of our cloud offering, as well as the quarter we just finished, Microsoft actually exceeded all the revenue of all the other cloud applications that we represent.
So, I guess, in summary, I’d say — yeah, in summary, I’d say that the cloud is real, and that we’re really for the first time starting to see meaningful revenue being generated from the cloud. So, we’re excited about it.
JON ROSKILL: That’s fantastic, Ken, thanks.
KEN LAMNECK: Thanks, Jon. (Applause.)
JON ROSKILL: We love that the Microsoft solution is exceeding all others combined. That’s great.
All right, Eilert from Mamut, has come all the way from Norway, and he’s a hoster and an ISV. So, tell us what you guys are up to.
EILERT HANOA: So, thank you. A couple of years ago, we went all in on the software as a service opportunity. Now, we see that we can bet everything on the new Microsoft Online Services that are emerging. We’ve become now a BPOS indication partner. We started to roll out our first Azure-based services to our customers, and we’re preparing for the new Intune opportunity that we see coming around the corner.
JON ROSKILL: Good.
EILERT HANOA: And this is really a great way for us to deliver enterprise-class technology to small businesses and really taking the pain out of IT, so that their customers are getting their max efficiency.
So, we’ve been able to achieve three things, which is reduce our investment, reduce our costs and improving our margins. We’re getting an internal booster because we have new great technology and new opportunities. And maybe the opportunities are the most important, more business by embedding cloud into our current solutions and offerings.
And I think this is really a transformation that all IT companies have to go through.
So, my advice would be get your hands dirty today because five years from now all of us are going to deliver cloud-based solutions embedded, and with basically based on Azure and BPOS.
JON ROSKILL: BPOS. OK. Thanks, Eilert. Great, thank you. (Applause.)
Domnick, Domnick from Valorem, tell me about what you’re up to.
DOMNICK PARETTA: Yeah, Jon. Valorem really focuses on the upper mid-market, as well as SMB for online services. We provide solutions around business intelligence, SharePoint and a host of cloud-based services.
We really saw a change in the way customers wanted to procure IT solutions, so we added a new capability to our business, and built a cloud practice based on the Microsoft platform and the unique opportunity Azure and online provides.
Today, our cloud practice not only offers cloud-based solutions, but hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions. By aligning our business model to Microsoft’s, we’ve been able to experience enhanced brand value and great growth and expansion. Because of that, we’re developing a more national focus.
Online has provided us with the ability to develop an inside sales model to target and market to the SMB customer. We’ve also changed our sales model across all customer segments to capture and nurture cloud-based opportunities. Specifically, we’ve really focused on building marketing muscle and changing our brand and image to that of a cloud partner and solutions provider. We’ve built a virtual sales and delivery model to enable growth expansion geographically.
We’ve added a completely new capability around Exchange Online migrations that’s opened a completely new market for us. And it’s completely a result of the shift in our business model. That new capability has resulted in a 30 percent increase in our customer base.
So, you can see the big dividend for us has been growth. And most importantly, because of our enhanced brand and unique set of customer reference stories, we’re able to win against larger competitors.
JON ROSKILL: That’s great.
DOMNICK PARETTA: Thanks, Jon.
JON ROSKILL: Fantastic. We appreciate you guys betting on us. (Applause.)
OK, we’ve got Mark, WebFortis, Dynamics CRM reseller. Tell us about what you guys are doing.
MARK WOLENICK: Right, Jon. Well, we focus exclusively on Dynamics CRM. We love CRM. But one of the things that we’ve done is partner with a lot of Microsoft partners, many of whom are in the room today, to deliver the entire Microsoft stack as a solution to potential customers and prospects.
Now, we’re U.S.-based, but we’re headquartered in San Francisco, so you know who we compete against quite a bit, Salesforce.com. They’re in about 90 percent of our deals.
So, what we decided to do to transform our business was we decided to build out a separate line of business specifically to address that. We’ve got a dedicated practice manager, we’ve got dedicated sales and dedicated marketing. Additionally, we’ve modified our sales compensation to address the uniqueness of cloud-based services.
Now, we still offer on-premise services, but the two teams are able to work together in a hybrid solution to be able to address market needs.
The results for us have been very impressive. Year over year, we’ve tripled our customer interact. We’re able to go into markets of all segments and lead with the service offering, and we anticipate for next year doubling our customer growth, and, with the launch of CRM 2011 in January, we anticipate unlimited potential.
JON ROSKILL: Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you very much, Mark. (Applause.)
All right, and our last partner, Dan from Wirestone. So, Dan is an agency all online. So, tell us about what you guys are doing.
DAN LYNCH: Great, thanks, Jon.
Well, you know, technology continues to change the way people consume media and how they interact with brands. Emotional storytelling and immersive experiences are great ways for companies to make real connections with their customers.
Wirestone builds immersive experiences, connecting people to some of the world’s biggest brands, and we do so leveraging Microsoft tools like the Azure cloud technology to build breakthrough solutions like the Social Mosaic we built for the Air Jordan brand, which you’re about to see in a moment. This mosaic is composed of images that have been uploaded via Web interface from people all over the world.
In addition to that, we use Silverlight and WPF to build interactive experiences on Surface and on video display walls, multitouch video displays, that together have allowed us to truly capture the passion of the Jordan fans around the world.
Let’s take a look at the video.
JON ROSKILL: And there are a lot of them.
DAN LYNCH: Yeah, there are.
JON ROSKILL: Let’s run the video.
(Video segment.)
JON ROSKILL: All right, super cool, super cool stuff, guys. (Applause.) So, let’s have a big hand for the partners. Thank you very much for all coming up and participating. You did an awesome job. Thank you so much. (Applause.) You heard from them things like thinking through compensation models, thinking through how you set up your sales force, thinking through how you differentiate your product offerings.
You know, I love the Fujisoft. They set up Google and our BPOS offering side by side, and they used that as the way to show the customers that they were getting less than what they already had and they were crazy to even think about using Google.
So, we’ve talked about the opportunity, and we’ve talked about the path. Now what we want to talk about is the means, the means for how we’re going to get there. And let me tell you, we’ve got the means. We have the enhanced partner network that we’re adding in new support for a cloud strategy with a host of new tools and new resources that are going to help partners like all of you in the room make the successful transition to the cloud business.
We’re going to do this in four ways, so four key opportunities or four key additions. First, we’re going to help you on how you plan to build your business before you jump in, and think about where to invest.
Second, we’re going to help you with building the brand around your business so your customers are going to know that they’re in good hands.
Third, we’re going to get you the tools you need to support your customers as they go through the transition to the cloud.
And fourth, we’re going to get you the tools that you need to succeed running your business in the cloud.
So, let’s take a look at some of these in detail. First up under the plan bullet, two key tools we’re giving you to help you plan your transition. The first one is Business Builder for cloud services. These are the partner opportunity guides to describe cloud opportunity, and they describe cloud opportunity by customer type for four key markets: small business, mid-market, enterprise and public sector. But, within each of those guides, they go into specific partner type details. So, whether you’re an ISV or a hoster or a reseller or whatever, there’s a section for you and your business related to that set of customers. And these are ready right now.
Next, the Partner Profitability Modeler. The Partner Profitability Modeler is a tool that provides a financial estimate of Microsoft’s partner new business opportunity. It provides a confidential and detailed three-year quarterly profit and loss estimate, including revenues, costs, margins, ROI and investment analysis forecasts.
This tool is also available now, and it’s a really important tool that partners are starting to look at as they start to think about how they transition again their business from a financial standpoint to the cloud.
Next, around the brand, we’ve got some key changes that we’re making here, four key changes. The first one is two major add-ons that we’re making around MPN. First is the Microsoft Cloud Essentials Pack, and the second one is the Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner badge. The Microsoft Cloud Essentials Pack is a free one-year subscription that provides the software training, a cloud roadmap, internal use rights, support, testing, development and marketing resources.
The Cloud Accelerate Partner is a new badge that we’re introducing for our most committed cloud partners. They’re going to receive that badge. They will qualify for this badge by giving sales targets and business plans for either Azure, Microsoft Online or Intune. And when you do this, you’re also going to get marketplace priority and Pinpoint and Solution Finder.
Both Essentials and Accelerate are launching here at WPC, and the Accelerate brand itself will be available in November when we do the MPN renew. But current active partners can qualify for the badge even sooner.
Now, internal use rights — and just over the last 24 hours talking to partners about the sorts of things that you’re struggling with, internal use rights is on your minds.
So, what I’m here to tell you is, I think fantastic news. If you join cloud add-on pack or Cloud Accelerate, you’re going to get internal use rights for Azure, for BPOS, for CRM Online, for Intune, as they become available. So, today, we’re going to announce that you’re going to get 250 licenses for internal use for BPOS, and you’re going to get 250 licenses for CRM Online. OK, pretty exciting stuff. (Cheers, applause.) BPOS alone is worth say 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year, 250 people. That’s $25,000 worth of software just in BPOS. Then you get CRM Online, and you’re going to get Intune, and you’re going to get Azure, as well.
We’re doing this because we want you to be running on our latest software. If we’re all running on the latest and the greatest, we’re going to do a better job of going out and evangelizing to customers. So, we think that that’s a really important thing.
And if you want additional seats, you’re going to get them at the partner preferred pricing. OK?
The next enhancement I want to talk about is Pinpoints. FY ’10 has been a phenomenal year for Pinpoint. We drove 380,000 prospects to partners in FY ’10. Two hundred and fifty thousand of those came from Pinpoints, and Pinpoint is only available in five countries. So, tremendous excitement and tremendous success, but only in five countries.
For next year, we’re expecting to get to 685,000 prospects out to the partners. And you know what, I think we can do even better than that.
But the thing that’s really exciting, I think, is that we’re going to be rolling out Pinpoint into 46 countries for next year. So, while I realize that’s not everybody in the room, it’s a big, big improvement of where we’ve been.
And what I can tell you is Pinpoint partners, those who have their profile updated, they get eight times as many leads as those who don’t, and you get an average of 150 leads per profile.
So, I really want to encourage you to get up on Pinpoint, get your profile up-to-date, and we want to start passing you those prospects.
OK, next, supports. We’re going to provide a wide range of tools to help partners both drive the deals, and then, once you get the deals, to be able to manage the customers from a support and deployment aspect because we know this is a big topic for partners.
We have some key announcements in this area. Number one, BPOS readiness workshops. BPOS readiness workshops, they’re designed to provide sales and deployment training to partners. This is 100- and 300-level courses covering deployments, covering support for BPOS solutions, helping you to compete and to value, compete and value on positioning.
This training course is going to be available to Cloud Accelerate partners. So, again I want to encourage you to get up there and register for Cloud Accelerate.
The second one is the BPOS Practice Accelerator. And, like the other practice accelerators that we’ve done in MPN, the BPOS Practice Accelerator is designed for Cloud Accelerate partners to help them build and launch a BPOS solution delivery practice and help shorten their time to market. So, it’s got a comprehensive set of reusable tools, offering best practices, and it’s delivered through Live Meeting.
Next, presales and break/fix support. Again, as I spent time over the last 24 hours talking to folks, my friend Tomas, who I think is sitting over here, I saw him this morning, Tomas Lynn from Taiwan was telling me, “You guys need to do a better job of supporting us and helping us when we’re trying to win customers, and we’re trying to help them deploy successfully.”
So, we’re going to do that. Number one in presales and break/fix support, Cloud Essential partners are going to get access to online presales support, and then Cloud Accelerate partners are going to get unlimited presales phone support.
Microsoft Essentials and Cloud Accelerate partners are also going to receive unlimited phone support on trials and on break/fix support on BPOS deals.
So, that’s a big, big deal, and I think you should be very excited about that. We believe this is going to allow partners to quickly and effectively position BPOS solutions, and resolve any issues that come up while they’re going through trial and managing into deployment phase, something we think that is very important to help customers have a great experience out of the box.
A couple claps? Yeah, no, that’s pretty good stuff. (Applause.)
OK, the next is deployment support, and coming in again around the Cloud Accelerate program, Cloud Accelerate partners are going to receive 24-hour support as part of the program benefits. Partners can use these benefits to help on BPOS deployments.
In addition, to help build partner expertise on BPOS, Cloud Accelerate partners are going to receive proactive support for deployment based on the size of the deal that starts at 40 hours per deal for deals over 500 seats, going up to deals that are greater than 2,400 seats, you’re going to get 160 hours of support per deal.
You know, and again from what I’ve been hearing from all of you, this is a really, really important thing. So, I’m very excited to be able to be here and announce that today. (Applause.)
OK, lastly, the means. We’re going to provide the means for you to succeed running the business with three new tools.
Order on Behalf. Those of you who have been already doing work with BPOS have experienced the Order on Behalf tool, and this is a place where we’re seeing enhancements happen regularly. Every 90 days, they’re taking feedback. Those of you who are on the Intune trial, you heard yesterday about the feedback they’re taking on the admin tools as well.
So, Order on Behalf has some really cool things that ensure that you are going to be the partner of record. We know how important that is going to be for you, so you need to ensure that you’re going to be the partner of record.
And we can do that by doing things like creating a marketing link when you create your own marketing campaign that does things like put a link into an e-mail that you send out to customers, so that when the customer clicks on that link and starts a BPOS trial, you are automatically registered as the partner of record, and you will be able to maintain partner of records and get the follow-on business that comes from that.
Next, I want to talk about — did I skip over Admin on Behalf?
BPOS sales dashboard. OK, BPOS sales dashboard makes it easy for partners to manage their sales pipeline, again something I’ve been hearing from you. It’s got a new quote section. So, whenever you go out and you do a quote, it’s going to help you again in a single-view track the various quotes you’ve got out there, what stage they’re at, and which ones are resulting in actual follow-on transactions.
There’s a customer search feature inside this that gives you a new customer detail view, and it will show you by customer name or by contact name what the status of that particular opportunity is by partner.
Admin on Behalf. So, as you start to get into running the system, and particularly for small- and mid-market accounts, they’re counting on you to become their IT support. Admin on Behalf is a critical, critical feature. And this lets you take over the administration of your customer’s online services for them.
The big thing here now is, one, you can sign in once and manage all of your customers from a single pane, from a single portal. And it really helps you to own that relationship, which we understand how important that is.
So, the three pillars we talked about. We talked about the opportunity. I showed you that it’s going to be huge, billions and billions of dollars of partner opportunity out there. We took a look at the path. We looked at those seven partners who have done this already successfully and have made this transition, and then we looked at the means, the tools and the programs that we’re delivering to help you make the transition.
So, the opportunity is there, the partners have blazed a path, and the means to enable you to be successful are waiting for you.
Now, people often ask me, what does it take to be the best partner? And I got asked this three times yesterday: What do I have to be to be your best partner, Jon? What’s it going to take to be an advanced partner? What’s the recognition we need to do? So, we worked up a slide here that is the characteristics of what we see as the most successful partner.
So, number one is currency. Are you guys on the latest and greatest software? So, the work we’re doing here with internal use rights on the online components I think is really important. But we need you to be running our latest and greatest software. And I’ve been out in the last year, and I’ve seen partners that are still running Windows XP, and I’ve seen partners whose websites are running on Linux. And you know what, those folks, they’re great folks, but they’re not going to be our best partners because we want you running on Windows Server, and we want you running Windows 7, and we want you running BPOS, and we want you running CRM Online.
The second part, leverage MPN, leverage the MPN tools to drive the new business tools, such as that Practice Accelerator that I just showed you.
Number three, the Microsoft stack, and figure out how you’re going to differentiate within your own business. It’s really exciting to me — it’s just talking to all of you about your particular business because you’ve all figured out your niche in the world: construction, you know, telco, multimedia, working with television stations. Everybody is figuring out their niche in the world. And the most successful partners have a clear understanding of where they are operating.
Using the brand to differentiate. OK, and with that, we’ve got — sorry, I skipped over a slide there. Back us up.
Important announcement we’re making this morning around the MPN brand, and that’s that we’re changing the brand, and we’re dropping the network off of the logo. And this is based on the partner feedback from many of you in the room that have come back and said, “Look, I’m a Microsoft partner, I’m not a network, and what I want to have on my business card, I want it to say Microsoft partner.”
In addition, we’re adding the gold and silver competencies. Those are the brands you’ll have, sub-brands to being a Microsoft partner. And then, we’ll have the gold and silver differentiation with the competency, the advanced competency next to that, so business intelligence, gold business intelligence, as we’re showing here, or the silver search competency. So, I hope you’ll be excited about those changes.
OK, next, the best partners are out taking share. They’re going head-to-head with us against the competition.
And let me give you a great example of this. Yesterday afternoon at the barbecue, I was talking to a gentleman who came up to me and said, “I am the largest VMware partner in Scotland.” And I was like, “Well, that’s great, tell me what you’re doing, tell me what you’re working on.” And he said, “Yeah, well, I’m moving to Hyper-V, and I’m moving to System Center. I’ve seen the light, and I’m going to be with you, and we’re going to go back and we’re going to take share from that VMware base.”
Those are the partners that we’re going to love the most because, together, we want to grow our business, we want to grow the pie, but we also want to go out and we want to take share.
Next, partnering in the network. You know, things like the IAMCP are fantastic opportunities for you to build your partner-to-partner connections. Go out there and figure out how to enhance your own business capabilities through utilizing partners in the network.
Customer satisfaction, another important differentiator. We’re driving hard on this, and we need your help. Nothing less than excellence is going to be what we strive for in this space.
And then lastly, challenge us. E-mail me. Talk to your PAM. Give us feedback so that we can continue to improve. I hope you see from all of the changes that I’ve just walked through here we are trying to listen, we are being responsive, and we’re delivering the goods. So, we really want to get that feedback.
OK, so before I send you off for the day, I want to leave you with this thought. Microsoft, we started 34 years ago, and we realized right from the start that we couldn’t go it alone. To succeed and drive the innovation we need to have a vibrant partner community in every corner of the globe. And together, we’ve been through many transformations. We went through the PC DOS to GUI transition in the early ’80s. We went through the client-server transition in the mid ’80s. Then we went through the Internet transition in the ’90s.
The transition we are on right now has never been clearer to me than right now at this show. It’s right there in front of us. Each transition we have gained share, we’ve expanded our business together, and we’ve brought more opportunity and seen more mutual success.
So, together, we’re going to succeed in this transformation to cloud. We want to do it together. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END
