Microsoft used the opening keynote of its Worldwide Partner Conference to focus on developing business applications, highlighting newly launched solutions rather than the major product families of Windows, Office 365 and Azure.
WPC 2016 is being held in Toronto this week, with more than 16,000 attendees from 144 countries – the first time ever the event has sold out. More than 250 Australians have made the journey to Canada, also a record attendance.
There were no major announcements in the opening session, as the vendor's mainstream software and cloud brands took a backseat to Dynamics 365, PowerApps, AppSource and Flow.
Chief executive Satya Nadella said: "It is such a golden era for building out your big data applications, your advanced analytics applications, mobile apps, web apps, IoT apps, SaaS applications. You name it, it is an amazing opportunity because infrastructure is infinite, easy to provision, you can have the databases you need, the containers you need and the virtual machines you need to build these applications."
If the keynote seemed more geared toward ISVs than resellers, that was no accident, said Phil Goldie, director of partner business at Microsoft Australia.
The vendor has been telling partners for several years to evolve beyond bread-and-butter reselling and focus on the more profitable areas of managed services and productising intellectual property. With the new tools discussed in the keynote, Microsoft is "delivering, at the product level, on what we have been saying", said Goldie.
"This is the same thing we have been saying for three years, that the value and the profitability and the margins will be much richer when you have unique IP and differentiation and you are building things on top of the platform using these simple tools.
"Today is the product manifestation of what we have been saying for three years. The resale models and the traditional models are becoming increasingly less effective at driving profits and the value will be in solving business problems with these kinds of tools," said Goldie.
While the tools demonstrated centre on application development, they are necessarily being pitched at Microsoft's ISV partners – rather at the broad partner base.
"I hope what people will see in terms of our apps and AppSource is less about being a developer and more about being a business problem solver. You can use these tools very simply to deliver a different business outcome," he said.
Solutions such as PowerApps and Flow are geared toward less highly skilled developers, putting powerful tools in the hands of mainstream partners and end users.
PowerApps, which was unveiled in November, allows users to easily create apps for any device using a Microsoft Office-like experience. It can connect to cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive and on-premises systems including SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases and SAP.
Flow is pitched at the end user level. It is a rival to If This Then That, allowing users to create automated workflows between 37 apps and services, including Office 365, Twitter, Slack and Salesforce. Users can get notifications, synchronise files and collect data – for instance, a user could set up an alert to automatically send a text message whenever they receive an email from their boss.
AppSource, which was announced last week, is an enterprise app store where partners will be able to publish their own applications. It currently hosts more than 200 apps.
Do more with data
For Goldie, there is a big opportunity around "graphs" – the rich datasets that sit underneath Office 365 and Dynamics as well as LinkedIn, which Microsoft is acquiring for $26.2 billion.
Two years ago, Microsoft used WPC 2014 to show Delve, an early example of an application that surfaces data from the Office graph. But Goldie sees Delve as just an example of what partners could build themselves on top of Office 365.
"Increasingly Delve has analytics capabilities that show things like 'In my internal meetings at Microsoft, how productive am I? How much time do I spend on email versus participating in the meeting? Which hours of the day do I typically work?' You are starting to see the value of the Office 365 graph surfaced through things like Delve.
"What we have been saying to partners for two years now is: that is the big platform opportunity with Office 365. We have built Delve as an example application but there are thousands of things that could be built on top of that graph of info," said Goldie.
He was excited about how partners could integrate the Office 365 graph with the rich data from LinkedIn, which boasts 433 million users.
"If you look at the public announcement around LinkedIn, one of the areas that was clearly called out was the LinkedIn graph. So now in Office 365 you have all the underlying user information about people's productivity at work and all of the information about where they work, who they work for, how they are related – a second massively rich data graph of information."
Steven Kiernan is a guest of Microsoft at Worldwide Partner Conference
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