Partner takeaways from this year's Microsoft Inspire

In the wake of a controversial few weeks for the tech titan, partners share their experiences of the vendor's annual event in Las Vegas

The road leading to Microsoft Inspire 2019 was a rocky one compared with previous years.

Held in Las Vegas last week, Inspire followed a contentious fortnight that threatened to jeopardise its relationship with partners.

Prior to the event, news emerged that Microsoft would be withdrawing a number of benefits for Gold and Silver partners, including internal use rights (IUR) and on-site technical support, because it could "no longer afford" to maintain those elements, according to global channel boss Gavriella Schuster.

A week of sustained outrage from partners, including a petition against the decision which netted over 6,000 signatures, saw the tech giant roll back on its decision on the eve of its Inspire event.

The furore and Microsoft's reaction was to the forefront of Schuster's opening keynote, where she admitted that the vendor "clearly underestimated" the value those benefits brought to partners.

She emphasised the importance of the partner ecosystem, telling the audience that the vendor would be investing $3bn in its channel this year, particularly in its Cloud Solution Provider programme, marketplace and co-selling propositions.

Once that issue was addressed it was business as usual, according to partners who attended the event.

Microsoft teased a number of announcements ahead of Inspire, which attendees got to see up close and personal at the event.

We spoke to a number of partners and asked them for their key takeaways from this year's Inspire.

IOU IUR

Despite the vendor's U-turn on retaining key benefits to partners, it may have been expected that there might have been an air of disgruntlement among attendees who had been following the events of the week beforehand.

However, those who attended the event described the mood at the event as being positive.

"[Schuster's comments] was the new humbled Microsoft coming through," said Dan Scarfe, UK founder of Azure partner New Signature (pictured below).

"That immediately put that issue to bed. Then the earnings report came in on the last day of the conference, and you could just tell they were going to blow the doors out, and they did."

Chris Bunch, general manager at Cloudreach Europe, added that Schuster addressing the controversy head on put the event on a good track.

"I think if that hadn't been dealt with, it probably would have been a pretty tough week for Microsoft - people would have been haranguing them the whole time," he explained.

"I thought they adapted - at very short notice - the opening keynote with Gavriella to include not just an apology, but a commitment to working with partners more effectively in the future. And I thought it came across very well."

Leading light

Microsoft's Azure cloud platform will see a number of new features and services added to it.

Azure Lighthouse was flagged by Scarfe as a "game-changer" for partners.

Lighthouse is a control panel that allows partners to manage and view all their Azure deployments at scale and across all customers.

Available from this month, the feature has no extra costs and it allows partners to onboard new customers via public or private managed service offers on the Azure Marketplace.

"Lighthouse is phenomenally important," he stated.

"We couldn't really run our managed service business effectively without it - it is a real game-changer."

He added that the vendor's Cloud Adoption Framework is also "incredibly helpful" to partners, as Microsoft has done "all the thinking" for partners.

AMPing up

Like Lighthouse, the Azure Migration Programme (AMP) was also teased in the run-up to this year's event.

AMP provides customers with expert guidance for a step-by-step approach to cloud migration from start to finish, the tech giant said.

Bunch (pictured right) singled out AMP as the most interesting proposition for his firm.

"We have a software solution that we use both as Cloudreach and sell to other partners in the channel under the Cloudamize brand, and that feeds in very nicely into the Azure migration programme," he explained.

"This is all about a structured way of accelerating migration at scale to the cloud; that plays in nicely to some of the software and IP that we have in this area."

"There are lots of incentives linked to migrating at scale, and it's especially linked to migrating Microsoft workloads, so there are some pretty heavy incentive links around the old Windows 2008, both for Windows Server and Sequel Server 2008, and getting those moved over to Azure.

"They really want to make sure that Microsoft continues to capture those workloads as all the vendors are chasing them."

New Signature's Scarfe was a little warier on the topic of AMP, however.

"We're waiting to see how that pans out," he said. "But I think that should be positive as well."

Hello HoloLens

Both Bunch and Scarfe hailed corporate VP of marketing Julia White's keynote as the most memorable display of tech from the event.

Her session showed off the capabilities of Microsoft's augmented reality (AR) HoloLens headset as the audience saw her use it to project a life-size AR hologram of herself speaking in Japanese - a language she doesn't speak and that had been machine-translated into Japanese.

"[The product announcements prior to the event] are more practical but the thing that excited me the most was all the new technology that Microsoft is bringing out," explained New Signature's Scarfe.

"The HoloLens demo was mindblowing, just incredible."

Bunch considered the vendor's AR play to be an "interesting angle" to take, but he added that almost every offering on show had some sort of AI capability.

"They were able to put some of the newer technologies into a more tangible form for the audience - that was interesting," he said.

"I'm sure every single thing that they talked about - any kind of product or solution area - had something around AI in the description. I think that's another takeaway - probably not a surprise - but you see that renewed commitment to AI."

New year expectations

In its recent fourth-quarter results for the three months ending 30 June 2019, the tech titan reported that its cloud business revenue had for the first time eclipsed that of its other divisions.

Its Intelligent Cloud unit, which houses Azure as well as other products, saw sales rise 19 per cent year on year to $11.4bn. Overall revenue for the vendor in Q4 was $33.7bn.

This news coincided with the last day of Inspire and both Scarfe and Bunch agreed that it ended the event on a high note.

As Microsoft begins its new fiscal year, what do partners expect in their relationship with the vendor for the next 12 months?

"There is nothing but optimism from my side," said Bunch.

"They put their results out into the stock market and they overachieved versus expectations, and I think we'll continue to see that growth from Microsoft over the next 12 months."

New Signature's Scarfe meanwhile said that the good results show the strong demand for Azure offerings and services which throws up its own obstacles.

"The biggest challenge is going to be keeping up with the market," he said.

"There's just so much interest in Microsoft, with lots of customers wanting to do lots of exciting things. I think that's going to be the one panic from all of the Microsoft partners, but that's a perennial challenge."