Jon Roskill: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Introduction

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group, Jon Roskill. (Cheers, applause.)

JON ROSKILL: OK, please join me in another round of applause for our country award winners. (Cheers, applause.)

And now I’d like to ask you to join me in congratulating the global award winners. These are partners that have delivered amazing solutions, really showcasing the innovation that we’ve done with our products over the past year. So congratulations to our global award winners. (Cheers, applause.)

[Awards segment.]

JON ROSKILL: All right, thank you so much, all the award winners. Please, everybody, join me in one final round of applause congratulating all of the award winners. (Applause.)

(Cheers, applause.)

So we’re starting WPC exactly as we should be, by celebrating you, our partners.

Good morning! I’m Jon Roskill, and I am so excited and so proud to be able to welcome you all to WPC 2013. (Cheers, applause.)

Thank you all for being here. I know you’ve taken the time out to invest with us, and it’s your most important asset, so we really, really appreciate that.

The last couple of days as we get ready for this have been just fun, amazing. Getting to see so many familiar faces, walking around, playing golf yesterday, you guys make quite an impression. Let’s take a look at who’s in the room with us right now.

Anybody here from IMCP? (Cheers, applause.) Sounds like they’re sitting over here. All right, welcome, IMCP.

One other group I want to ask us all to give a special look out for are our first-timers. We have almost 3,000 first-time attendees at this WPC, and you can identify them because they’re going to have a red lanyard. And we all know that WPC the first time around can be a little overwhelming. So I want to ask you, all of you, please keep an eye out for these folks, help them along.

So every year at WPC we also come together to give back, and this year we’re doing that through our Partners for Youth challenge. You can help us raise money, up to $100,000, for local youth organizations through this Partner for Youth challenge. It’s a great opportunity to give back, and the Microsoft YouthSpark team is going to match your contributions up to $100,000. So that would be $200,000 for local community youth. I know you guys think big. This is an opportunity to give big. It really will make an impact.

To get ready for this event last night, thinking back, what a year it’s been. What a year it’s been since Toronto. And, you know, I really get to reflect on it and think about a truly pivotal year in our transformation to a devices and services company. And we’ve brought together just some amazing products that we launched together. Let’s take a look at some of the fun from the last year.

(Video segment.)

(Cheers, applause.)

JON ROSKILL: In a year of amazing launches you guys delivered. And so on behalf of our joint customers I want to just say a big thank you.

And then from Microsoft we also want to show you a little love as well. And so you might have heard that we’ve got a special offer that we’re making to you on the Microsoft Surface. It’s worth a value of almost $2,000, and we’re bringing the Surface to you here at WPC. You can get the Surface Pro, 128 gigabytes, for $399, or you can get the Surface RT for $99, 64 gigabytes, or you can get them both.

And we’re also hoping to have a special MPN sleeve available for the first 5,000. This is assuming they get through customs. We’re standing by on that one right now, so fingers crossed — fingers crossed. So again thank you.

Now let’s turn our attention and look forward, because while WPC is about celebrating, it’s also about us coming together to build our business plans together for the next year and kick off the fiscal year. That’s what WPC is all about.

And we’ve made a few changes in WPC, some of which you’ve already noticed as you look at things we’ve done in MPN today, but changes based on your feedback.

One of the key ones we’ve made is in the keynotes. You guys told us that you needed to have all of the product strategy upfront in order to be able to go and build your business plans over the remaining days. And so we’ve taken the day two keynote and the day one keynotes, and we’ve combined them together into a WPC day one supersession. So that’s what we’re going to do this morning.

Then you have day two fully open to go and do networking, go to sessions, and build out those business plans.

And then on day three we’ll come back together here with me, Kevin Turner. And then Wednesday night we will celebrate. And boy, are we going to have an amazing celebration. And by Wednesday night I’m going to be so excited to go crowd surfing with you guys.

We’ve also made this year ‘s WPC, we’ve built it around a customer-centric notion, customers at the center of WPC. And we’ve done that by basing WPC around these four industry megatrends: mobility, enterprise social, cloud, and big data. These are trends that are relevant every day to customers, and they’re driving demand for all of our solutions. So you’re going to see these four trends reflected not just in the keynotes and the sessions, but also in the expo across the commons, in the BG areas, et cetera.

We’ve got so much in store for you today. As I mentioned, we’ve got the supersession here this morning to kick it off. I’ll be back at the end of the supersession to help with a few announcements to bring it all together and help us put it into action.

Fasten your safety belts. Stick in those seats and get ready, because WPC 2013 is officially underway. (Applause.)

END

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