WPC 2016 Preview: 5 Coopetition Clues

RCP analyzed the Worldwide Partner Conference session catalog to help partners get the most out of the show or to track it from the office. For more on WPC 2016, visit our event page here.

Some call it coopetition, others call the companies involved frenemies. In any case, they're the tech giants that fight each other in some areas and work together in other ways.

1. Oracle: Some things never change. Microsoft may have taken away the "enemies list" that doesn't allow certain competitors to attend the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). But with SQL Server 2016 hitting the market, there's still a session in the WPC catalog about Oracle compete opportunities.

2. AWS: Amazon Web Services doesn't get mentioned by name. But when it comes to a session titled, "Five Success Principles To Compete and Win in IaaS/PaaS Public Cloud," who else would they be talking about?

3. Red Hat: Shifting gears from compete to cooperate, Microsoft has several sessions dedicated to strategic alliance vendors. One is open source OS heavyweight Red Hat Inc. Among several sessions, one includes a lot of detail about how partners can leverage the Microsoft-Red Hat alliance.

4. Docker: A few sessions cover Azure Container Services and third-party technologies that work in those containers, such as Docker.

5. Salesforce: In a very specific session, Microsoft is pointing partners to the opportunities in using Power BI with Salesforce.com in order to set up a dashboard that exposes a data warehouse on Azure and Power BI reports on behalf of customers. The same Power BI capabilities are featured in a parallel session involving Dynamics CRM instead of Salesforce.

Posted by Scott Bekker on July 07, 2016 at 6:29 AM