Microsoft Inspire: Five areas Microsoft's channel bosses wants partners to prioritise

The vendor’s channel team tells partners where they should invest as it rolls out new incentives around marketplaces, Teams and security

Microsoft's channel execs told partners where they should invest as it rolled out a raft of new incentives and programmes to push partners to succeed across Azure, marketplaces and Microsoft Teams.

Here's our overview of the five areas Microsoft want partners to prioritise after its Inspire conference

Become more technical

Partners must upskill their technical abilities if they want to stay relevant to customers, said Microsoft's channel boss Rodney Clark.

He said that customers are becoming more technical, and partners must keep pace if they want to succeed with Microsoft.

Clark said, year on year, Microsoft will invest 250 per cent more in its fiscal 2021 on upskilling its partners.

This will include so-called Cloud Weeks, or week-long bootcamps on Microsoft Cloud, as well as virtual lab events and on-demand skilling content.

Clark said that upskilling its partners will help it capture a business applications market that is worth more than $100bn, according to Forrester.

If you add in services related to applications, this grows to a $582bn opportunity by 2023, Clark added.

"These are concrete opportunities and you can see why Microsoft is excited to support your growth here," he said.

Skill up on new, advanced-level security specialisations

Security, compliance and identity management have become "critical" for Microsoft's overall growth, Clark said.

He said Microsoft is expanding its competencies to give partners the "building blocks" of security compliance and identity through training in solution development and go-to-market.

Microsoft is also expanding to include new advanced-level specialisations "for those further along in the journey".

"Deepening your technical capability is absolutely critical," he said.

"These skilling initiatives represent our expansion of the channel's technical acumen and at the same time we stand behind you providing expertise that keeps you on the path to greater specialisation."

Start using Azure Marketplace's new private offer function

The vendor announced that is has drastically reduced marketplace fees for transactable offers during Microsoft Ignite.

Fees have been reduced from 20 per cent to three per cent as Microsoft looks to incentivise more partners to sell via its marketplace platform.

"This reduced transaction fee helps us demonstrate our commitment to the success of partners creating value on our platform," said Charlotte Yarkoni, COO of Cloud and AI at Microsoft.

Yarkoni said Microsoft has seen a 70 per cent year over year increase in transactable applications through the marketplace.

She added that Microsoft has also added a new "private offer" capability, which enables partners to sell through 9,000 cloud service providers using the platform.

Private offers will help partners access and share margin with resellers across the globe and offer their own solutions on their storefronts.

"Everyone wins. You get greater reach, cloud service providers get a broader solution offering, and customers get greater flexibility and choice."

Build your own solutions on Teams and Microsoft Viva

Yarkoni urged partners to take advantage of the booming growth of Microsoft Teams, which it claims is now at 145 million daily active users.

She said that Microsoft will be announcing new benefits to help partners build their own solutions on top of Teams and its "employee experience platform" Microsoft Viva.

"These benefits include access to Microsoft Technology such as Microsoft 365 developer Sandbox and Azure credits. And one on one consults with MS experts to help you design and build your application, marketing resources to help increase your exposure to new customers and support with achieving co-sell status," she said.

Take advantage of co-sell opportunities

Microsoft now has $22.1bn in contractual co-sell value since 2018, claims corporate vice president of global partner solutions Nick Parker.

He asked partners to take advantage of Microsoft's upcoming investments into co-selling programmes.

"We'll be dialling up our commitment on co-sell and investing in more sellers and programmes to co-sell with you to help build your scale offers, deep industry solutions as well as land your solutions in the marketplace to further scale and grow your business."