Accelerating success and achieving new heights with cloud and devices
Hong Kong, 11 September – Microsoft Hong Kong today gathered with more than 900 partners at Microsoft Channel Partner Kick-off (CKO) 2015. Under the theme Accelerate Your Success (with Cloud & Device), the CKO this year upholds its mission to share new opportunities for partners to grow their business in the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and win together with Microsoft to achieve new heights. At the same time, Microsoft also shared its success in the cloud market for the past year, reinforced its bold ambitions going forward, and gave out 16 awards to top-performing local partners at this annual event.
In Hong Kong, the cloud market growth achieved together by Microsoft and its partners was impressive in FY15. The cloud market had a triple digital growth and the cloud mix is over 20% in that period, with a record high revenue by the year’s closing. This result is undoubtedly supported by 800+ local partners selling cloud. Since the launch of Azure Open Partners in FY15Q2, Microsoft’s Azure partners reached 300 in past 10 months, while Office 365 partners increased the customer base by 3 times YOY.
“The theme this year, ‘Accelerating Your Success”, captures our long-term commitment to help partners succeed in growing their cloud business,” said Horace Chow, General Manager of Microsoft Hong Kong. “We thank our partners for helping us reach a record high year, as well as growing cloud as a mainstream business in FY15, and we look forward to achieving new heights together in the future. Microsoft is the only company that has the breadth and depth of technology and expertise to offer a one-stop-shop platform, from infrastructure to applications, for partners and our mutual customers to embrace cloud and transform their businesses. No other company does better than our company when taking the technology we have and making it available to every company in every vertical industry in all parts of the globe.”
Some new attractions announced included FY16 flagship product launches such as Windows 10 and Office 2016, as well as the launch of the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. CSP is a new global partner program to increase and improve existing Microsoft partner sales channels, with a dedicated goal to deliver more integrated and value-added cloud services to customers embracing the cloud journey.
Microsoft’s Bold Ambitions and New Partner Program
Microsoft has introduced its core ambitions in context of how to empower partners and customers to thrive and differentiate in the new digital age, which encompass more personal computing, reinventing productivity and business process, and building the intelligent cloud. These three interconnected ambitions reflect a unique set of assets that span productivity services, cloud platform, device platform and the family of devices. Therefore, under the company’s new ambitions, Microsoft hopes to achieve breakthroughs in its cloud offerings to end customers. After listening to feedback from its partner channel, Microsoft built and launched the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program as a new partner sales channel to deliver better cloud services to end customers.
Under the CSP program, partners and resellers are encouraged to deliver value-added services, building on top of Microsoft products as a foundation, while taking total ownership of customer relationships and sales cycles. The benefits of this program will be heartfelt by the customers, especially small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), who are the target customers of CSP. Customers will be able to enjoy more flexible billing, 7×24 customer support, and value-added services to standalone Microsoft products like Azure or Office 365. The CSP partners will be able to form cloud solution packages with various added services to deliver true one-stop-shop experiences to customers adopting cloud technology. In turn, CSP partners and resellers can capitalize on every cloud opportunity and make bigger impact on their customers like never before.
Ingram Micro Appointed as CSP Distributor
Ingram Micro (Ingram) is appointed as Hong Kong’s CSP distributor. The company has been a long term Microsoft commercial distributor, who has worked closely with Microsoft from the headquarter level to local level to drive the landing of this program in Hong Kong. As CSP distributor, Ingram continues to serve as a distributor in the market with its established reseller network, helping Microsoft to source and appoint appropriate CSP 2 Tier resellers, which will make up the majority of the partners in the CSP mode.
“We see great values and new opportunities in the CSP program for resellers who are looking to grow their businesses with the booming cloud market,” said Dirk Doets, Senior Managing Director of Ingram Hong Kong. “The Microsoft CSP program is designed to strengthen customer relationships and expand cloud sales by allowing channel partners to provision, bundle, invoice, manage and support Microsoft cloud offerings with greater ease and efficiency. Channel partners are able to maintain complete control of the pricing, billing, and support for Office 365 and can also bundle the service with other cloud solutions on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace giving them all of the tools to lead a successful and healthy cloud business.
As a pioneer in the local CSP program, Ingram has made several investments to this new Microsoft business model, the most notable being the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. The Marketplace is an online platform that enables CSP resellers to easily provision, manage and invoice a range of cloud solutions from one single portal. Channel resellers can now benefit from the Marketplace through the profitable CSP program in a self-service fashion through Ingram Micro’s automated Cloud Marketplace. In addition, the Marketplace also features add-on solutions and bundles, such as the SkyKick[1] x Office 365 bundle, leading to simpler, more efficient and more secure email migration for customers moving to Office 365.
KBQuest Winning ‘Country Partner of the Year 2015’
KBQuest Inc. is one of Microsoft’s best-performing cloud partners, who has consistently won a number of awards such as the Best Azure Partner over the past few years. Today, KBQuest was announced as the “Country Partner of the Year”, the most prestigious partner award, for its business transformation and evolving business model to succeed in this cloud and mobile era. Based on its deep-rooted connections with customers, KBQuest sees that they must evolve their business model to adapt to the growing customer needs of more integrated solutions and value-added services on IT. For example, instead of a deal-by-deal sales cycle, customers nowadays are looking for more managed services, like packaged cloud service solutions and packaged product implementations. Therefore, KBQuest revamps their business engine to provide end-to-end cloud adoption services to the customers, managing the entire sales journey from advisory, design, implementation and migration, to after-sales support and further utilization.
KBQuest’s business transformation to deliver more managed and integrated cloud services to customers has proven to be a huge success for the company. Through Microsoft cloud business, KBQuest has witnessed five times growth in local staff size, five times annual revenue growth rate annually, as well as ten times more project enquiries than it had before. At the same time, KBQuest sees CSP as a good sales channel which is closely aligned with its own vision of the cloud market and it looks forward to having more opportunities to drive bigger impact and business values in the cloud.
“Thanks to our clients and Microsoft, KBQuest is extremely honored to receive the recognition from Microsoft as the Country Partner of the Year 2015.” said Eric Moy, CEO of KBQuest, “We will continue to work tirelessly in providing clients with the best class IT solutions and services.”
Microsoft’s partner ecosystem is one of the largest in the industry. Today, it has more than 1700 cloud partners enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Networks. As announced at CKO, Microsoft is equipping its partners with a robust lineup of additional resources, focusing on building partners’ soft skills on cloud solution selling, while bringing in innovative channels such as digital marketing to help all partners achieve more.
[1]SkyKick provides a new kind of migration application that significantly reduces the effort, risk, and cost of email migration projects to Office 365.
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About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
About Ingram Micro Cloud Ingram Micro is a master cloud service provider (mCSP), offering channel partners and professionals access to a global marketplace, expertise, solutions and enablement programs that empower organizations to configure, provision and manage cloud technologies with confidence and ease. For more information on Ingram Micro Cloud, please visit www.ingrammicrocloud.com.
About KBQuest
KBQuest was founded by a group of IT professionals in the United States, with headquarter in Los Angeles and offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It provides high quality IT consulting, system integration and software development services to leading US, China and Japanese companies, specializing in cloud technologies, mobile solutions and enterprise systems design and development.
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Elaine Zhang
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Email: [email protected]
