Microsoft: There is more to our channel than cloud

Vendor's partner boss insists customers' needs more important that its corporate cloud push

Microsoft has insisted that end users' requirements come ahead of its cloud-first agenda and said that partners should be as clued up on traditional tech as its new cloudy wares.

In September, the vendor made a tranche of cloud-fuelled changes to dozens of its competencies which meant some were scrapped and cloud requirements were added to others.

Since chief executive Satya Nadella took over the top job at the start of the year, his has continually pushed his "cloud-first" agenda.

But the vendor's UK channel leader Linda Rendleman insisted that although growth is coming primarily from the cloud within the UK business, partners should not snub on-premise tech.

"Ultimately, we introduced cloud competencies so we could have all of our programmes under one umbrella which is Microsoft Partner Network (MPN)," she said.

"What we want to accomplish is a network which can sell the solution that's right for the customer. Growth is coming from cloud but many need a hybrid solution and we believe hybrid is our differentiator.

"Even though we have cloud competencies in MPN - and we think it is important to align to those competencies to give support - ultimately we want them to be able to sell the right solution for customers.

"Many already understand the on-prem piece but the better they understand both [cloud and on-premise], the more they are able to sell the solution the customer is ready to engage with."

Earlier this week, Rendleman and the rest of the Microsoft UK channel team gathered partners together in London for a channel-specific day at the firm's Future: Decoded event.

During the wider event - which is the biggest UK partner gathering yet - Nadella talked up the cloud opportunity to UK partners.

Rendleman said her team was keen to extend the invite to the event outside the usual group of top-level partner execs and welcomed in techies and sales and marketing staff too.

"We wanted to broaden this out and give an opportunity for more partners to attend," she said. "Breakouts were focused on SMB, public sector and some focused on privacy and security, for example - they were segment specific and role-specific as well."