Jon Roskill: Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 – Day 2

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jon Roskill. (Applause.)

JON ROSKILL: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to WPC 2011, day two. How’s everyone doing? (Cheers, applause.) All right, I expect that worked you up a little bit. DynaVox: another fantastic partner story about winning together. Like the Japan story we heard yesterday, sometimes winning together is more than just about winning in business. Sometimes it’s about enabling potential, sometimes it’s about changing the world, and DynaVox is an example of both.

I’d like to say thank you to Tina Guo, our cellist, just off an appearance with the London Symphony Orchestra, and Allison Iraheta. (Applause.) Allison Iraheta is a singer with an American Idol finalist, and yeah, great, great energy there, very exciting to start the show that way. Feel very privileged to be able to work with people like that.

I also have a bit of news hot off the press to share with you this morning. Right here, the mayor of Los Angeles has declared it Microsoft Partner Week of Los Angeles. (Applause.) Here’s the proclamation. WPC 2011 is the biggest show that’s going to happen in LA this year, so big thanks to all of you for joining in. That’s a big, big achievement, obviously, lots and lots of things happen in LA every year. So for us to be the biggest is pretty cool.

All right, yesterday’s keynote set the stage for today. Yesterday we heard Steve Ballmer talk about the future and how that future we’ve talked about for the last two years is happening right now.

Then Tami Reller came out and talked to us about the opportunity with Windows 7 and the successes that partners are seeing right now, and then talked about the opportunity and how that sets us up for “Windows 8.”

We celebrated the new innovation awards with partners. We had a fantastic awards lunch. We then went to the business model value keynotes and throughout the entire day, we celebrated partner success.

Last year, we introduced major program changes to MPN. We introduced a program based around competencies. We asked you to embrace MPN, and you responded. Competencies and industry specialization are about differentiation. Customers want solutions; partners want to highlight their capabilities and their industry insights. The new MPN was built to do that.

Over 6,000 partners gained more than 8,000 competencies last year. So let’s have a hand for all the Gold partners out there. I know many of you are here in the room. (Applause.) And over 14,000 Silver partners attained more than 31,000 competencies last year. Again, a hand for the Silver partners. (Applause.)

Over 20,000 of you have taken advantage of our cloud programs, Cloud Essentials and Cloud Accelerate. All together, over 40,000 competencies have been achieved. As we redesigned MPN, we also had to redesign the recognition program. Please join me in recognizing each of the 2011 Industry and Competency Award Winners.

(Award Winners segment.)

JON ROSKILL: Another hand, woo! (Applause, cheers.) Industry and Competency Award winners. We’ve got my friend, Steve Clayton, sitting over there right now with a couple of them. Let’s go ahead and hear from Steve and the partners.

STEVE CLAYTON: Thanks, Jon. Good morning, everybody. So literally hot off the stage, I’ve got John and Angel here, so congratulations, guys, terrific. John literally walked off the stage and said to me, “I wish I could do that every day.” So not quite sure we can set that up but glad you enjoyed your time up there on the stage.

So a couple of questions for you guys. I’m interested to know, John, from you: How has the last 24 hours been? What have you enjoyed here at the conference so far?

PARTICIPANT: It has been awesome. We are so fired up and so thankful for this award. We want to thank Microsoft, we want to thank all of our clients and partners, and most importantly our family and friends that have supported us.

STEVE CLAYTON: Fantastic. Angel, you’ve clearly had a great year, so what does the next year kind of hold for you guys? (Cheers.) We’ve got some fans back in the audience there. So what’s the next year hold for Rock Solid? (Cheers.)

PARTICIPANT: Well, we did it last year, we are here again, so that means we have to do it next year. So we are real excited to repeat this.

STEVE CLAYTON: Terrific. John, back to you. What’s kind of the key takeaway that you’re going to apply to the business this year? And then same kind of question to you, Angel.

PARTICIPANT: Cloud. (Laughter.)

PARTICIPANT: In our case, partnering. I mean, we have opportunities to partner with people in Australia, Argentina, Spain, Mexico, so we’re very excited about that.

STEVE CLAYTON: Fantastic. Thanks, guys, congratulations again. So the key takeaways, cloud and the partner network. You know, we’re going to hear a lot about that today. So with that, I’ll take it back to Jon up on the main stage. (Cheers.)

JON ROSKILL: All right, thanks guys. (Applause.) Really important achievements from each of those partners. Let’s give them one more hand. (Cheers, applause.)

All right, so together we have been on a journey. There we go, get the slides to move. We started two and a half years ago. We saw the introduction of huge datacenter investments to support cloud services. We saw new products such as BPOS, Azure, CRM Online, and you saw us invest in marketing campaigns to build customer awareness.

And now we’ve added Office 365. Do you guys feel the momentum? Do you feel the momentum? (Cheers, applause.) Come on, can we have some momentum? Woo! (Cheers, applause.) Nobody else is even close. Nobody else is even close. It is my opinion that Microsoft and our partners are being massively underestimated right now, massively underestimated.

The momentum is growing among partners. Let me give you three examples. Start with Cloud Essentials and Cloud Accelerate, those cloud programs I mentioned earlier. We announced them last year at WPC, and those programs are there to arm our partners with the information and the products they need to add cloud services to their portfolios. Over 20,000 of you took advantage of those programs in the last year, 20,000. Very smart.

Quote on behalf. Partners took advantage of the quote on behalf features in the BPOS sales dashboard over 47,000 times last year. Each time a partner did this, it generated a quote that went to a customer, encouraging them to try and to buy. If the average deal size represented just 20 seats, that would represent 10 million seats of cloud services.

Pinpoints. Over 80,000 of you have profiled your solutions on our Pinpoint Online catalog. From those Pinpoint catalog descriptions, we have generated over 900,000 leads — over 900,000 leads that went to you, the partners. From those leads, over 200,000 deals were closed. So momentum is building, your capabilities are building.

Partners taking advantage of cloud benefits closed more cloud deals, and they have higher close rates. You’re going to want to make sure that you’re taking full advantage of all of our cloud programs. Why? Because this is a business professional we need to serve together. She is smart, she’s connected, and she expects everything she needs on every device she touches. She wants her applications on her phone, she wants her social information on her computers, she wants her business applications at home or at work, she wants content of any type delivered wherever she is whenever she is. Daunting expectations. Daunting expectations that bring huge business opportunities and explosive growth.

Today, we’re going to talk about how Microsoft and our partners are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this huge opportunity. Today’s keynotes will deep dive into each of these topics. We’re going to start off with Satya Nadella, and Satya’s going to talk about the core platform technologies, the base platform layer.

Then we’re going to be joined by Kurt DelBene, and Kurt’s going to talk about the productivity layer that sits on top of those base platforms.

And then we’re going to be joined by Kirill, and Kirill’s going to talk about the Dynamics business applications layer that sits on top of both of those.

And then wrapping it all up, we’re going to be joined by Andy Lees and Steve Guggenheimer, who are going to bring it all together, showing us how new devices and the world of mobility are driving new partner opportunities and powerful new solutions.

You guys ready to get going? (Cheers, applause.) All right, let’s go ahead and get it started, thank you very much. (Applause.)

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