Marching Orders 2019: Transform Yourself to Transform Others
What are the top steps Microsoft partners can take to help their businesses succeed in 2019? We put that question to top experts, including Mark Rice, General Manager, Managed Services Partners, Microsoft.
As customers digitally transform themselves, all partners are also going through some level of transformation necessary to take advantage of the growing customer demand and opportunity in the cloud. The promise of the recurring revenue of long-term cloud managed services is a clear end game to their customer engagement. This is a journey, and can be looked at in three pillars: business transformation, capability transformation and sales and marketing transformation.
Business Transformation
Customers are looking for dynamic solutions focused on business outcomes from their partners, who can help them navigate the move to the cloud. But they're not just looking for partners to help navigate, they're looking for help optimizing and governing their use of the cloud. Partners who are best positioned to deliver this to their customers are those who can deliver a full customer cloud engagement lifecycle. This sounds very simple, but taking a customer from plan/design through migration, application modernization, optimization and running requires solutions, tooling, automation and, of course, a ton of talent. Partners who adapt to guide customers through this cycle will have a competitive advantage over their peers in the coming years.
Capability Transformation
Higher value cloud services are driving profitability and higher margins for partners. Many partners tend to offer basic IaaS management services, but those who can build and manage agile, cloud native apps will see margin differentiation. Many are finding that to sustain and grow margins, significant investments in IP, tools and people are needed. For most cloud partners this means striking a balance and finding the right inflection points in their businesses to accelerate transformation from existing business models to new ones, such as migrating from traditional hosting to modern cloud-managed services.
Sales and Marketing Transformation
The transformation of sales, GTM and operational excellence is a clear challenge for partners as they move to a cloud model. These range across 're-wiring' their customer management systems (automation), sales compensation models (moving from large deals to incremental consumption through new service offering penetration) and leveraging digital marketing. The shift also includes how they partner with ISVs, other services companies and even their historic competitors. However, although these changes may be challenging at first, being able to provide high value cloud offerings to customers will open up a whole new world of opportunities and profit to partners.
It is an exciting time for our partners, the business opportunity is incredible, as is the potential to impact our customers' business. Although there may be growing pains while making the necessary transformations, the impact and reward in delivering optimized cloud services far outweighs the costs.
Mark Rice is general manager for managed services partners at Microsoft.
Posted by Mark Rice on January 29, 2019