As Microsoft retires the Gold Certified and Certified tiers of its program this year, partners must find new ways to communicate their expertise in Microsoft technologies to potential customers.
One South Carolina-based Microsoft Certified Partner is using its membership in Microsoft's fledgling U.S. Cloud Champions Club as one way to fill that marketing gap.
Palmetto Technology Group (PTG) announced on Monday its membership in the club, a three-tier program that Microsoft launched in September for identifying and supporting partners who make a commitment to selling cloud solutions.
The club, which is run by Microsoft's U.S. subsidiary and is a partial model for Microsoft's global Cloud Accelerate initiative, provides additional sales resources, marketing funding and, for top-tier partners, double the margins on Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) sales.
Although PTG has belonged to the club for several months, the company issued an announcement about the status to promote a customer webinar for IT directors this week. Reed Wilson, president of PTG, says the company's message in the webinar will be that "you can focus, as a director of IT, on the more business critical applications that you're running on premise, like Great Plains. It's going to make you a little more agile."
Helping Wilson make that case will be Microsoft employees Todd Shultice, a partner account manager covering the Southeast District, and Todd Sweetser, a Microsoft Technical Solution Professional for Microsoft Online Services.
Wilson said PTG's membership in Cloud Champions was the key factor in getting Microsoft's participation in the webinar. Because of PTG's membership, Wilson said, "There's an increased awareness of who we are and what we're doing at Microsoft."
Joining the club early has had other unanticipated benefits, Wilson said. Microsoft selected PTG to participate along with a handful of other Microsoft partners nationwide in a specialized cloud marketing program with Jeremy Epstein, founder of Never Stop Marketing. "It was very valuable for us. This gave us access to subject-matter experts around how to effectively market your business in the cloud world," Wilson said.
The first tier of the Cloud Champions Club requires three BPOS deals for 75 or more seats total. Partners advance to the second tier with eight deals and 200 or more seats, and to the third tier with 20 deals and at least 500 seats.
Microsoft estimated in September that of the 4,000 partners then registered to sell BPOS in the United States, about 1,200 would qualify for the club if they applied.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 21, 20110 comments
Microsoft hosted about 200 development-focused partner companies in Redmond for product briefings, NDA and otherwise, this week. Attendees included members of the Visual Studio Integration Partner Program (VSIP) and Microsoft Partner Network members in the Application Lifecycle Management competency.
The major piece of public news was the immediate availability of Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2. My colleague Michael Desmond has details on all the bells and whistles in the new beta here.
LightSwitch is new territory for Microsoft. Here's how Desmond described it:
"VS LightSwitch is aimed at business analysts and power users who often create ad hoc business logic in applications like FileMaker Pro or Microsoft Excel and Access. Based on Visual Studio, LightSwitch offers a visual, wizard-driven user interface that allows business users to craft true, .NET-based applications with rich data bindings. Unlike ad hoc development, the .NET code produced by LightSwitch can be seamlessly imported into Visual Studio for professional developers to inspect, edit and extend."
The open question is whether this group of development-focused partners, or any existing group of Microsoft partners, is the right set to explain the value of this particular product to customers.
Dave Mendlen, senior director of developer marketing at Microsoft, says of LightSwitch, "The reality is, it's a different muscle for us."
While Microsoft's developer tools marketers are accustomed to talking to professional developers, enterprise developers, testers, database professionals and project managers, they'll have to learn to engage business analysts and power users for LightSwitch to succeed.
"We're having to partner up with our friends over in the Office organization [on] how best to engage this kind of person," Mendlen said. "We're in the middle of that learning right now. Obviously, talking to these partners is a critical first step."
Mendlen contends that many of the same companies that found opportunities in extending Visual Basic for software developer customers will find analogous opportunities to extend LightSwitch for power users.
"My sense is that this ecosystem is going to look at this and say, 'We have a whole new audience. We have to think about this a very different way,'" he said.
Partners will have to get away from selling custom controls for a LightSwitch audience and move up the chain to offer entire objects, such as a business subsystem for credit card processing.
"I think we're going to see this shift from subatomic particles to a coarser-grained object. I think that's where we're going to evolve to with LightSwitch," Mendlen said.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 17, 20110 comments
One of the key metrics in the smartphone battle is the number of apps in your App Store (or whatever vendors are legally allowed to call them without drawing a lawsuit from Cupertino). On those grounds, Microsoft has had a great week, with news that Microsoft is the fastest smartphone maker yet to hit the psychologically important 10,000-app milestone.
As things stand, Microsoft has a long way to go. The Business Insider blog posted its own count of apps earlier this month. Apple's iPhone led the chart with 350,000 apps, Google's Android was next with 250,000, RIM's BlackBerry had 20,000, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 had 9,000 at the time.
Maybe Microsoft's strategy of letting employees moonlight by developing Windows Phone 7 apps is paying off? There are a lot of smart developers inside Microsoft's walls. Getting their competitive and entrepreneurial juices flowing at the same time is a great strategy for seeding a Windows Phone 7 market.
Offhand, I asked one Microsoft developer, Dave Mendlen, at the end of a recent interview if he had any Windows Phone 7 apps in progress. The senior director of developer marketing at Microsoft said he'd already finished a TiVo remote control app for his wife, and he was working on a Netflix app.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 17, 20113 comments
Registration for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference doesn't even start until next week, but Microsoft partner executives were making news last week at such a fast clip that it felt like a WPC was in progress.
The sources for all the activity were Microsoft Partner Advisory Council (PAC) meetings in Redmond, Microsoft meetings with leaders of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners and, especially, a Web-based interactive forum between senior Microsoft channel executives and several hundred partners on Thursday.
News out of the forum and PACs included:
- Commitments to develop and provide more detailed roadmaps for partners on both products and partner programs. (See story here.)
- Plans to tweak the ISV competency to make the Microsoft Partner Network a better fit for vertically focused development shops. (See story here.)
- Efforts to stabilize and standardize incentive programs around the world to move away from a focus on "ineffective" short-term server promotions. (See story here.)
- A move to broaden pilot programs for providing up to 20 points on software for solution providers with gold competencies who drive sales, even if they don't transact the licenses. (See story here.)
- New branding efforts around silver competency partners, emphasizing their exclusivity as representing only 5 percent of all Microsoft partners. (See story here.)
- Momentum on the Pinpoint partner solution directory, with Microsoft well on the way to surpassing a goal for providing 700,000 leads to partners in FY '11 and sharing a goal to provide 1.25 million goals in FY '12, which starts in July. (See story here.)
- Acknowledgement by Microsoft executives of the problems that formerly Microsoft Gold Certified Partners pose to partners that embrace the new silver competency, with related promises to police the expiring brand more aggressively. (See story here.)
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 16, 20110 comments
Facing questions about the value of the silver competency from partners, Microsoft is starting to push the achievement as an exclusive club that will represent only about 5 percent of Microsoft's entire partner ecosystem.
"You've heard the number often quoted [for Microsoft partners] of 640,000 organizations today. Only 5 percent of that community is silver," said Karl Noakes, general manager of Microsoft Partner Strategy and Programs, during the Microsoft Partner Network Interactive Leadership Forum last week.
Company executives caution that the partner re-enrollment process is in full swing, and actual figures for how many partners will pursue silver competencies versus gold or other customer-facing brands, such as Small Business Specialist, are difficult to predict. However, the 5 percent figure is a design goal of the MPN.
By comparison, the company is aiming for about 1 percent to 2 percent of partners to earn a gold competency. If those numbers are borne out by actual re-enrollments, partners with a silver competency would be among the top 6 percent or 7 percent of all Microsoft partners.
Noakes and other senior Microsoft channel executives were responding to attitudes like the one expressed in this anonymous question that was displayed during the forum: "With the new competency alignment in the Microsoft Partner Network, we are being downgraded from gold to silver, which makes us look bad to our customers. Everyone knows silver is second-best."
Julie Bennani, general manager of the Microsoft Partner Network, said, "Gold Certified and Certified in the Microsoft Partner Program does not equal gold and silver [competencies] in the Microsoft Partner Network. They're apples and oranges."
"Silver is tougher than Gold Certified was in most areas," Bennani said. "You asked us for differentiation and also to raise the bar because you felt the gold brand, the old Gold Certified, had become diluted. So we did -- we even made silver a tougher thing than what was Certified."
(Ed's Note: For more news from the Microsoft Partner Network Interactive Leadership Forum, click here.)
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 16, 20110 comments
Independent software vendors in the Microsoft Partner Network can look forward to an overhaul of the way they fit into Microsoft's partner structure, according to senior Microsoft channel executives.
In an interactive partner forum last week, Microsoft channel executives said they are looking to find better ways to fit vertical ISVs into the MPN, which was relaunched in November under a new framework after a multi-year process.
"I think the competency structure that the team has built is fantastic, but in the ISV space, we are a little bit off," said Microsoft global channel chief Jon Roskill, who has been in his current job for eight months. ISV/Software is one of the 28 competencies in the MPN.
"The needs of ISVs are somewhat unique, so it's something we clearly have taken an action on, and we will be looking at tweaking going forward," Roskill said.
Julie Bennani, who as general manager of the Microsoft Partner Network had broad responsibilities for restructuring the MPN, said the MPN structure as it stands works well for many ISVs.
"In the competencies that are focused on solutions like business intelligence, most of those competencies have an ISV qualification track through Microsoft Platform Ready, meaning that you can qualify your application as opposed to focusing too heavily on certifying technical people," Bennani said. Competencies with ISV tracks in the MPN include Application Integration, Business Intelligence, CRM, Data Platform, ERP and Unified Communications.
"Where that works great, to Jon's point, [is] for horizontal ISVs. But when we think about vertical ISVs, that's the work that I think we need to do. If you're horizontally focused, please consider that track. If you're vertically focused, we do have more work to do," Bennani said.
In the meantime, Ross Brown, vice president of Worldwide Partner Sales, promised as much transparency to the process as possible. "I'll work with the ISV [Partner Account Manager] community to try to put together a little bit more of a forecast of where we're taking the ISV business as a competency," Brown said.
(Ed's Note: For more news from the Microsoft Partner Network Interactive Leadership Forum, click here.)
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 16, 20110 comments
Partners using unrenewed Microsoft Gold Certified Partner logos had better watch their backs. Microsoft channel executives are making noises about policing the brand more aggressively.
During a Q&A with partners last week, Microsoft global channel chief Jon Roskill said, "One of the things that we've heard is that [partners] feel that people are out there using a gold brand from several years ago, and they aren't current. That is something that we're looking at -- how we can police that."
Microsoft already does some enforcement of the brand, explained Karl Noakes, general manager of Microsoft Partner Strategy and Programs. "We do some mystery shoppers where we do check, and we do contact partners that are misusing the brand," Noakes said.
Microsoft partners are getting more sensitive about the subject, though. With the new Microsoft Partner Network taking effect, the old Microsoft Gold Certified brand is being phased out this year in favor of the labels gold competent and silver competent, both of which are supposed to be harder to obtain than the old Gold Certified logo.
Some partners who are achieving the new silver competency are worried that until the Gold Certified Partner branding is grandfathered out of the channel, they will be at a marketing disadvantage against less-qualified partners. While Roskill said there is little that Microsoft can do about the necessary grandfathering period, Microsoft can be more aggressive against partners who are abusing outdated Gold Certified brand materials.
(Ed's Note: For more news from the Microsoft Partner Network Interactive Leadership Forum, click here.)
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 16, 20111 comments
Back in December, we did a cover story on Microsoft Execs: Who's Who? Poking around the Microsoft Partner Network portal recently, I ran across a nice resource that drills down from the top-level positions that we highlighted in the Redmond Channel Partner magazine article.
The U.S. Partner Team has a Meet the U.S. Partner Team page with pictures, names and titles of 17 people at Microsoft that it wouldn't hurt a partner to know.
For those wondering how the people on the Microsoft portal page map to the people in RCP's cover story (available as a PDF here), Arnie Mondloch and Jake Schenkein are two Rosetta Stones.
(Fair warning: If you're going to read on from here, you'll probably want to have the Microsoft page and a copy of our PDF in front of you.)
Mondloch reports to Kristi Schwartz (unpictured) in Jenni Flinders' PS&P organization. Four people on the page report to Mondloch: Diane Golshan (the main contributor to the U.S. Partner Team blog and person behind the @msuspartner Twitter account), Sharon Collins (who manages the team that helps U.S. partners with the MPN transition), Julie Golding (the person behind the Action Pack Twitter account) and Tina Hanson (the liaison to the U.S. IAMCP and HTG Peer Groups).
Schenkein, also reports to Schwartz. Three people on the Microsoft page report to Schenkein: Dunja Bounds, Melanie Riddick and Don Roessler.
A large group also comes from Cindy Bates' SMB&D team. While Josh Waldo isn't pictured, three people come from his team: Kelly Stark, Jennifer Martin and Jen Sieger. Alison Catania and Steve Measelle are on Eric Martorano's team and Shelley Svien is part of Alex Fong's team. Neither Martorano nor Fong is on Microsoft's "meet the team" page, but they and Waldo report directly to Bates.
The other two people on the page come from different areas of Microsoft. Riyaz Jaffer is actually part of the worldwide organization but has duties for North America. Colleen Tyler is part of U.S. Public Sector Partner Marketing.
With that, I'm Microsoft org-charted out. But if you're eager for more, check out the msdev.com site, which is a Microsoft resource site for solution partners and developers. It has a sophisticated "Meet the team" page here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20112 comments
Slalom Consulting, Microsoft's 2010 U.S. Partner of the Year, is on an expansion tear.
The Seattle-based Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI) recently announced that it had surpassed 1,000 employees during 2010, and has plans to hire more than 400 new employees this year. The company had about 800 employees when Redmond Channel Partner magazine profiled the company's cloud practice in July.
Supporting the employee growth were revenues of $209 million in 2010, an increase of 46 percent over 2009, according to a company statement.
Some of the new employees will staff a New York office scheduled to open this year. The company also has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Portland, San Francisco and El Segundo, Calif.
One of those new 2011 hires is Brian Rimmer, who joined Slalom this month as national director of the company's growing CRM business, which has been newly organized as a national CRM practice. Rimmer was formerly partner and director of CRM at Ascentium, where Slalom officials say he led the global expansion of Ascentium's CRM practice.
Ascentium's Dynamics CRM and federal practices were acquired in May 2010 by Avanade Inc., a global systems integrator and specialist in Microsoft technologies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20111 comments
Earlier this month, we covered a Microsoft partner subsidy that effectively returns 68 percent of first-year BPOS revenues to partners. It's an eye-popping figure, but the rub is that by the time most partners figure out how the incentive works, it will have expired.
A California-based partner raised the issue with Microsoft channel executives during the Microsoft Partner Network Interactive Leadership Forum on Thursday.
"I have been sort of frustrated at some of these incentives that it takes a full-time person to just keep track of. I'm wondering why can't it be simpler. I feel like we are coupon clipping every Sunday, trying to figure these things out. It just needs to be one number for the entire year. I mean, can we do that?" the partner asked during a call-in portion of the webinar.
"I have to figure out if we mix a SQL Server with a Windows Server and do it between July and August, we get a certain amount off if you include another one of this or another one of that. It's really confusing," the partner said.
While the Business Productivity Online Services subsidy is a recent example of a fast-expiring promotion, the caller's complaint applied more to server-based programs like the U.S. Big Easy incentive, which relies on partners selling complicated combinations of server products.
Ross Brown, vice president of Microsoft Worldwide Partner Sales, acknowledged the issue during the forum.
"One of the things that you're rightly identifying is that on server-based products, short-term promotions aren't really effective," Brown said.
"We've been trying to...create a more standard framework around our channel incentives, and really try to limit the amount of short-term promotional activity that's going on in lieu of more structured, stable programs that [are] consistent both in terms of how you claim and the qualification process as well as consistent in the economic benefits," Brown said. "It's taking us some time to get our arms around all of these local activities that occur that are more promotional in nature."
Brown said a member of his team, Allen Boone, has created a Channel Incentives Governance Council inside Microsoft to get a handle on the rate of change and the types of programs that subsidiaries are creating. The goal, Brown said, is "to help limit...unproductive churn."
Another mention of incentives in the online forum covered efforts to drive solution incentives to gold competency partners who are not necessarily doing the licensing transactions.
"The solution incentive program...puts real meat behind the gold competency. It starts to provide additional revenue opportunities for partners that are able to go off and achieve that gold competency," said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group.
Brown said pilot versions of the solution incentive program have been running in the United States and other Microsoft subsidiaries.
"The transaction may occur through a LAR or another partner. You can earn up to 20 points on the license value for being that solutions partner that drives it. We've rolled this out on our management and virtualization stack, and in some subsidiaries we've rolled it around some other areas, such as SQL BI and [we're] looking at Windows 7 deployments," Brown said. "We intend to go broader with these as we evolve our incentives program, and being at the gold competency allows you to participate in those incentives."
Also on Thursday, Roskill may have cleared up something that's had me scratching my head for years. Almost every year at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner talks about Microsoft's investment in the channel. It's gone steadily upward to $3.3 billion at WPC 2009 and Microsoft used a $4 billion figure this year. It was mysterious to me because one Gold Certified Partner after another had told me how drastically their market development funds have dropped in recent years. I've asked Microsoft spokespeople repeatedly what the amount referred to and no one could tell me or find out.
During the webinar, Roskill said, "Over $4 billion worth of channel incentives is shaped around the programs that we put into market." Ah. Maybe the figure refers to incentives.
(Ed's Note: For more news from the Microsoft Partner Network Interactive Leadership Forum, click here.)
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20110 comments
Perficient, a St. Louis-based IT consulting firm and Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI), reported strong fourth quarter earnings and expects to continue its growth trajectory in 2011, according to financial statements released this month.
The NASDAQ-traded company reported 18 percent revenue growth to $55.9 million for the final quarter of 2010 and 14 percent revenue growth to $215 million for the full year. Net income more than doubled to $1.3 million for the quarter and quadrupled to $6.5 million for the year.
"Perficient is beginning to benefit from meaningful operating leverage and while we expect revenue to increase substantially in the years ahead, we expect earnings to accelerate at an even faster rate," said Paul Martin, Perficient's CFO, in a statement.
Based on information midway through the first quarter of 2011, the company is telling investors that it expects Q1 revenues to be in the range of $55 million to $59 million.
"We see confidence returning to the IT spending market and we're well-positioned to realize several years of solid revenue and earnings growth," added Jeff Davis, Perficient's CEO and president, in the statement.
Part of the revenue growth should come from the acquisition in late 2010 of fellow Microsoft NSI speakTECH, of Costa Mesa, Calif. The $15 million deal brought Perficient a company that was doing $16 million in annual revenues. SpeakTECH's 120 employees brought the combined company to about 1,400 consulting, technology, sales and support professionals in North America. Perficient also acquired Kerdock Consulting LLC, an Oracle business intelligence and enterprise performance management consulting firm, in 2010.
According to Davis, Perficient is still looking for additional acquisitions: "We intend to continue to augment our organic growth with accretive M&A to scale quickly in the years ahead."
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20110 comments
The Zune media player, Microsoft's 5-year-old attempt to answer the Apple iPod, may be about to join the ranks of Microsoft's zombie products.
In a report posted Monday, Bloomberg quoted a source familiar with the decision saying Microsoft would discontinue the player due to low demand and to shift its emphasis to mobile phones. There have been rumblings for weeks that something was happening in the Zune product unit.
Bloomberg noted that Zune failed to rank among NPD Groups Inc.'s top five portable digital music players in the United States last year, when Apple's market share was 77 percent.
The report's source told Bloomberg that Microsoft would continue to sell existing versions of the Zune, and that Zune software, which was fairly sophisticated and has inspired some aspects of the Windows Phone 7 interface, will go onto Windows phones.
UPDATE 3/16: A subsequent blog post attributed to a Microsoft program manager says the company has not officially confirmed whether it is discontinuing the Zune hardware line.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 14, 20111 comments