Simon Witts: Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2006

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2006
Simon Witts, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise and Partner Group
Boston, Mass.
Thursday, July 13, 2006

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Simon Witts.

SIMON WITTS: Wow, it’s a complete privilege to be at the conference with you, to meet so many of you, and now to have the chance to talk. I want to talk about selling. I’m going to talk about selling the People Ready Business, and what it can mean collectively for our growth. I actually think it can help us win in the enterprise, and you suddenly think, win against who? And there are a number of good players. I respect most of them every day like you do. But, in many senses I think IBM represents the heritage of the winner in the enterprise.

Now, I think we have better technology; we have better partnerships, clearly, and hence better solutions. Now, the tough piece is the strength of IBM’s relationship, and I’ll come back to that, because we have to respect that deeply. The thing that’s been frustrating to me, frankly, and chatting to many of you this week frustrating to you historically has been, even if IBM doesn’t have the best story, and collectively we have the best story, somehow they seem to tell a better story than we do, time and time again.

So I want to start a new era, where Microsoft and our partners not only have a better story, but collectively we tell a better story. I think the People Ready story is going to fuel us for the next era of winning, and seriously great growth.

Now, I believe our growth ends up being your growth. And I want to deeply thank you for the last few years, I’m being very careful with my language here, meaning not just last year. I want to thank you for helping Microsoft grow our business, and hence grow your business in the enterprise. We’ve had the same double-digit growth for the last three years. So thank you, thank you, thank you. (Applause.)

Nice compliment in the intro there, but I’m very proud the Microsoft Enterprise Team has an association of winning with partners, and that really does mean we’ve all contributed to these kinds of numbers and growth. Having said that, while we look forward in the opportunity of selling People Ready to businesses, we will up this growth by at least to 15 percent compound annual growth inside the enterprise. And I want to talk very clearly to you today at two levels.

I want to be super clear on what the opportunities are, and I want to be super clear on how I think we can approach them. I think what’s in it for you, frankly, is to get more return out of the investment you make with Microsoft in the partnership. And I think we have something special, we clearly have something unique in my view. I think People Ready is a real vision for business, and I think collectively we can start to deliver on it today.

So I want to talk about how we do that, as Allison says, not just through how we communicate in the market, but something more deep-seated than that in front of the customer, with the customer conversations we know we’re going to have. And I love this, because it all starts, as Steve said, in many senses from a founding principle of Microsoft. I think our company stands for empowering people through great software, and that in one sense starts with an orthogonal position from how IBM starts to think about it. And now if we can apply that to business, I think this will accelerate our collective growth.

So what’s the story? How do you have the story, the conversation, with the customer? We actually start by a discussion, not just of People Ready software, but what it means to be a People Ready Business. And it’s incredibly important to start with the fact that we’ve got to embrace not just business process to get better as businesses, but the business practice. It always can’t quite be defined, it’s not so narrow, it’s maybe more ad hoc, and more realistic, more agile, more collaborative. Many companies are starting to realize that it’s a thing that you can’t quite describe that really is happening out there, and at the end of the day it’s people. It’s people that are accelerating the most impact on the most important business outcomes. And we’ve got to have that discussion, frankly, with our customer about are they betting on their people or not.

The next part of the discussion goes into understanding the broadening role of software, not just to automate process, or give people personally productivity, but now huge areas around how people can work together, and collaborate, how you can set an environment for compliance, how information and insight can be shared, how people can work anywhere. And you’ve really got to get a company into a view of understanding that, that software can now amplify the impact of people on the business outcomes. And really it’s a discussion about betting on software.

Lastly, it’s basically demanding better solutions. We’ve talked really clearly, I think, at the conference about what can now be done. The example I sell most, as the sales executive at Microsoft, is what I call CRM done right, where you really connect the personal workflow with the enterprise workflow, you start to deliver role-based relevance through scorecards and price line discipline, and you really talk about how CRM can be done, when you stop and think about these new waves of software.

It’s really all about betting on the attributes of our software – innovative, well-connected, familiar, and easy to use – and frankly, it depends on really betting on our partners for these new solution types.

So when you get into the opportunity with the customer, and what are we really selling, I’m going to present it in two forms. I’m going to talk about selling the platform to the business, and I’m going to talk about selling the infrastructure to IT. And it starts with the platform.

I think we’ve gone through the products really well over the last few days, and we’ve seen what’s possible from Vista, from Office on the client, and now the new suite of Office Servers. And I think we really have a proposition to go not just to information workers, but to business leaders on what this platform is capable of, in terms of driving top line business results.

The things I point out in the sales cycle that collectively we have to harness are these concepts of last mile productivity – the fact that we actually connect people with process, we actually allow the enterprise workflow and the personal workflow, and we bridge the gap that’s been existing, where many people have been disappointed with the business case for personal productivity, or process automation. And now we can really bring the reach and richness of those apps to a different level, and a different set of business outcomes.

The second one would be role-based, the personas you’ve been hearing about. In my case, CRM done right, what does the Office and SharePoint environment look like back to the legacy CRM for a sales professional, or even different sales professionals in that role. Ultimately, our belief, and talking to many of you now, your belief, is that this platform can be applied to any business process and can be applied to any role. And so the universality of what we’re doing here is very, very, very important, and I’ve come back to that in terms of our opportunity to grow.

Now, what’s the real point of the conference in my view, and the successful outcome of the conference is really talking to you about what it means, as Steve said, to go into new areas with us to take your strength, your solutions, and really take some bets to reinvent ourselves to this proposition and real fast. I am delighted with the discussions I’ve had here.

What I wanted to do quickly here, though, is to turn it into how do we really sell it, as we evolve the offering. The six customer campaigns are really the same as the sales priorities when it comes to selling to business. The way I describe them to our sales force, the discussions I’ve had with many of you about how we really go to market, are really quite straightforward.

Clearly, compliance allows us to start to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem, if you look at what’s going on in Office 2007 the client and SharePoint, really we’ve taken a game change there in terms of being able to install an environment of compliance with the customer.

On the mobile side, really two things are happening here that we’re picking up on. One is the ubiquitous form factor, so even if people want something that feels and looks like a Blackberry they can [get that], but really it’s also the advent that now we’re at par with mobile messaging, the fact that we have a better business platform, or applications platform as well as messaging. You’ll find that most of our customers when talk to their mobile workforce they want to take both scenarios and not just one.

Find, use and share information is all about not just bringing the strength of search technology to be able to find things also at work, it’s also embedding that in Vista, embedding that in SharePoint, and really the scenarios of not just being how to find, but use and share the information in a much broader way than just search.

The business performance is all about taking the strength we have with BI, and the SharePoint analysis and reporting and now exposing that through SharePoint, exposing that through performance points to really show BI to everyone, through the designer, where it can be used quite ubiquitously across, again, all processes and all roles.

The customer connection is, in my language, CRM done right. And the real business world, the real business processes, builds on our ERP and financial proposition that really, again, uses SharePoint and Office to connect through the line of business integration services of SharePoint, to connect the Office smart client with the middle tier, with SharePoint, and really allowing a new set of scenarios with the reach and richness of real business apps.

So we’re massively excited about selling with you in a very clear way to show off what’s possible for the platform for a People Ready business. Now, there are two things. One is, we always in reality go with an industry lens on this. Clearly, if you are selling to a pharmaceutical company we’ll have a different discussion, different proposition, ultimately, than selling to a retail bank or a high street retailer. The other reality is, we always have to sell to IT, and in many senses now we’re more dependent on the underlying infrastructure and its state of health to enable these things than we were in the past.

Let me switch gears and talk about the other propositions we have together, which is selling the infrastructure for a People Ready Business. Again, we’ve seen all what’s possible with the product this week, with SQL, with BizTalk, and with the Windows Server, and ultimately here we’re selling to development and IT. I would position that there’s really the core proposition we have together here is to start to build on this product set, and again, reinvent your solutions to change the discussion we have. The way I like to think about it, and the way we’re suggesting we sell it together, is to really separate out what’s core infrastructure, business productivity infrastructure, and also the application infrastructure.

On the core it will be capabilities like identity, access management. It will be things like server, desktop and device management. It will be things like making sure the network is secure, and ultimately what we do with data, in terms of backup and restore. On the business productivity, as you’ve seen, it’s all about unifying communications and fundamentally changing how people share things at work, through making the enterprise content management and the business intelligence part of what can be expected for any process or any role. Thirdly is the application side, where we look at a different way of doing data management, SOA, process integration, development, and the user experience.

The thing you’ll find across the proposition that has become very clear to me is what’s going to differentiate us in terms of building a richer infrastructure is the fact that we interoperate, it’s hugely important to say you can use AD with this other product not necessarily from Microsoft. It’s hugely important that we show openness here, as well as the fact that when you put the technologies together from us, and the way you’ve worked them into your solution sets.

We’ve got an optimization that’s possible in the infrastructure, not just within core, or within business productivity, or within the apps class, but frankly if we can take the characteristics of network access, identity management presence, and also take that into business productivity, the real integration between these layers of the infrastructure really starts to pay off, rights management there, as well. If we can take the forms architecture, or the workflow, that will change the kind of business applications we can deliver.

And the IT promises, essentially, to make the environment manageable, with agility, to make the data secure, protected, and fundamentally change the productivity of the people and the kinds of applications IT can deliver, I think we have a very, very real solution set here.

This all comes together through you, again. There’s no way this is going to work without you. And the way we’re going to sell this together  we had very good discussions this week. I feel the last year we’ve made very good progress at structuring how we will be selling core infrastructure with you. Those that have been in this area understand we go in and profile, and really discover the situation in a customer, and then show them through cost-driven models how they become secure and well managed.

And really we can start to look at this trend where over half the customers we know in the enterprise have basic infrastructure that’s basically non-instrumented, non-automatic, and basically manual and an increasing cost center. You know and I know there’s a trend here to standardize on fewer technologies and, frankly, fewer vendors, and really start to get that more automated and become more efficient as a cost center. We see this trend where also IT is wanting to rationalize the provisioning and say, hey, it might just be cheaper to make it available for everyone, don’t distribute Exchange, have a farm; don’t distribute SharePoint, have a farm; make rights management everywhere; content management everywhere. And so this centralization, if you will, is turning this into a business asset and not just a cost center that’s always interrogated every six months or every year. Finally, the path to being really dynamic, where there’s a strategic nature to what’s possible, and really fits within our vision of dynamic systems across the IT lifecycle here. So, very, very tangible tools here to help us sell together the cost-based models to advance or optimize the infrastructure and it’s having tremendous impact and results. I think it’s changed the way we are considered collectively in front of development and IT.

Now, I’m pleased to announce available now a partner infrastructure optimization kit. In here you’ve got the executive overview of all the models. You’ve got details of all the models. You’ve got all the profiling questions, all the tools, and really a complete set of PowerPoint and engagement models, and TCO calculators to really make sure much more broadly now we can engage IT through the infrastructure of the People Ready Business here.

Now, to demonstrate this, I’m going to ask Dave Karle to come up and to show this. Now, before I do it, we’re going to show a quick video, because we’re going to use the demo showcase for the rest of the morning, and I want to make sure we introduce the customers in there so that you can get a feel for the demonstrations throughout the morning before, rather than just me demonstrate the IT change, which I’m going to do with Dave now. So, can we roll the video, please.

(Video shown.)

Dave, these guys have hard jobs.

DAVE KARLE: They do, they definitely do. Thanks for having me up here, Simon.

Hello, partners, my name is Dave Karle, and I’m a product manager here at Microsoft. And as you saw in the video, (Tim Lippman ?), the CIO of (Fabercam ?), has many issues that he faces today, just like your customers. And so what I’m going to be showing you today is an opportunity to solve some of these issues, and for you to make money in the process. I’m going to show you three things. I’m going to show you first how you can help customers optimize and secure their core infrastructure; second, how you can help your customers do a better job with their business productivity infrastructures; and, third, how mobile brings this all together.

With that, we’re going to start on the optimization piece, and let’s talk for a moment about Vista and Vista deployment. Obviously that’s something that your customers and all of you are thinking about, and what we’ve done is, we’re addressing this issue. We’ve created a tool called the Business Desktop Deployment Workbench which helps you with image, configuration, and management. Right here on the central console what you’re going to see is, we have best practices, guidelines and tools to help you plan and execute deployments with your customer. Second, we actually have the image build and deploy process itself. First, we have a distribution share, where you can keep your operating system, applications, packages such as Hotfixes, and also your drivers. Second, we have a build environment, with a build wizard. It’s very straightforward and easy to use.

And what I want to show you here is a build that I made for Fabercam. And what I want to show you is this task sequencer. It allows you to set preconditions for the deployment, conditions for the deployment, and post-conditions. Last, you actually have to deploy it. And what’s really cool is, your customers may not have a high speed data network. If they do, you can certainly deploy with SMS or a share. Let me run the wizard here, and you’ll see I can do a deployment from the lab, from a share, from SMS, but maybe most importantly I can create a DVD that will then allow me to propagate a really great image that I know is solid all the way through the organization.

SIMON WITTS: And I understand it, Dave, BDD goes across Windows and Office, so this tool can really change the 

DAVE KARLE: It’s really a fantastic tool to simplify and make the deployment cost effective for you and your customer.

SIMON WITTS: Thanks.

DAVE KARLE: Now, the second thing we’re going to talk about today is securing your network. And what we’re really focusing on here is messaging security. Now, we have a new group of technologies that live at the edge of your network that allow us to do a number of things. Now, the first thing I want to talk about is spam. At Microsoft, we get 10 million e-mails every single day. 92 percent of those e-mails are spam – that is 9.2 million e-mails I don’t want to have on my network. So, if we can remove them before they hit the network, that’s a great story. And what we have here on our edge technology within the console is all sorts of native spam filtering. We also have the ability to discriminate specific e-mails. We saw in the video the AnnaKournikova.exe. A very common way to propagate a virus, coming through the e-mails, you have an attachment that’s an EXE. We can set a transport rule, and we’ll name it in honor of Anna, that allows us to see any e-mail that comes in that has an EXE in the subject field, and put that message into quarantine before we move it off to deliver it.

SIMON WITTS: Cool. So, how does this come together for mobile?

DAVE KARLE: Well, for mobile, we have some great solutions. The first thing that I want to show you is a Windows Mobile device that I have right here, and this Windows Mobile device is obviously a great messaging platform. It’s a great messaging solution, but it’s also a great productivity solution. Imagine your customer with their mobile sales force, or a mobile field force, they’ve got customer relationships they need to manage. And so the CMR 3.0 Mobile Client for Dynamics allows us to do that. I can go into the opportunity here, and what we can do is, we can open up Contoso. And within Contoso, I can take and update an opportunity. And when I’m done updating and save it, it gets propagated back to corporate, and anybody else that’s working on this account, of course, can see it, and it’s actionable. It’s really a great way to mobilize your workforce.

SIMON WITTS: And for IT?

DAVE KARLE: For IT, obviously, I’ve got critical corporate data on this device. So, how do we take care of this device in case I lose it? Imagine you’re at the big party last night, and you left your device sitting there at the party. And now, all of a sudden, you realize I don’t have my device, I can’t find it. Guess what, if I come to my management console here, what I’m going to show you is, from Exchange, I can enforce password policies on the device, I can also wipe the device from the Exchange console. But, with Exchange 2007, I can actually do more. I can go into Outlook Web Access, from Outlook Web Access, I can manage your device. I want you to imagine for a moment: you’re at the party, you’ve lost your device, and now you know you need to wipe it. Well, guess what, you’ve lost your phone, how are you going to call home? What you need to do is simply find a computer that has Internet access. In a lot of cases, in a lot of traveling scenarios, it’s actually easier to do. You run into the options menu, you go into mobile devices, and once you’re in mobile devices, here’s my device, I can choose to wipe all data from the device. You see a little dialog box, say yes. Now, I have a pending wipe going out to the device over the air, and the device is actually already wiped, so the device has already been wiped over the air, that fast, it only takes a couple of seconds. And this is really amazing technology. Now, all of your corporate data has been wiped off of the device, and now your entire network, of course, is safe.

SIMON WITTS: For helping IT with their pain, thank you very much.

DAVE KARLE: Thank you very much. (Applause.)

SIMON WITTS: So, I really believe the infrastructure optimization kit, and you saw an element there of the demo showcase, is really going to change the way we can sell together, and work in front of our customers in a seamless way.

Let me go on and just close here. Really, what I’ve been trying to do is to say how I think we can sell together, and how we can sell People Ready as a platform to business, and how we can sell People Ready as an infrastructure for IT, and how I believe deeply in the fact that it will change the game, and show us significant growth.

Steve referred on the first day to one of the go dos for the team, which was to go and sell the enterprise versions of our products. And I just wanted to be very precise as to what those look like. There is clearly now an enterprise version of Vista, which the difference really is the software assurance, and the annual additions we’ll make for IT there in deploying that version of Windows Vista in the enterprise, in the agreement.

Then there’s the enterprise version now of the Office 2007 client. I keep calling it client to differentiate it from the server. I think that is usually quite useful to change the perception of Office to client and server. And here I think the real breakthroughs are Groove for offline SharePoint access, and OneNote.

And then we have the Enterprise CAL Suite that goes beyond offering the core information and some of the elementary parts of business productivity into this all you can possibly ever want in terms of building out the core infrastructure and the business productivity infrastructure, all the security, all the monitoring of the client, as well as the server, all of the enterprise access to the Office servers of Exchange and SharePoint, as well as the Live server, and the onsite Web conferencing. For just $80, the customer can move from the Core CAL to the Enterprise CAL Suite. Today, we have about 40 percent of the enterprise under the platform agreement with the professional versions and the Core CAL. I see two things happening, I see the standardization on the core products increasing to maybe 50 percent or even 60 percent over the next three years, and I see this migration to the enterprise version, and in particular to the Enterprise CAL Suite.

Even if we got 10 percent of the market to that, this is where this confidence I have for the 15 percent growth  and remember we grow, you grow  so I hope I’ve been real clear about what the opportunity is with the platform and the infrastructure, and real clear with the approach, the sales policies for the business, the sales policies to IT.

Again, I think this is a game change, where you have the chance with us to change, in fact, the return you have on your investment in this partnership. I think it’s unique. I think our vision for business is real, and I think we can deliver on it today.

I said I would come back to relationships, because ultimately getting this kind of approach with our customers depends on relationships in this business, and this is where IBM is still very, very strong. And I just make the plea, if you don’t see us getting better at account management, or one account plan, or the way we manage the relationship with you and one business plan, or if you don’t see us get better at solution selling, and solution selling for us means partners, and you don’t see us wanting one pipeline effectively with you, then I don’t think we’ve made the commitments we need to make to remain partner-led, and to accelerate the business of all the companies here in this room.

Microsoft Services is a critical part of this. For us, it’s all about building confidence, trust, and loyalty inside our accounts as we put more people in the account teams, and everything we do for our customers is available for partners, and we really now need to accelerate the growth in the enterprise together, and I actually think the critical success beyond having the People Ready story and selling the platform and the infrastructure is strengthening the relationships we have with you and, hence, strengthening the relationships we have with our customers. We’re going to win. I couldn’t be more excited. I’m probably more excited now at the end of the Partner Conference to go to the sales conference next week inside Microsoft and just hit it out of the park, because we’ve got the best partners, the best strategy, the best story, and I can guarantee you, come with us. We’re going to have the best results. (Applause.)

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