Last week's "Future of SharePoint" event held by Microsoft in San Francisco earned high praise from the SharePoint community. The importance of SharePoint in the Microsoft ecosystem was reconfirmed, which seemed to reignite energy in the SharePoint community.
To help those of us who don't live and breathe SharePoint understand the impact of the 2016 release on partners, I spoke to Naomi Moneypenny, chief technology officer at ManyWorlds Inc. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on May 11, 20160 comments
The next Microsoft Envision event is already scheduled to kick off on Feb. 27, 2017 in Los Angeles, Calif. Hopefully, following the advice of partners, Microsoft has already begun planning, building on the strengths and learning from mistakes of the first Envision held in New Orleans earlier this month.
One of the most common observations from both customers and partners about the first Envision was confusion about who should attend the event. Clarifying the roles, along with the corresponding value proposition for each, should be a pretty straightforward exercise for Microsoft. This year's sessions were aimed at business, finance, IT, marketing and sales leaders.
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Posted by Barb Levisay on April 13, 20160 comments
Fair or not, almost every conversation at the first Microsoft Envision conference, which took place earlier this week in New Orleans, began with a comparison to Convergence, the discontinued Microsoft Dynamics event.
Loyalty to the Convergence legacy borders on fanatic, but the event is a tough act to follow by any measure. The Convergence team had become a well-oiled machine that consistently delivered great content and smooth operations. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on April 07, 20160 comments
Microsoft's Power BI Partner Showcase is a testament to the success of partners helping their clients, from enterprises to SMBs, realize the potential of data through analytics and visualization. For most SMB partners, however, experience and resource challenges put building a Power BI practice beyond their reach.
But one of the showcase partners, RoseBud Technologies, has set its sights on taking Power BI to the SMB market -- and helping other partners do the same. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on March 29, 20160 comments
The Women in Technology (WIT) community of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) has gained impressive momentum over the past two years. Well-attended webinars, popular regional meetings and standing-room-only Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) luncheons establish the value WIT brings to the channel.
Taking another step forward, the IAMCP WIT is sponsoring the Entrepreneurs, Executives and Excellence (E3) Program, an intensive entrepreneurship program for women in the channel. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on March 09, 20160 comments
The results of a recently released survey of 1,000 SharePoint and Office 365 developers provide an interesting look into the business realities that Microsoft partners must balance.
The study, titled "The State of SharePoint and Office 365 Development," was conducted by Rencore, a SharePoint and Office 365 ISV, and can be accessed here with registration. It revealed "that many organisations have a mixed up approach to SharePoint and Office 365. Microsoft's vision of a cloud-first world just has not materialised yet. In fact, organisations regularly use a broad mix of Microsoft's most recent and legacy software." More
Posted by Barb Levisay on February 24, 20160 comments
While not everyone in the channel is excited about Microsoft Envision, the replacement for Microsoft's old Convergence event, could it be just the right content offered at just the right time?
Billed by Microsoft as the flagship event for business leaders, this year's Envision may be Version 1 of a well-timed bid to replace Salesforce.com's mega-event, Dreamforce, as the destination for those seeking a strategic vision of technology.
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Posted by Barb Levisay on February 10, 20160 comments
While many partners are making progress attracting and retaining women in the Microsoft ecosystem, a visit to most any partner's leadership page reveals a continuing challenge: Women are not proportionally represented in leadership roles.
Recognizing the problem, one partner moved beyond rationalizations to look for specific ways to break down barriers and tap the value of its entire workforce.
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Posted by Barb Levisay on December 09, 20150 comments
Vendor programs of the past were designed to make it easier for channel partners to sell a set of solutions as one "package." While the intent of Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program shares that goal, this time partners have to complete the package on their own. The CSP requires a new mindset, where partners must clearly define the role they want to play in their customers' future.
For those partners used to a transactional rather than strategic relationship with their customers, the CSP program represents a transformational business model change. Microsoft's intent with the CSP program is to drive long-term consumption, which means promoting user adoption and expanding workload footprint. Those partners wishing to gain the attention of Microsoft need to develop their CSP offerings with those objectives in mind. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on November 11, 20150 comments
As the floodgates open and massive amounts of data move to Office 365, the nature of e-mail migrations has changed forever. Instead of being the primary force of migration projects, e-mail has become just a small piece of the migration opportunity. The cloud, and specifically Office 365, is driving a fundamental shift from data-centric to user-centric migrations.
Historically, e-mail archive projects involved migrating one on-premises legacy archive to a more efficient, space-saving archive solution. In the early 2000s, growth of archiving took off as compliance requirements meant that more data had to be retained along with the e-mail. The high cost of storage created a strong market for efficient archiving. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on September 30, 20150 comments
For technology providers, the cloud is changing the nature of service delivery. Office 365 removes the application and infrastructure limitations, allowing customers and partners to focus on business outcomes instead of technology features.
To deliver services in the cloud era, partners are taking a user-centered approach to business analysis supported by a commitment to continuous learning. More
Posted by Barb Levisay on August 27, 20150 comments
Taking an important step beyond anecdotal evidence, Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Group (WPG) has created several cloud profitability tools based on substantive partner research. An overdue investment in empirical research, the Microsoft Cloud Profitability Scenarios and Financial Models provide insight into the real world of partner experiences with cloud business models.
The Microsoft Cloud Profitability Scenarios project is an outgrowth of partner interest in the Microsoft-sponsored IDC research released last year in the "Successful Cloud Partners 2.0" e-book. Jen Sieger, senior business strategy analyst for WPG, said, "Last year's IDC e-book had a lot of good insights on the business models but partners wanted to know how they could pursue those models with Microsoft." More
Posted by Barb Levisay on July 30, 20150 comments