‘It’s never been a better time’

By Helen Frost

Bringing together more than 640 delegates from 300 companies around the nation, Microsoft’s 2008 Annual Australian Partner Conference was the largest in the event’s 16-year history. Set in the beautiful surrounds of Port Douglas the conference was packed with informative keynotes and breakouts.

It was the first time Paul Voges, director of Small and Mid Market Solutions and Partner Group, hosted the event although Pip Marlow, former channel chief and current Public Sector director, was on hand to co-host the gala award dinner.

The special guest in attendance was Allison Watson, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group of Microsoft, and the key message was all about software plus services.

Software plus services has been touted as the next evolution for computing. It provides a way of delivering services via Software-as-a-Service, services-oriented architectures and web 2.0 mechanisms, across a range of access devices, browsers, and IT infrastructures.

Global scale

After addressing an audience of around 10,000 in Denver, Colorado this July, Watson flew to Port Douglas to speak to Australian partners and inspire them with the software plus services message that has already had a positive response from partners in the US.

“Partners are saying wow, we are part of the plan with you and they realise it’s a journey and most of them are saying okay, where do I spend time, where do I make the first kinds of investments? In Australia we see quite a bit of it. More on the global stage, in Houston a few months ago, but I think we will see more of that pick up over the next year as people really establish it,” explained Watson.

Commending the local partners she noted that Australia already has a great platform for Microsoft’s hosting channel. Over the past three months the vendor has completed the areas that are now packaged up around Windows Server 2008 that allows multi-tenant hosting and HMC (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5).

The two product families are included to offer hosting partners in Australia the chance to provide the same set of services today the vendor is providing with Productivity Online.

“There’s been big interest in the hosting market with partners saying ‘How do we grow? Where do we go? They had a fantastic year. I think we added 40 new hosting partners and have a total of 140 here in the Australian market. It is very strong, with a 70 percent year over year growth,” said Watson.

She believes that the decision to take up these offerings should depend on what business model you are already in today. Partners need to understand where their core competence is and need to extend from there.

“The best luck I find our partners have in the channel is when they really understand their core competence and how they make money. That they stay true to what they can be profitable at doing because a reseller model of profitability is different than a web partner profitability,” she said.

“The beauty of the software plus services model is whether it is hosted by a partner or hosted by Microsoft is all of the partners can play. It’s really the professional services business where the bulk of our partners will continue to make money with us as we move into software plus services.”

Grow your business

Understanding the partner community is one of Watson’s key interests and she makes sure she spends time with partners, finding out what they need from Microsoft. One main question she hears is echoed from partners around the world, ‘How do I grow my business?’

“I was talking to our hosting partners today and I said if you all want to think about growing your business here is what I would have you do. Become really good at marketing what you are good at because hosting is misunderstood, people don’t really understand what that word means.

Decide what you are good at and market it online quite well to customers,” she said. “The second thing is to reach out to ISVs. We have a rich eco-system of ISVs. Australia is both a good local ISV economy and a good global exporter of ISV technology. Reach out to ISVs who need a hosting platform for their next generation of software. It’s a partner to partner kind of connection between hosters and ISVs.”

Watson strongly encourages partners to work together. Earlier this year Cisco encouraged its partners to work together at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Hawaii. There hasn’t been a massive increase in partners collaborating with other partners, but it is on the rise.

“I strongly encourage our hosters, and any set of partners I talk to and talk about how a relationship with any other partner type can be a mutually beneficial one and can really help grow their revenue,” said Watson.

The Microsoft Solution Finder is a tool that was designed specifically for customers to find partners and Microsoft had 6.7 million searches worldwide last year where people searched for partner solutions on a worldwide basis.

“250,000 of those turned into leads for our partners, so we have this incredible uptake on partners who put their solution into the Solution Finder,” explained Watson. “That’s really the main intent of that but it has turned out to be a partner to partner tool. Partners are looking for partners that do specialised applications or to fill in gaps in a product line that they are trying to deliver for a customer.”

Watson added that there is a fairly significant export economy of ISVs that build specialised applications for the resource markets and banking sectors. “We’ve had quite good success on a global scale through some of our globally oriented partner to partner communications to connect ISVs in other markets where they have a specialised application.”

Watson’s key message

“Watch digital WPC!” was the first thing Watson wanted to tell any partners who did not attend the local partner conference, but she also wanted to stress that in her view, it’s never been a better time to bet on Microsoft.

“Especially in times of any economic instability you have to pick who you are going to bet on and you have to decide to bet on fewer, deeper. Microsoft’s continuing to invest, it will be the biggest year in investments we’ve ever driven into R&D in times when other companies might have decided to step the ball back. Microsoft’s committed, we’ve got more of a stack, it’s never been a better time to invest, and I’d say pick your investments wisely, focus on delivering very high levels of satisfaction and you can’t lose,” exclaimed Watson.

Local front

Speaking at one of the morning keynotes, Norbert Haehnel, director of the Developer and Platform Strategy Group, Microsoft, said that people are unclear about what software plus services is.

“One of my jobs is to help people understand what software plus services really means for an ISV. Does it mean I build my applications for the future as a service in the cloud and nothing else and hope that people access it? Or do I build a part of my application in the cloud and build other parts of the application in an environment like Vista or downloadable as a Silverlight application that plugs into the browser? We basically work with the partners at the moment to give them an understanding of what’s best for their solution because there is no one answer. At the end of the day, everything is possible.”

Haehnel explained that the biggest opportunity in software plus services for partners is to build upon the existing stack that companies already have. Businesses have rich assets they have invested in for years and aren’t going to be getting rid of their IT infrastructure overnight.

“They want to use it and they need to find a way to migrate their data. I think for partners there is a lot of opportunity in the future. To take their current assets and transition some of the areas of their business that makes sense into the cloud and consume some services that are cheaper to basically use from the cloud that they can basically host themselves,” he said.

Haehnel insists that there are still a lot of areas that will stay within the traditional enterprise. Partners should also make sure they focus on keeping the sensitive data within their control on premises and also control authentication.

“Partners need to understand how to position themselves and how to help their partners position themselves in this world. This (software plus services) is not happening tomorrow, this is something that happens over the next two or three years, so it’s gradual. Partners have the chance to go in there and basically pick their niche.”

Host of possibilities

Attendees commented throughout the conference that one of the more interesting take-home messages was the variety on offer from Microsoft. The vendor wants to ensure there will be a lot of opportunities for partners in the coming year.

Paul Voges, director of Small and Mid Market Solutions and Partner Group, Microsoft Australia explained that the next phase after the conference is an intense partner-planning stage and he thinks there will be a couple of standout areas of interest for partners.

“One will definitely be virtualisation. The amount of feedback I have had from partners in the past few days alone, just talking about the opportunities they see, there is a real excitement about our offering there. Virtualisation and management is really outstanding. I suspect that just that sheer momentum that comes from this partner conference, with the messaging they’ve heard and the launch of the new product, we are going to see that as a huge standout,” said Voges.

“The other one that I’m really bullish about is the Business Intelligence Suite with SQL Server 2008 and Performance Point Solution and Business Intelligence. I think we are going to see a massive take-up there. That’s an area that we’ve seen almost ripe for the taking for a long time now and we really have
a strong platform now, all the benchmarks are suggesting it’s going to be a really fantastic product.”

Another area Voges touched on was mobility, and with Internet access becoming more prolific, he sees a good opportunity for partners to combine Small Business Server with mobility solutions.

“I think there is a renewed push and I think it’s a market where people would have been on the old Small Business Server for some time now. With the new offering it just refreshes it all again. We want to get some momentum in that way to grow the business,” said Voges.

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