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Sign of the Times: Microsoft Adds an Open Source Partner Award for WPC

The award ceremony at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) has always been primarily a celebration of the partners who go deepest with Microsoft's proprietary stack.

But this year, one of the partners called to the stage in July will be recognized for deploying an open source solution on the Microsoft Azure platform.

"At Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this year, we will highlight how [our open source] momentum is made possible by our partners, and their delivery of open cloud solutions, by awarding the first annual Open Source on Microsoft Azure Partner of the Year Award," said Mark Hill, vice president for Open Source Sales and Marketing Strategy at Microsoft, in a blog post Thursday.

"This new award will recognize partners who build outstanding open source-based solutions on our cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. This year's winner will have illustrated customer success with an innovative Azure solution that includes a significant, globally recognized open source project," Hill wrote.

The new open source award will be just one among dozens of categories of awards Microsoft will hand out in July. Most will still reward partners for Microsoft-heavy implementations.

Hill put the new award in the context of Microsoft's increased emphasis on openness over the last year, which has coincided with Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO. Among Microsoft's open source milestones, according to Hill, are a 20-percent-plus share for Linux-based solutions of all Azure compute usage and the move in November to make server-side .NET open source.

Posted by Scott Bekker on February 20, 2015


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