Microsoft laid out opportunities for partners to add new customers and revenue streams with Copilot at its Microsoft AI Partner Innovate event in Sydney yesterday.
The event, which drew hundreds of partners to Sydney’s Hilton Hotel, covered the value proposition for partners and their customers, how partners and vendors are using Copilot, updates about go-to-market programs, and Microsoft’s new AI-optimised Surface devices.
Microsoft senior director of partner channel sales for Asia, Sarah Bowden, talked up the “massive opportunity” Copilot presents for partners, telling partners there were three million addressable SMB users in ANZ. In January, the company announced the removal of the 300-seat purchase minimum for Copilot for Microsoft 365, expanding availability to SMBs.
“…this is an opportunity for you to gain net new customers, but also it's an opportunity for you to diversify your income, your revenue streams and to continually support customers in not only defining what their AI strategy is and should be, but coming back and iterating and changing and adapting to their needs,” Bowden said.
Noting strong cloud adoption in ANZ, Bowden said the “opportunity to take cloud now to these AI motions is something that customers are desperately wanting.”
Bowden also acknowledged that partners and customers were asking about value from Copilot, in some cases to justify spending. She cited results from Microsoft’s early adopter program, telling partners that “on average Copilot saves users more than 10 hours a month.”
She told partners that 64 percent of users in the early adopter program spent less time on email, while 71 percent of users did less mundane tasks. Three quarters of users saved time searching for files and 85 percent created document drafts faster.
Creating conversations about security, compliance
Microsoft also used this week’s event to build on its broader security pitch.
Speakers noted that Copilot for Microsoft 365 is natively built on the Microsoft 365 environment, so existing privacy, compliance and security commitments partners and customers have made in that environment will apply.
Jordan Hennessey, Microsoft Partner Strategy Lead – Security, spoke about ways partners can evolve their professional services when deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot: managing over-privileged and risky users by using Microsoft Entra, mitigating device risk by using Microsoft Intune for device management and application management, preventing the overexposure of data by using Microsoft Purview, and discovering and controlling the use of AI applications using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.
“If we can bundle that together with deploying M365 Copilot, ANZ will just see a massive uptick in in M365 Copilot,” he predicted.
Speakers also pointed to opportunities for partners to move customers to Business Premium to take advantage of these solutions.
Backup, recovery and “data readiness”
Veeam’s ANZ regional CTO Anthony Spiteri spoke at yesterday’s Sydney event about using Copilot to do more with backup data.
“Think about the power of taking a backup repository that is just sitting there historically, ready for an event, a disaster; but let's put some AI over top of it, let's put Copilot over top of it and let's get some meaningful information from that data.”
“What generative AI enables us to do is to take that data and unlock it. He positioned Veeam, as “custodians of that data”, as being in a “great position” to use technologies like Copilot to do more with that data.
Veeam is preparing a product “fully integrated” with its Veeam Data Cloud which will use Copilot for such things as data classification, looking into emails, looking into backup solutions and getting insights to help protect platforms and data.
Commvault was also at yesterday’s event and spruiked how it has synced its own GenAI assistant with Microsoft Copilot to help automate data recovery.
AvePoint spokespeople were also invited on stage and talked up the need to help ready customers’ data for Copilot. They pointed to lack of user knowledge and skills and “data readiness” as key challenges to GenAI adoption.
AvePoint’s pitch involved three steps: consolidating data in Microsoft 365 and improving its quality through discovery and business rules, identifying sensitive data and protecting it by enforcing content policies, and putting in place ongoing data governance and automation of content archival and deletion.
The company talked up managed services opportunities it sees, such as “Microsoft governance as a service”, “data protection backup as a service” and “MS365 adoption training as a service”.
AI-optimised Surface devices
Microsoft also talked up two new Surface devices that will become available on April 9 – the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 for Business that were announced in March. The two products will only be available via the commercial channel, not via the retail channel.
Both new Surface devices feature “neural processing units” (NPU) for AI workloads and the latest Intel Core Ultra processors.
Partners heard that NPUs are more efficient for processing AI workloads, such as when improving video call experiences. For example, users can employ “eye gaze correction" to make it look as though they are looking at the camera even if they are not.
For users to have a “great Copilot experience…you need to have the right device in front of them," said Microsoft ANZ Surface Commercial Distribution Manager Amir Bukan. He described the new Surface products as “no compromise” devices.
Bukan also talked up the lower power usage of the new Surface’s NPU when processing workloads.
He also noted that Microsoft has expanded its Surface reseller program, with resellers who could not previously able to get access to Surface no longer needing authorisation to obtain Surface from distributors.
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