JON ROSKILL: All right, Satya, thank you so much.
So an amazing morning, lots and lots of content. I told you it was a super session. You know, we had touch. Clearly we’re in an inflection point around Cloud OS and Office 365.
So I just wanted to touch on four important points, really announcements that are made today, that are really going to help you as partners put all of this into action.
No. 1, Tami mentioned the Touch Wins program. The Touch Wins program is about pouring gasoline on that touch fire, millions of dollars of incentives that we’re going to put in place for authorized OEM distributors and resellers that are reselling touch, featured touch PCs and tablets with Windows 8 Professional. So that’s the Touch Wins program.
The second program is around our own tablet. Our own tablet, of course, is the Microsoft Surface. And last week we announced availability in the United States of the Microsoft Devices Program. It’s our first step into commercial distribution for the Microsoft Surface, something partners around the world have been asking me about since we first put Surface in the market last fall.
So I’m very excited to be here today to tell you that we’re taking the Microsoft Devices Program, the next phase, 28 more countries by the end of September. And you see that featured on the map above me. Again it’s a thoughtful phased approach of bringing business customers, commercial customers the Microsoft Surface.
The third announcement, and this one is also super, super important for Microsoft partners, is around Office 365 Open. And Tami touched on this but I want to be really clear on this, that we’re making the announcement today of availability of Office 365 E1, E3 Pro Plus, plus Government and Academic SKUs, all of those SKUs are going to be available in Office 365 Open. (Applause.) That’s right. Now, that’s a big deal because Office 365 is already one of the most heavily incented products that we have, and this is just going to massively expand the surface area for partner opportunity around Office 365 through Open licensing.
The second pieced around that, though, is we’re also going to make available transition SKUs. We’re finding that a lot of customers, they get into something like Small Business and they want to go to Small Business Premium. And previously you haven’t been able to do that. And now partners are going to be able to offer those transition paths to customers as well.
So that’s Office 365 Open. This is something you guys asked about all the time. So I’m super excited to be able to come here and talk to you about this.
All right, the last news of the morning is around profitability. And partners who have worked with me, you guys know core to my job is focusing on your profitability. And also since I started the job three years ago, it’s been cloud, cloud, cloud, right?
So really excited to be able to announce today the release of an IDC cloud partner profitability study. We’re releasing this up onto — it will be up on DigitalWPC.com. I’ll talk more about it on Wednesday. But the insights in the study are just amazing. You know, one that Satya touched on, partners doing more than 50 percent of their business in the cloud are growing 2.4x, 240 percent more than partners that aren’t, OK? So you want to be thinking about the cloud obviously. This study helps quantify all of that.
All of these announcements are up on my blog. You can get to that from DigitalWPC.com.
Amazing morning. Thank you so much to all of you for sticking with us. Have a great WPC, and I’ll see you back on Wednesday. (Applause.)
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