Remarks by Jon Roskill, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group
Los Angeles, Calif.
July 11, 2011
GENKI SUDO: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my honor to introduce your host, Jon Roskill. (Applause.)
JON ROSKILL: Good morning WPC 2011. You guys pumped? (Cheers.) Welcome to Los Angeles, thank you to World Order, thank you for that fantastic musical introduction. Sometimes, changing the world is what we’re about. We’re about more than business achievements. Sometimes, it’s about enabling people and truly having that level of impact. We have a record number of partners here from Japan. Partners from Japan, please stand and let’s recognize you. (Applause.)
Yesterday was also an example of the kind of things partners do every day that goes beyond just business. Yesterday’s Day of Giving carnival helped raise money for the Boys & Girls Club of Los Angeles County and the Magic Johnson Foundation. We had a lot of fun; the kids had a lot of fun. There were games, there were contests, and the Danish team — Danish team out there? (Cheers.) The Danish team brought lots of Legos. Thank you, LA, for welcoming us to your community, and thank you to all of you, all of you partners who came and participated. Thank you for helping to give back.
Now, assisting us today throughout the conference is Steve Clayton. Steve Clayton is Microsoft’s senior storyteller, and he’s here to help us make sure we connect the dots and that we listen carefully to what you, the partners, have to say to us. So please say hello to Steve. (Applause.)
STEVE CLAYTON: Hey, Jon, great to be here with the crowd. After three years in our U.K. partner business, I’m excited to be back amongst friends. It feels like 15,000 of our family are here. I’m going to be around for the next three days here in the STAPLES Center on the show floor, at the convention center, the solutions innovation center, taking your feedback and getting that back up onto stage.
We’re going to be having a conversation around this conference, so send us your feedback through Twitter — we’re on Digital WPC. You can send us feedback using the hashtag WPC11; we’re looking forward to hearing everything you have to say, getting that up onto stage, and answering your questions.
Back to you, Jon.
JON ROSKILL: All right, thanks, Steve. So this conference over the next several days is all about how we are going to win together. Winning together. There are over 12,000 partners here in Los Angeles. Together, you represent over 120 countries from around the world. Most of you are line-of-business executives or CEOs of the firm. So this is very firmly a conference about business.
You’re here representing many industries: Representing healthcare, financial services, government, education, and we have virtually every partner type here represented, as well. We have distributors, we have OEMs, we have lots of resellers, and we have ISVs. But I want to highlight the Microsoft learning partners that are here today. Any learning partners out there? (Applause.)
Critical time right now for the learning partners. They are partners that enable other partners with technical and business skills. So as we talk about transformation, I want to make sure you’re thinking about the learning partners in that context.
We also have a record number of Dynamics partners here today. Anyone out there from Dynamics? (Cheers. Applause.) Okay. I want to highlight one thing from Dynamics. The Dynamics referral program. Partners referring the Dynamics opportunity receive a 5-percent referral bonus. You find an opportunity, you refer it, 5 percent of the deal.
In the first six months of running this, over 750 of these deals have been submitted. Last year, you made over $10.1 billion in partner-to-partner activity, and those numbers continue to grow. The overall partner-to-partner opportunity is huge. There are over 25,000 partner-to-partner connect meetings being scheduled already here at WPC. So I want to make sure that all of you get out and take advantage of that opportunity.
Now, you here, together, you in Los Angeles, you report the elites. You are the elite, the elite of the largest technology ecosystem in the world. Together, the 12,000 partners here represent 640,000 partner organizations around the world. The 640,000 organizations are made up of 15 million employees — 15 million employees serving government, business, not-for-profits, organizations of every size.
Winning together is the theme of WPC 2011. Winning together and changing the world. Winning together means generating growth, generating good profitable business together. For every dollar Microsoft makes, partners make $8.70. For every dollar Microsoft makes, partners make $8.70. This translates into huge economic impact. How big? $580 billion. The ecosystem drove $580 billion in total revenue.
To frame this for you, if we were a country, and we stacked ourselves on the worldwide GDP stack rank, we would be number 19 sitting there between Indonesia and Switzerland. So I hope that gives you a sense of how big we are. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. (Applause.)
Now, over the course of the past year, I’ve been lucky enough to travel, get around the world and meet many of you. I’ve learned about your businesses. I’ve learned about the opportunities you see, the challenges you face and the ways that partners are literally changing the world all around us. It’s impressive. It’s really impressive.
I saw a lot of fantastic examples of partner success, and you’re going to see many of those over the next three days here at WPC. Here’s one: EasyWay (ph) from China. They’re a solution partner in China. The customer is the Chinese Ministry of Railways. Chinese Ministry of Railways required high-speed integrated data services to meet their growing needs for their high-speed rail.
Together, we face stiff competition against VMware service providers. When I say VMware, that’s when you all go (hisses). Okay, let’s try it again. Together, we face stiff competition from VMware service providers.
AUDIENCE: (Hisses)
JON ROSKILL: Not too bad — we’ll work on that way.
But EasyWay’s superior solutions along with SharePoint and Lync won the business. EasyWay and Microsoft: enabling high-speed rail to the Chinese people. EasyWay’s CEO Dong Yang (ph) is sitting here today. Over here. (Applause.) Nice job on the win.
So how does Microsoft stay in touch with so many successful partners? How do we do that? Well, there’s this organization out there called the IAMCP. The International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners. (Cheers, applause.) There we go! Can you guys guess where they’re sitting?
The IAMCP is an independent organization that supports partners worldwide. They provide us, Microsoft, insight on partner challenges and opportunities. Steve Clayton is sitting down with some of the IAMCP representatives right now. Take it away, Steve.
STEVE CLAYTON: Thanks, Jon. I’m down here with Kerry and Jeff, the incoming and outgoing presidents of the IAMCP. So just had a question for you guys while we’re sitting with 15,000 of our friends. So, Kerry, as the outgoing president, what’s your kind of thoughts and advice to our 15,000 friends here?
KERRY GERONTIANOS: Well, first, I just want to thank Jon for giving us an opportunity to be up here because we are about P2P, so our members really drive themselves in creating new partner opportunities. So what Jon talks about in terms of the amount of revenue, that’s our key focus. So our membership has really driven a lot of success. It got us to be recognized by Microsoft. I couldn’t be more proud of that.
So I ask everybody here at the show to come and see who we are, look at a little more information about us. I also want to highlight that we have a real advocacy role, too, as Jon mentioned. So we help fine-tune the voice for Microsoft, bring it out from the partners into Microsoft in a very crisp way and couldn’t be more proud of our membership, couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished over the last decade.
STEVE CLAYTON: That’s fantastic, thanks, and congratulations with your time as president. So, Jeff, looking over to you — you’ve got big shoes to fill here. So what are your kind of ambitions, your goals, what’s your message for the partners here today?
JEFF LOUCKS: Well, certainly, they are big shoes. The big shoes of all the predecessors, whether they be from EMEA, the United States, from Latin America, we’ve had a lot of great leaders. And certainly, I’m very proud to have been honored with the responsibility.
But as we look at a crowd of 15,000 energized partners who are looking to grow their business, and they’re hungry to do that, the IAMCP is really the opportunity to find that new growth potential. Certainly, we’ve seen some partnering studies done by IDC, one which was written by my colleague here, Per Wengren, and it says that the IAMCP members are growing at 19 percent faster than their cohorts, and it’s because we’ve embraced things like P2P.
But we have an even greater opportunity as the 20th economic engine in the world — we have an opportunity to seize that voice. And it takes partners getting involved with the IAMCP and stepping up, being board members, and being members so that we can grow that voice and really have a strong voice in the global impact that we have on the quality of life and productivity that we influence around the world.
STEVE CLAYTON: That’s great. Thanks, gentlemen, congratulations to you both. Big round of applause for these guys. (Applause.)
We also wanted to make one quick shout-out. Down here to my left, we’ve got a bunch of students of a business program. You’ll see these guys all in blue T-shirts. We’ve got 200,000 students registered in our students of business program. Give them a big hand. (Applause.)
You can find these guys on Microsoft.com/S2B. With that, I’m going to hand it back to you, Jon.
JON ROSKILL: Okay. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Kerry. Thanks, Jeff. And welcome students, clearly they’re out to be hired, so that’s great.
I actually heard from French partners the other day. They told me the single toughest thing they had right now is hiring enough good people. So maybe that’s part of your pipeline.
So let me tell you all a bit about the next three days. Your input drove WPC structure and content. Your input. We’re to start off day one with Steve Ballmer. And Steve’s going to show us the future is happening right now. The future that we were talking about two years ago, last year, it is happening right now, and the opportunity that presents.
Steve’s going to be joined by Tami Reller, and Tami Reller is going to show us about the success that partners are seeing today in the marketplace with Windows 7 and how that sets us all up for success with Windows 8.
You asked us to show you about new partner opportunities. And that’s what day two is all about. Day two, you’re going to hear from the Microsoft business unit executives, and they’re going to be speaking about solutions — solutions in public cloud, solutions in private cloud and continuing to drive our on-premises business. And then how we serve that all up to mobile devices and PCs.
Then you asked us how to partner, compete, and how do we deliver all of this. And that’s what day three is all about. Day three, I will start out with a business discussion about aligning our joint priorities, our priorities around growth, around profit and around overall marketplace relevance.
Then Kevin Turner’s going to join us, and Kevin Turner, like last year, is going to talk about winning together and what we need to do to get after that competition.
And then lastly, we’re going to be joined by our special guest this year, our guest keynote, Sir Richard Branson. And Sir Richard Branson is going to talk about investments, taking risks, and he also knows a bit about what it means to win together.
And that’s just what’s going on on the main stage. There are over 100 breakout sessions each day, 22 regional keynotes and country breakouts. We’ve got the first mobile Microsoft Store happening right here at WPC. On Wednesday, there’s a women and technology luncheon.
I heard from a lot of you that you wanted a bigger partner celebration on Thursday. Does anybody want a partner celebration on Thursday? (Applause.) I heard you guys said we wanted bands. So we got not one band, but we’ve got two bands for you. We’ve got Los Lobos, and we’ve got Smashmouth planned at the party on Thursday, and it’s going to be great. (Applause.)
And then we’ve also brought you the biggest solution innovation center ever, and it’s going on in the partner expo hall. Let’s take a quick look at what’s going on there.
(Video segment.)
JON ROSKILL: Okay. Thanks again, Steve. Be sure to spend some time at that solution innovation center tomorrow and, actually, over the course of the whole conference.
So WPC collectively offers you an incredibly rich set of content and resources that are all about accelerating your business and helping you connect to Microsoft. Take full advantage of that.
Now, this conference itself, it happens at a point in time, a point of significant transition in the world of IT. Microsoft has always been a leader in each of these major technology transitions over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, from PCs to client-server, from client-server to the Internet, and then the transition we’re in the middle of right now driven by mobility and the cloud.
Through each of these transitions, Microsoft has been challenged and has succeeded by executing on a unique and consistent strategy. We developed platforms, DOS, Windows, NT, Xbox, Internet Explorer, and now Windows Phone 7 and Azure as examples.
We enable partners. Every one of those platforms enables profitable partner business models, and we are the only company out there that does this while generating 95 percent of our revenue with and through partners. 95 percent plus. (Applause.) Yeah. That’s a good thing for all of us. Remember, that’s how we get that multiplier, the 870 multiplier to get to that $580 billion, all right?
Now, last year, Steve Ballmer announced at WPC 2010 that we were all-in on the cloud. And so here we are at WPC 2011 — let’s take stock of where we are. We surveyed some of you coming into this conference and what you told us was that 58 percent of you are working with the cloud today. So that’s pretty good, 58 percent of you are working with it, but you’d still characterize it as more opportunistic than core to your business.
We are going to give you even more compelling reasons during the course of the next three days to continue making the transition to the cloud. This year, in addition to the cloud track, the cloud is baked into every session at WPC. And as we continue this journey, we’re starting to see some absolutely standout successes of partners winning in the cloud.
Let me tell you about Parallels. Parallels is a leading hosting and cloud service automation vendor. They enable over 5,000 service providers, and together with Microsoft partners, they serve over 15 million users worldwide.
Parallels provides infrastructure that allows service providers to speed the time to cloud from months to days. The result is a partner-to-partner example of winning together with more customers faster.
Apptix, the Microsoft partner in this case, used Parallels to create one of the largest partner-hosted cloud environments for Exchange in the world. 350,000-plus mailboxes, 20,000-plus customers. These guys are an example of success right now, driving growth and making profit in the cloud and being very, very relevant in their marketplace today.
Now, you’re going to hear more about winning together right now from our CEO Steve Ballmer coming up next. But I want to wrap up by saying, WPC, it’s about winning together, and WPC 2011 brings you all fantastic opportunity. Over the next three days, we’ll show you how to take advantage of what we believe is the opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you all so much for being here. Hang onto your seats, and have a great WPC 2011. (Applause.)
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