Five things to expect from Microsoft Inspire
The vendor has a spate of announcements to make at its annual partner conference in Las Vegas next week
Microsoft has been catching flak since it quietly revealed last week that it is intending to remove internal usage rights (IUR) for partners from July next year.
While its rationale for the decision - that it could no longer afford to fund partners' free use of its offerings - will no doubt be the main topic of conversation among partners attending the vendor's Inspire event next week, Microsoft still has more to say, unveiling a slew of updates to its products in a media pre-briefing ahead of the event
Here is what partners can expect to hear more about at next week's Microsoft Inspire, held in Las Vegas.
Azure updates galore
Microsoft's cloud platform Azure will see a number of changes and updates, the most interesting of which is the introduction of the Azure Migration Programme (AMP). This will provide customers with expert guidance for a step-by-step approach to cloud migration "from start to finish", according to the tech giant.
"Customers can simplify and accelerate their move to the cloud, working hand in hand with Microsoft experts and specialised migration partners," stated Julia White, corporate VP of Azure in a blog.
The programme is compromised of curated guidance, technical skill building for customers, free Azure migration tools and the opportunity to reduce migration costs.
Elsewhere, the vendor is announcing the launch of Azure Lighthouse which will become available from this month.
It is a control panel that will allow partners to manage and view Azure deployments at scale and across all customers, explained Erin Chapple, corporate VP of Microsoft Azure Compute.
"Azure Lighthouse brings scale and precision together for service providers at no additional cost," she stated. "And that's consistent for all licensing constructs customers might choose, including EA, CSP and pay-as-you-go.
"Additionally, service providers can seamlessly onboard new customers via public or private managed services offers on Azure marketplace or ARM templates…Thanks to a built-in activation of Partner Admin Link, managed services partners using Azure Lighthouse can seamlessly participate in partner rewards and incentives."
Multiple marketplace refreshes
Earlier this year, Microsoft revealed a number of sweeteners for independent software vendors (ISV) using its AppSource and Azure Marketplace.
Inspire will see the announcement of a raft of further Marketplace bonuses for partners, with new pricing models, a new rewards programme and route-to-market being rolled out from this month.
The benefits are aimed at partners who publish SaaS software and services built on one or more of the vendor's clouds. They will have access to new tools and a single onboarding process to help them publish "transactable" offers into the AppSource and Azure Marketplace platforms.
"We are enabling partners transacting through CSP to pull those marketplace offers right through in their CSP offerings," explained Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's global channel boss.
"Then we are incenting them on behalf of the ISV to actually go sell it. So the same way we incent our sellers to sell those third-party services, we are incenting the CSP partners to do it too.
"Those are big new investments that we are making to really help them reach more customers and we believe that is going to drive the biggest value in growing their business this year."
The marketplace's new pricing models include monthly and annual SaaS billing, flexible, custom pricing options, standard contracts, and free SaaS trials that convert to paid engagements.
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Five things to expect from Microsoft Inspire
The vendor has a spate of announcements to make at its annual partner conference in Las Vegas next week
Go Teams!
Two years after its full rollout, the vendor's collaborative platform Teams has amassed 13 million active daily users.
New partner-specific capabilities include the integration of contact centre solutions, compliance recording, workforce management and the opportunity to allow partners a free six-month trial of the full Teams product to customers which have yet to move to the cloud. It will be available to customers through Microsoft Cloud Service Provider partners from 1 August this year.
Support for firstline workers, channel cross-posting, priority notifications and channel moderation are also new features set to crop up on the platform.
Doing up Dymanics
Microsoft's CRM and ERP system, Dynamics 365, will see new financial and automation integrations, along with a new version of its Nonprofit Accelerator.
"These Industry Accelerators provide ISVs and more importantly their end customers with consistent entities and attributes relevant to their industry, making it easier to work with data across boundaries," stated Steven Guggenheimer, corporate VP of AI & ISV engagement.
"Today, there are more than 60 dedicated Dynamics partners around the world creating purpose-built solutions for nonprofits and mapping their data structures to the Common Data Model for Nonprofits, an unprecedented data standard that enables seamless integration between nonprofit data systems."
New ISV programme
Inspire will see the launch of Microsoft's new Business Applications ISV Connect programme, which the vendor claims will help ISVs get to market more rapidly, as well as simplifying publishing their solutions on AppSource and Azure Marketplace and promoting these solutions with customers.
The new scheme is built on a revenue-sharing model in order for Microsoft to "re-invest" in the technical, marketing and sales abilities of their ISVs. It will also offer co-selling and co-marketing benefits to ISVs to allow them to take advantage of "the Microsoft field".