Partners conference: The land of opportunity

Set against a backdrop of Queensland’s beautiful Hamilton Island, Microsoft Australia’s Partner Conference 2007 embraced a theme of opportunity. With a focus on unity, the sense of family within the huge community of partners and Microsoft employees was clear for all to see. Enthusiasm was abound, not just from the resellers, the Microsoft representatives were also buzzing with excitement.

With such an expanse of information to cover in just four days it was vital that partners could take as much information away as possible from each event with 60-minute break-out sessions included for partners across all of Microsoft’s business areas.

Hype surrounds the new server product range, with the launch of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio. Unified Communications was also a popular topic with a waiting list of 80 resellers for the pre-day event hosted by Oscar Trimboli, director of Unified Communications.

Resellers had excellent feedback when Pip Marlow, director of small mid-market solutions and partners launched Partner TV, some resellers even have their eye on appearing in their very own blog. Whether that is part of Microsoft’s plan is yet to be revealed.

Unified Communications
The conference featured more time for Unified Communications than ever before with resellers still missing out on the sought-after places. A pre-day event was held with 130 partners flying to Hamilton Island the day before the conference officially started. Trimboli said 80 partners were still left on the waiting list.

“I think of it as a bit of a journey for me, three years ago I had to pay for sponsorship at the pavilion stand because Microsoft wouldn’t put me in any keynotes! Last year we had three sold-out sessions and this year we had to do the pre-day. When we had the keynote presentation we had over and above the 130 partners turn up, we also had another 220 partners turning up to our presentation on Unified Communications.”

Everything Microsoft is seeing in this area is growth. At the recent TechEd event, Trimboli talked himself out of a voice answering all the questions from interested end-users asking about deployments.

“The opportunity is huge for partners because there’s this incredible opportunity to integrate these silos of communications together. For guys on the voice it’s a whole new leg of revenue for them, we’re dealing with some of the larger reseller partners out there in Avaya and Alcatel and Nortel land, all of them are saying they see Microsoft as the next business unit they will be setting up inside their business.”

Communications sector
Another key area of interest for resellers was hosting. John Hennessey, director of the communications sector, said that as Microsoft goes forward, hosting is becoming more about a service delivery model.

“People are trying to do two things. They are trying to drive up their revenue stream and drive down their cost. The software plus services model and the hosting model is about leveraging the ability to provide this in a replicable form to a number of organisations in its simplest environment and by doing that then you can actually drive a whole bunch of costs out of your business.

“The other part of that is you can then control and deliver a greater service level to high-end customers because you actually have control over their environment, in your environment. The opportunity for these guys, and the priority from our perspective is around having the organisations that are looking at delivering value-added components communicate and relate to others and create an ecosystem around it . Really making sure that the services that they do have are projected out there as a web service and integrating foundational levels of our platform, exchange, communication server.”

According to Microsoft, in the market today around 15 per cent of the business mail market or the exchange market is actually hosted and is set to grow.

Stefan Jansen, hosting manager at Microsoft Australia said there will be significant growth happening in the developer community. “They will start building on the Microsoft tool set, building new applications that they will monetise through offering them on the web. In addition we will continue to work with ISVs to platform and re-platform to the new environments. The hosters who are there already, who are hosting the web centrals Hostworks for all these established companies, are seeing a huge uptake from these developers and ISVs who want to host their applications through them. Microsoft will continue to provide services and solutions to these hosters to enhance what they currently already offer.”

The government sector
Resellers looking to tackle the government sector need to start by focusing on the smaller jobs. This is the message from Microsoft to partners, as it is hard to tender for the bigger jobs without an existing relationship with government employees. Sue Johnston, government industry manager, has a background in government and works with partners looking to move into this lucrative and competitive space.

“One small company that had never had any previous experience with government was able to work with an agency, sponsored with Microsoft, and develop a solution that changed the working model of how you might do trade missions, where people are working overseas. Because they had a solution and were able to present it that’s led to leads and extra contacts and other partners are talking to them,” said Johnston.

The skills shortage isn’t just affecting organisations in the private sector, governments are feeling the pressure as well.

“One of the problems that may prohibit governments from realising these visions is the skills shortage. A lot of people have spoken about the skills shortage but governments in particular are suffering from a staff point of view in a tight labour market. It’s very difficult for governments to compete in terms of wages and there will be increased dependency on partners to be able to help them realise their goals. Our focus is on working with government industry bodies and the partners to be able to come up with ways to address that.”

In the area of health, partners should still be looking to start with smaller jobs and quotes. A growing area for Microsoft, healthcare provides an interesting platform for IT specialists.

Dr David Dembo MD, health industry manager at Microsoft said there is money to be saved in the smaller jobs. “Most people wouldn’t think of Microsoft in the terms of clinical and business engineering healthcare when in reality it’s actually a perfect fit in out technology and what health reform is trying to do,” said Dembo.

SMB market
Recognising the importance of the SMB sector to the IT industry, Microsoft has its own SMB unit. Inese Kingsmill, director, small and medium business at Microsoft said there have been changes in the way the vendor approaches the SMB market.

“We’ve recently reorganised the way we look at the SMB market to better focus on them. What we’ve tried to do in the upper SMB space is scale up the small business messages and scale down the upper mid-market messages into that five to 250 PC space,” said Kingsmill.

Kylie Summerhayes, group manager, SMB breadth marketing explained that partners need to make sure their profile is up-to-date with Microsoft as leads are handed out according to the profiles. Another key message from the SMB sector is that resellers need to make sure they are utilising the resources available through the partner portal, the sales and marketing material in particular.

In a roundtable event held at the Opportunity Conference, the skills shortage was brought up constantly. This seems to be a significant challenge facing a large number of resellers. “Partners are having the problem of staff, opportunities are not the issue, it’s the staff to make it happen, partners are time-poor,” said Summerhayes.

Microsoft launches Partner TV
Microsoft announced ‘Partner TV’, at the Opportunity Partner Conference on Hamilton Island. The new website features video blogs of the vendor’s key players, with feedback invited from partners through email or comment posts. Partner TV has been created to provide an interesting platform of collaboration as resellers had been pressuring Microsoft to provide new ways for them to communicate within their partner community.

Discussing skills and development opportunities as well as sales and marketing advice, Pip Marlow, director of small mid-market solutions and partners presented one of the first blogs. Jeff Putt, the director of Windows client presented another blog that talks about the Windows business and initiatives for the year ahead.
Partner TV gives resellers in remote locations the opportunity to directly interact with Microsoft executives. “It’s a way for us to reach out to our partners that’s fresh, that’s personal, that puts a face to Microsoft and allows them to give us feedback and help define the future content,” explained Marlow.

Australia is the second country to receive its own interactive Microsoft community, with the site being originally launched in the UK. Christian Longstaff pioneered Partner TV in the UK and has joined the local team to oversee the project’s success.

Blogs can be downloaded, viewed on mobile devices, by podcast or from the desktop and have been recorded by subject so the user can pick and choose from different categories.

To experience Microsoft Partner TV: blogs.msdn.com/ozpartnertv