Partner-Facing Roles Shuffled in Microsoft Reorg

The leadership of the six-month-old One Commercial Partner (OCP) organization at Microsoft got a minor shuffle when the company's entire sales and marketing organization underwent major upheavals at the beginning of July.

Some of the biggest changes to Microsoft's global partner organization took effect well before the recent reorg. In January of this year, Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Commercial Business Judson Althoff named Ron Huddleston corporate vice president of a new OCP organization that at the time folded in the Worldwide Partner Group (WPG) run by Gavriella Schuster, the Enterprise Partner team led by Victor Morales and the ISV Partner Business Evangelist/Go-To-Market team led by Kim Akers.

Akers, however, moved in mid-May to the role of Readiness lead, reporting to Althoff in the Worldwide Commercial Business, leaving Huddleston with an open spot on ISV.

Rather than a straight ISV replacement, Huddleston chose to create a combined systems integrator/ISV role, and named Corporate Vice President Michael Angiulo to that post this month. Reporting to Angiulo are Morales, Alex Payne and Bob Maher.

Of the OCP's three newly defined core functions -- Build-With, Go-To-Market and Sell-With -- Huddleston says Angiulo's team will qualify as Build-With, which includes partner management, recruiting and business development.

In an interview this week at the Microsoft Inspire partner conference, Huddleston said Angiulo's marketplace-building experience at Microsoft was an important reason he was chosen for the role. "He has experience with setting up ecosystems at Microsoft, where he started the ecosystems from scratch for Vista, Surface Hub and a couple others. We're bringing him on board to take all of his Microsoft knowledge and apply it to those two different organizations -- ISVs and SIs," said Huddleston, adding, "He has really strong leadership at his directs level. Really, really strong."

Huddleston said the ISVs and SIs share elements of their selling motions and combining their management in one organization could also drive partner-to-partner cooperation. "Those two partner types spend a lot of time co-selling. The connection between that and what we're doing on the co-sell side and with solution maps is really critical," Huddleston said.

A position for a Go-To-Market Lead remains open on Huddleston's immediate leadership team. Other members of Huddleston's team include Schuster, corporate vice president of Worldwide Channels & Programs (Microsoft's worldwide channel chief); Larry Orecklin, vice president of OCP Field and Operations (a key "Sell-With" role); Joel Borellis, general manager of Technical; Gavin Orleow, Strategy and Planning Lead; and Chief of Staff Todd Nelmes.

Meanwhile, the major July reorganization brought significant changes to the U.S. organization, as well, shifting some high-profile partner executives into different roles.

An organizational chart viewed by RCP showed Jean-Philippe Courtois, executive vice president and president of Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations, serving for now as acting president of Microsoft's U.S. subsidiary. The chart showed that direct reports to Courtois in the U.S. organization included David Willis leading U.S. OCP, Phil Sorgen running Enterprise-Commercial, Allison Watson leading Marketing and Operations, and Gail Thomas leading Enterprise-Public Sector. Sorgen and Watson are both former Microsoft worldwide channel chiefs.

Posted by Scott Bekker on July 14, 2017