Remarks by Jeff Raikes, Group Vice President, Information Worker Business, Microsoft Corporation
Worldwide Partner Conference 2004
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
July 12, 2004
JEFF RAIKES: Well, I hope that I can get some of those people headed to the exits back into the audience. I’m a little worried here. You know, as I was coming up onto the stage, or getting ready to come up onto the stage, they said, “Knock them dead.” And I was thinking, gosh, if they don’t get me on the stage soon, we’re going to starve them to death.
So, I’m going to do my very best to, in the next, 40-45 minutes or so, do what I was asked to do, what I’m excited to do, which is to get you excited about the opportunity that you have to build great information solutions around Microsoft Office System.
You know, I had a chance to speak with many of you last fall at the Worldwide Partner Conference. That was a great month for us. It was October of 2003, it was the month of the launch of the Office System and Office 2003; it was a time where we talked about the transformation from personal, team and organizational productivity to using Office as a way to drive new types of solutions. And I was also very excited to share some of the partner momentum that was already underway at that time. People like Randy Schilling at Trilogy and the things that we are seeing with Immedient and OSIsoft.
Now, today, we’re going to build on that foundation. In my talk, what we’re going to do is to talk about the new and enhanced business value that you can bring to customers, and how that gives you new sources of profitability, great business opportunity for you. And in order to do that, we thought the best thing is not for me to give you a lot of numbers about billions of dollars in services revenues. You can read that from Gartner or Forrester, or the others. What I want you to do is to hear from your colleagues, to hear from other companies that are learning how to deploy, train, and then deliver comprehensive solutions for productivity of information work.
And the main thing, I’m going to come to it right now, the main thing I’m going to ask you to do is to achieve at least one IW solution area competency, achieve at least one IW solution area, hopefully more, that you can use as a way to grow your business. And so, today we’re going to focus on learning, and how to take advantage of the investments that we’re making so that you can help customers realize gains in productivity and build and deliver great breakthrough solutions.
Now, as I mentioned, the key to this is transforming Microsoft Office. We talked about this a little bit last fall. Office has traditionally been viewed as a client suite, a set of desktop applications, but in fact, with this Office Systems transformation, now it’s applications, it’s servers, it’s services, it’s a way to do and build on native XML, to use VS.NET tools.
Historically, Office has been thought of as personal productivity, but with the office’s transformation it is now viewed, in addition to personal productivity, [as] collaborative, team, and organizational productivity. And in particular, for you our partners, Office historically has been viewed as licensing and training services, very important, but now it’s also the opportunity for solution development, enterprise integration, deployment services, building on the SharePoint technologies.
You heard from Paul Flessner this morning, my colleague, and there are millions of Windows 2003 Servers out there just waiting for you to turn on the SharePoint services capability. You’re going to see today how you can use Office for smart-client application development, how you can take advantage of XML, building smart documents, where you’re actually programming the application of Word and Excel and InfoPath and other members of the Office Suite.
I’m excited to say that many of you have already caught on. Last fall I think we talked about maybe 700 solutions. There are now almost 2,500 solutions and service offerings that we’re aware of, that are on the Microsoft.com Web site. We talked about some of the people that have been trained. There are now 70,000 people in your organizations that have been trained on how to use Office systems as a solution area. And we’re seeing this across customer segments, we’re seeing it across verticals.
In the area of portals, companies like Meridio and KDS and Trilogy and HP and Avanade and SPI Razorfish and EDS. In the area of enterprise project management, P-Cubed, Immediate, Project Assistance, Quantum PM. In the area of business intelligence, Panorama, ProClarity, OutlookSoft, Business Objects, all great examples, and there are many, many more of companies that have figured out how to take advantage of the Office System to increase the value that they deliver to their customer.
And today I’m excited to tell you we’re continuing to build on that. We’re announcing today a strategic agreement with British Telecom that shows the future of information work. They are adopting Office Live Meeting, the live-meeting service, not only to save money in their internal organization, but in conjunction with their audio-conferencing business, and to make Office Live Meeting their lead Web-conference solution. So these are just some examples of the great momentum that’s out there.
The best thing, though, is to hear from your colleagues, to hear from our partners that have already decided to make the leap, and are seeing the profitability that they can get form this investment. I wanted to hear why they invested in Office System, why their solutions will resonate, or are resonating with customers. And it’s so much better for you to hear it from them. So let’s go ahead and roll the video.
(Video segment.)
JEFF RAIKES: So my congratulations to all of those partners. The common theme was they saw that by focusing in on information-work solutions built on top of Office System that what they could do is really raise their profile in delivering business value to customers. Instead of focusing in just on the IT-infrastructure side, they saw that they could raise the business value added, talk to business decision makers, more than just the CIO, and be able to bring new sources of profitability.
So I want to say thanks. Thanks to all of you who have already made that bet, and I’m an optimist, thanks to all of you who will be making that bet after you hear more about these opportunities today, and at this conference.
Yesterday you heard from Kevin Johnson, who spoke about the go to market initiative. That is so important, and I want to emphasize that today, and in particular the connected productivity go-to-market. As Kevin said, this is an opportunity for us to build on the business partner lifecycle, and in particular have alignment of our technology, and our marketing initiative, not only does that allow us, together, to be more successful, but we form closer relationships with the customers, and our other partners. It’s a way for us to really understand who is focused in on the business of information work solutions.
One of the questions I want to answer is, how does Office connect? I’m very pleased to say our business group is one of the first to offer the information work competencies. In other words, we’re one of the first to deliver a competency as part of this framework. It’s an opportunity for you to really develop your skill set, related to the various information work solutions. And here are some of the areas, connected productivity is the lead, and I’m going to spend a lot of time on that, but there’s also the opportunity of portals, enterprise project management, the Office Live Meeting services, connected systems, like business intelligence, and integrated .NET applications.
So there’s a tremendous opportunity for us to work together as we align what we’re delivering, in terms of technology components, what you’re doing in terms of building solutions, and how we work together to go to market and succeed.
So let me dig in to connected productivity just a little bit more. First, I’m going to give you an overview. Our goal, the goal that we share together, is to motivate customers to try, deploy and adopt Office System. Of course, the best way to do that is to focus in on the business solutions they will have on top of Office System.
We want to reach out to the expert information workers, not just the power users, but the 30 to 40 percent of the broad information worker population that is ready to adopt solutions that will help their personal productivity, or their team productivity. So we’re putting in place those scenarios so that you can clearly communicate the business value opportunity that comes from building on Office System. Of course, what that will do is it will get those customers to move to the latest versions of our technology, Microsoft Office System, Office 2003, Windows SharePoint Services, Windows Mobile, OneNote, Outlook, and to really emphasize the point, to really work together with you in creating this demand, this opportunity, we’re going to put more than $100 million into a global advertising program to communicate the opportunities of connected productivity. Why are we doing this, because together we have an issue.
Some people out there think that what they’re using is good enough. Old versions of Office, old versions of Exchange, old Windows NT, but the opportunity to really advance productivity comes from using the latest capabilities that we’ve provided combined with your services for the right solutions. Together we show the business and productivity value of the Office System, and in particular your services built on the Office System, to build solutions, to get people deployed, to get them trained, to provide the support.
The partner opportunity, the opportunity for you is to tap into the significant investment that we’re making, so that people see that the old stuff is not good enough, the new opportunity, the new business value capability comes from what you can do with Office System.
Now, one thing I think is very important to all of you is to know that this isn’t something that we’re just dreaming about. This is something that is already happening in the marketplace. And to really communicate this, we invited OSIsoft, who works for the company, their customer, Prasentia, in the energy business, a wind-power consultant, and they’re already showing the connected productivity benefit. So let’s go ahead and take a look at what OSIsoft has done to build a breakthrough solution for their customer.
(Video segment.)
JEFF RAIKES: A great example of the customer benefit that comes from connected productivity. Yes, they’re using Office Pro, they’re using the Windows Server System, they’re using Windows SharePoint services, but those are just enabling technologies for the solutions. And partners are making money today doing that.
So what are the opportunities that you should be focused in on, in order to take advantage of what we’re describing here. First of all, you have the obvious thing that you should be thinking about, Office System deployment services, the opportunity to use Windows SharePoint Services for workspaces, for improved file sharing, for custom information work solutions. Mobile workforce connectivity, you saw that in Doug’s presentation where he was bringing in the use of Smart Phones. Then, of course, Office System end user training.
Again, I want to share with you a couple of partner examples. A great one is Unisys, many know the name, have known the company for a long time, but what you may not realize is that Unisys today has 80 percent of their business coming from services. They’re one of the largest business process outsourcers in the world, handling more than 50 percent of all check clearing. They’re one of the largest IT outsourcers in the world. In fact, they manage over a million PCs.
What they wanted to do is they wanted to build on that desktop practice, expand it to an even higher value-add. So building on their packaged offering of Windows XP and Office 2003, they’re helping customers to accelerate the desktop deployment, but in particular, because they’re thinking about the business solutions that come on top of that, vertical solutions for financial solutions for financial services on Office System, vertical solutions in the area of healthcare or others, for their business. A great example.
Another great example is Dell. Dell we think of as a computer company, but they are also a systems integrator, mid-market through enterprise. And they’re looking at the evolution from personal to team productivity, taking advantage of the Office System with OneNote, Office Professional, and Windows SharePoint services, and they’re using that as an entry point for deeper services engagements, in particular the portal opportunity. So another good example of how partners are looking at Office System as a way to grow their business.
Now, the next thing I want to do is I want to show you how the connected productivity go to market fits in, and is a foundation for what we’re going to do with the other, deeper opportunities that you have. We have the opportunities in the portal areas, Office Live go-to-market, the Enterprise Project Management go-to-market. These are all built on that foundation. So from there, you can extend from personal productivity to team productivity with the connected productivity marketplace, and then go to organizational productivity. Really thinking about end-to-end solutions that integrate line of business applications that improve business processes.
Another couple of great examples: Immedient is the U.S.-based systems integrator, and what they did is, they were able to take their business from just focusing in on infrastructure and custom Web development, the .NET area, to enterprise project management. That is now their No. 1 growth business, and they have more than a $10 million pipeline, and they’re building on top of these enterprise project management opportunities with SharePoint Portal Server.
Another good example is Vorsite, a company that Microsoft didn’t even have a relationship with, is what we call an unmanaged partner. Absolutely, we now have a relationship with Vorsite. They focus in on the enterprise area. They have financial services verticals, pharmaceutical focus, what they wanted to do was move to more profitable, higher value solutions. And they did that by building on the Office System, and Windows SharePoint Services to take people from collaboration to full SharePoint Portal solutions. And so now their average engagement exceeds a million dollars, because they’re able to deliver on these more complex solutions and are more profitable from that kind of deeper engagement.
So, these are all very good examples of how partners today, partners that we can all learn from, are building on the Office System for their business.
I want to talk for a moment about Office Solution Accelerators. These are a very important tool for all of us, accelerators. They accelerate the customer understanding of business value. They accelerate your ability to close the engagement, and they accelerate your path to profitability. We’re continuing to invest in the solution accelerators. Getting the road map very much aligned with the IW competency solution areas. And you can start using the accelerators today, download them, use them. You can extend them, you can build on them. It’s a way for you to demonstrate to your customers why the investment in the Office System, and your services for the solution for information worker productivity is so valuable. You can customize your pilots. You can do prototypes and speed up your engagement. That is an opportunity, and in addition you can give feedback to us about what are the solution accelerators that are most important to you.
And one of the things that I want to emphasize is that today we’re making a very, very important announcement. We’re announcing the general availability of the Information Bridge Framework. The Information Bridge Framework is a way it’s an integration accelerator that you can use to more rapidly build solutions that will deliver on one of the most common points of pain for customers. And that common point of pain is the challenge of being able to get connected, get their users connected, with business process systems, and business applications systems that have that deeper insight that will help them be more productive.
So, what I want to do is, I want to show you a little bit about how Smart Documents and Office Systems, the Information Bridge Framework, come together to address that pain. Let’s go ahead and switch to the demo machine. I’m going to bring up to start with Microsoft Outlook. And, of course, Outlook is part of Office 2003, we’re really designed to help people more rapidly, more effectively consume the amount of e-mail that exists in our lives. For example, you see that I have an e-mail, I’m a customer service rep at Litware. And Robert Kelly has sent me an e-mail about a delinquent service request, and he’s able to use the flagging system in Microsoft Outlook so that I can see that he views this as a high priority.
Now, on the right, you see the reading pane, and so I’m immediately drawn to the information about this delinquent service request. And I don’t know a lot about Contosa, but you can see that there’s a Smart Tag. And so I click on the Smart Tag, and I show the details about Contosa. And now, the Information Bridge Framework comes into play. Here you can see this floating task pane that has the important information from Contosa. That came from Microsoft CRM, or it could have come from Siebel, or it could have come from another CRM system. And so, instead of, as an Office user, having to switch over to some other application, I’m able to work right from within the context of the Office user experience.
I can look at the account detail. I can look up the contact. You see Gretchen who was the sales representative, or sales manager, who sent in the information. I can look up the opportunities that are underway. You see that we have some very important opportunities, the licensing renewal, bids are open for service contracts, and of course as the customer service manager at Litware, I want to make sure that we’re putting our best foot forward, and that we quickly resolve this service problem that we’re having.
I can look at the service request. Again, the Information Bridge Framework is connecting me to these other business application systems, back-end systems, bringing this information right to me. And here I see the service request that I got e-mail about, and I can kind of see the problem. It was opened on June 15th, it’s almost July 15th, and it isn’t resolved, and it’s been set as a low priority.
So, I’m going to bring that up. And here, again, is an example where I might have to go to another system, an engineering change management system, maybe UGSPOM or maybe Dassault. Instead, what I’m doing is, I’m just connecting right to those systems using the Information Bridge Framework. And I see here that on the service ticket the priority has been set to low, so what I’m going to do is, I’m going to make that a critical priority. We need to solve this for the customer. And you can see that right from the Information Bridge Framework, I can go ahead and I can actually take action. I’m not just getting passive information, I have the ability to program a solution that will actually interact with those back-end systems.
Now, as part of our customer service process at Litware, if I’m going to escalate, I need to explain the escalation. And this gives me an opportunity to show you how InfoPath, one of the new applications in the Office System, is used in the solution. InfoPath is an electronic forms product, centered around XML. And here I see an escalation incident form. And, once again, you’ll notice that Information Bridge Framework gives me the consistency across all of my applications. Again, I have all of the account details. I have the contact information. And, it’s also contextually supported programming. So, when I click in InfoPath on Jay Adams, an engineer, I can see what are other service engineers are available, and I can actually look at their service assignments. Again, Information Bridge Framework is tapping into the service system so that I can take a look.
So, I see that Jay Adams is pretty busy, so Russell King doesn’t have very many service assignments, in fact, he’s available right now. So, I’m going to go ahead and set him as the active engineer. The information bridge framework goes back and sets the form, Russell King is now the assigned engineer, and of course as part of the process I need to explain why we are going to escalate this, I think this is a very important issue, and so I go ahead and submit this form.
Now, as I submit this form I’m actually saving this on a SharePoint site that we all can use, but my job is not done. Yes, I’ve taken a look at the situation, I’ve changed the priority, I’ve reassigned the engineer, and you can see how quickly I was able to do that as a user. You can imagine how quickly using Office and Information Bridge Framework the solution was created, but I’m not done. I need to go ahead and respond to the customer. So right from the information bridge framework I can call up an action, in this particular case to create a letter. This also gives me another opportunity to show you Microsoft Word as a part of this solution, and the Smart Document capability.
With Microsoft Word and Smart Documents, I have XML; in fact, you can see there is an XML schema that’s associated with this Word document, there’s all the tags, and over on the right-hand side the document action pane, I have the Information Bridge Framework information. In fact, if I click on Contosa, it’s contextually sensitive, so there you see the account details on Contosa, the same thing I saw on InfoPath, the same thing I saw when I was in Outlook. Similarly, I can click on the service ticket request, and I can get that same information in Information Bridge Framework.
Now, our company, like many companies, has worked on how we want to respond to customer issues, we’ve run that through the legal department. So in order to quickly respond I can just draw upon all of that approved textual information. I’m going to apologize to the customer for the delay. I’m going to explain that I’ve expedited their issue, I’m going to explain that we have reassigned the engineer. So I’m just drawing upon these text components to rapidly build a response letter.
In fact, I can go down here, and I can choose between different closings, closing one, closing two, I like closing one a little better. So now I’ve completed my letter to the customer. And when I go out and save this, I have the opportunity to save it right to our Contosa SharePoint site, where we have all of our communications with that customer. I’m going to go ahead and rename this to SR-245797, and now I’ve saved the document to the site. But, you’ll notice that SharePoint provides the opportunity to use the metadata as a way to initiate additional actions. It wants to know, how would I like to communicate with the customer? And that’s saving me a lot of time, because it’s using the Information Bridge Framework to pull the information about the fax number, the e-mail addresses, and give me various options. Fax it, I’m going to e-mail a copy to the customer as well, and I’m going to e-mail a copy to the account executive. And just like that, because of that programming, I was able to go ahead and complete this task.
Of course, one of the other things that we do for this kind of a customer service solution is we notify everybody of the escalation of this incident. So I’m going to go ahead and synchronize my e-mail, and there I have the e-mail that was initiated by the SharePoint site when we saved the incident form.
Now, I’m kind of wondering, is this a one-off problem or is this a systemic problem that maybe needs action? So I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to click here, and what that does is that brings up another accelerator. This is a scorecard accelerator that we have released, and it’s a great example of how you can take an accelerator, build on top of Windows SharePoint services for a great way to put together a score card for customers. In this particular case we have all of the score card information related to the service request. We also worked with a partner from Sweden, VPM, that helped us with these Web parts.
What I’m going to do is, I’m going to look down here on the scorecard and I see that actually overall our service request response time is pretty good. Our resolution time is about five days, which is under our target, and so the status is green. But, I also notice, over in the upper right hand corner, that the South region has a lot of outstanding service requests, about 36 percent. The way these Web parts work is, I have the ability to take action, in this particular case I’m going to filter to dig into the South region. And whoa, I see a problem here. This Web part shows me the engineer utilization for the South region.
In fact, the Web part was designed in the context of this site to give me some actions. I’m going to go ahead and send that to some folks, in particular the customer service leadership team. I’m going to bring that up. This is now Microsoft Outlook. I’m going to put the subject as the issues in the South, and explain that we need to investigate these issues. OK.
Now, I could just go and do what we normally do, which is to send this as a static attachment, but actually what I want to do is I want to have a shared attachment, something that we’re all collaborating together on. And this gives me the opportunity to show you another important capability that you have with the Office System and Windows SharePoint services. I’m going to create this as a document workspace. And when I send this mail, it’s now a live attachment. In fact, what it’s done is it’s automatically provisioned a Web site, a SharePoint site, called a document workspace, where we can all collaborate together. In fact, let me bring that up.
Here you see the site that was just now provisioned. I have the Web part, in fact, you can see it right there. I have the team member that I’m working with. We can collaborate together, do announcements, assign tasks, put shared information, documents that are associated with digging into this issue. So right from within the context of Microsoft Office I’m able to create a SharePoint site, and initiate collaboration.
So through the integration accelerator, and the scorecard accelerator, you’ve seen how with Office System and Smart Documents you can rapidly program a solution that really makes a difference, that uses Office System as the front end, lower training costs, lower deployment costs, faster solution time, higher value for the customer, more profitability for you, all working within the familiar Office environment.
So how can you learn more about these opportunities? The first thing we want you to do is to visit the Office Pavilion while you’re here. You can also go to the partner site on Microsoft.com under Competency, and look at the IW competency. Remember, our No. 1 goal was to get you signed up to do at least one solution area in the IW competency. I’m committed to helping you achieve success, so is my team. We want you to understand the opportunities, and if you make the commitment to get up to speed, to skill yourself in one of these solution areas, we’re going to make the commitment that we circle back to you, that we have the right engagement, and that you have the satisfaction that this is a new profitability opportunity.
You need to get out there and make sure that you’ve deployed Office 2003 Professional in your organization. You should be using SharePoint, if you have it. You can download it as part of your partner kit, or you can actually do a SharePoint trial. If you go to www.sharepointtrial.com, you have the ability to give SharePoint a try in a hosted situation.
That’s on the technical side. Now, let’s talk about the sales and marketing side. We want you to leverage our campaign materials. Kevin showed you the upcoming partner marketing tool, and how the information worker business group is going, and we’re providing from the information worker business group, the kind of tools that will help you on market deployment, on how to market portals, on how to market enterprise project management. We want you to take this and build your custom offerings, but leverage off the marketing materials that we’re putting in place.
Of course, engage with your local Microsoft office. We have our business productivity sales force, we have our partner account managers, again, let me give you another example. Unique World, a certified gold partner in Australia. In the last 18 months they have doubled their revenue, because they established an Office System practice. And what was their success formula?
They established a competency in four of the Microsoft Partner Program areas, they’ve engaged with Microsoft Australia in the go to market activities of the subsidiary, and in particular they’ve used the Office System and services on Office System as a foundation to create an ISV arm. What they’ve done is they’ve done is they’ve taken SharePoint portal server, and used Office System as a front end to document management systems that are commonly used by different parts of the Australian government. The key thing is they invested in the competency, 18 months later, twice the revenue.
So in closing, I want you, all of us in Microsoft want you, to take advantage of the investments that we’re making, help customers realize gains by building and delivering breakthrough solutions. Today we talked a little bit about how things have transformed, or transpired since last October, how the Office System is now a foundation for the kind of solutions that you can use to deliver high value to your customer.
We talked about the significant investment that we’re making in connected productivity. We talked about the significant opportunity out there, millions of Office 2003, millions of Windows Server, but what we can do is together we can deliver better solutions, higher business value to customers, by using these as components. You can deploy, you can train, but in particular, you have the opportunity to deliver comprehensive solutions for the productivity of information work.
So again, I want to say we look forward to working with you. Leverage our marketing and sales investments, help customers realize great business value, and productivity gains, by you building and delivering breakthrough solutions with our help.
Thank you very much.
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