What We Know So Far
There’s been lots of talk and sharing about Azure Stack. Lenovo and HPE have opened up orders. Microsoft has also announced availability of the Azure Stack Development Kit, the free single-server deployment (what we saw in the Preview program).
A DJ is DJ-ing on a Surface Studio and tells us to turn off our phones. And now we get an inspirational video on MS and Washington. Then someone talks about mountain climbing and dreams and stuff.
Ron Puddleston – One Commercial Partner VP
Over 17,000 people at the keynote – or trying to get in because security is supposed to be creating a nightmare there. Lots of “partners are great” and “partners are great”.
Partner feedback, according to him, was the MS wanted one way to be in contact with MS, and one way to interact with customers. They wanted one voice to advocate for them. And that’s why MS created “One Commercial Partner” group from SMS&P, EPG and other organizations last week. It’s to be “partner first”. It’s supposed to be simple and aligned to how partners work:
- Build the business
- Go to market
- Sell with partners to customers
That’s supposed to be what OCP (sounds like Robocop) does. They are measured on partner growth, not individual product sales. They’re investing €250,000,000 to connect partners with customers. The GM is to connect partners to customers – this is not a partner account manager as the past. He says “the right partner for the customer” – big emphasis this FY by Inside Sales on partners with competencies. Two new things:
- Focus on Azure billed revenue caused frictions for partners. Azure consumed revenue is now the goal. That only affects EA customers because they’re the same in CSP.
- MS reps will be recognized for 10% of the value of co-sold ISV products.
One partner team will offer all this.
Satya Nadella
He says the partner conference sets the tone for the rest of the MS financial year – it’s a highlight for him. 140 countries represented at the conference. There are currently 17 million jobs around the world because of MS partners. There are 64,000 partners leading with cloud solutions. Partners coming into the MS cloud from other ecosystems: Linux, Hadoop, Java.
They’ve been talking about mobile first/cloud first for years and been getting loads of feedback from MS partners’ digital transformation stories. Moving towards Intelligent Cloud/Intelligent Edge. 3 characteristics:
- Every experience that is built is multi-device and multi-sense. Might be speech on one, ink on another, touch on another.
- Infusion of AI – in every application experience that will be built. An autonomous car will generate 4 GB of data per second. That’s one car per second. That data has “gravity”. AI is being distributed to devices, not just in data centres.
- Managing all of this complexity requires a new efficient frontier for application development, distribution and management. This is about serverless tech, such as containers, functions, logic apps, etc.
The opportunity is bigger than ever before and growing. Microsoft has a history of jumping on platform shifts. The PC was democratized. Then client/server. There is $4.5 trillion of spend here. The product and the service are digital.
We will all thrive if we do the above by geography and by industry. Modern Workplace, etc above, are the framework.
Modern Workplace is where he starts. Empower people inside of your organization – brings a shift in culture and the early signal of digital transformation. Lots of CEOs in a video about changing business to be self-empowered, nimble, competitive, creative, etc.
The demographics of the workplace are changing. Skills are changing. How teams come together is changing. Teams are dynamic, traditional IT is not. Bring the systems into one simple framework. Need sophistication to protect the many endpoints for user access and data flow. Need operational insight to detect and respond to attacks.
Microsoft 365
Coming together of Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS. Two offerings: Enterprise (was Secure Compute Enterprise SKU) and Business (for SMEs).The 4 pillars are:
- Creativity
- Teamwork
- Simplicity
- Security
Demo coming up. Sonia Dara starts with an iPhone-base demo.
I had to leave at this point for a customer Skype call … interesting timing 
Erm, i think it’s 2017, not 2016?
True 🙂