Microsoft Adding 250 Techs to Field Organization

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Microsoft will add 250 technical people to its field organization over the next year to help partners develop their cloud businesses.

"I want to help you build new cloud and hybrid practices on our advanced workloads, so we're investing more technical resources in the field, cloud architects, to help you build those new practices," said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, during a keynote last week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).

The types of workloads the new field resources will specialize in will include Power BI and data analytics, Schuster said in an interview with RCP.

"That brings our total people in the field dedicated to partner success, so people who are 'partner somethings' in the field, to 3,500. It's a pretty big investment," Schuster said.

The 250 new employees in Microsoft's fiscal year 2017, which runs from this month through June 2018, represent almost an 8 percent bump in partner-focused field staffing by Microsoft.

Schuster said the new employees will not be focused on particular customer segments, such as SMB or enterprise.

"What they're supposed to do, and the way that we'll govern them, is based on those partners they think have the highest potential in the market. It's not based on which customer sets are they going to go after. It's more about their solution and how they can help them build their solution and how invested that partner is in building that practice," Schuster said.

"If you get a great repeatable practice going with SMB customers or CTM customers, you can really outperform an enterprise partner. Or if you get some really great horizontal solution in the enterprise, you could outperform everybody. They're going to just be evaluating who do I think has the highest potential in the market to drive consumption," she said.

Also at WPC, Schuster unveiled a new marketing logo for Microsoft partners with Gold competencies that includes the Microsoft logo (see below).

"Part of our intention is to make it obvious to our customers who our best partners are, who our gold partners are, and so for the first time ever we're coupling the Microsoft logo to the Gold Partner brand. If you earn Gold, you've earned the right to have the Microsoft logo on your card," Schuster said. "You have to also share what your competencies are so the customer can get to the level of detail that you're good at the thing [they're] looking for."

Barb Levisay contributed to this report.

Posted by Scott Bekker on July 18, 2016