Ignia director Joshua Boys joins Microsoft as new Azure lead

Former Ignia director Joshua Boys has joined Microsoft Australia as its new Azure lead, replacing Azure senior product marketing manager Wendy Smith.

Boys joined Ignia in 2010, a Perth-based IT service provider and one of Microsoft’s highest-performing partners in Australia. In 2015, the company won Microsoft’s Excellence in Industry and Platform Innovation award, as well as the Excellence in Mobility and Devices honour.

Ignia has also appeared twice in the CRN Fast50 awards. The company was No.22 in the 2015 CRN Fast50, having grown revenue 60 percent to hit $12.2 million.

Last year, Ignia was acquired by Insight, one of the largest Microsoft partners in the world with revenues of US$5.4 billion (A$7.1 million).

Beginning next month, Boys will work from Perth and commute to Microsoft Australia’s head office in Sydney when needed.

Boys told CRN the move to Microsoft was a long time coming.

“I've lived and breathed Microsoft for the past 14 years. To everyone I've told, they know this has been a long-time coming. Obviously, the next stage in my career was always going to be at Microsoft.”

His main role will be to develop the Azure strategy for Australia as well as working with the product management team. Coming from a solutions provider background, Boys said he would have a focus on the partner business

“What I'm bringing to this is adding a different perspective to help Azure grow even further. Sitting on the other side, I've been able to reflect on what partners want and now I can bring that forward to them. Being a partner, you always follow the market, but what I'm looking forward to most is working for the market leader, not just playing catch up.”

Boys already has his sights set on the Cloud Solutions Provider program, Microsoft’s program that allows partners to manage their own customer lifecycle for cloud products. The program includes Office 365 SKUs, Azure infrastructure-as-a-service, Enterprise Mobility Suite and Dynamics CRM Online.

"One of the insights I received was realising how people globally are leveraging CSP. That is something we need to be doing more in Australia," he said.

"We're moving away from selling just products. We're selling solutions now, and CSP really plays into solutions. We could do some really creative things with CSP”.