Did you know that 95% of Microsoft’s commercial revenue flows through partners? Satya Nadella and Amy Hood announced in the beginning of February that Microsoft has made $32 billion in revenue. More than 7,500 partners are joining the partner ecosystem every month. Partners are fueling the commercial cloud growth through their innovation and monthly growth.
Microsoft is consistently working with their old and new partners to help build their own digital capabilities to compete and grow. Microsoft is excited to witness the success of their partners and know they are collaborating with businesses of all types and sizes. Microsoft is now moving beyond their transactional reselling via partners, as part of their new digital transformation. They want a true partnership philosophy where they’re consistently working together to develop and sell each other’s technology and solutions.
Microsoft’s Partner Network is building on their technology, collaborating with other partners to build repeatable solutions, and developing new revenue opportunities. The speed of the cloud enables partners to accelerate value to customers. The hundreds of thousands of partners are allowing Microsoft to have a stronger ecosystem.
CSP (Cloud Solution Provider)
- Partners are embedding Microsoft technologies into their solutions and providing customers with more differentiated, long-term value for customers. 52% of partners transact through CSP and serve more than 2 million customers.
Azure Expert MSP
- This program has grown to 43 partners being able to deliver consistent, repeatable and high-fidelity managed services on Azure. They are also driving $100,000 per month in consumption. A major part of this number is in migration services, since SQL Server 2008 will phase out this summer.
IP Co-Sell
- Generating $8 billion in contracted partner revenue since July, Microsoft sellers for selling third-party solution is a major success. Partners are experiencing the benefits by seeing co-sell deals close three times faster, projects are six times larger and Azure consumption is driven six times more.
Microsoft Marketplace provides a compatible selling and buying experience that brings parity to first and third-party solutions. Partners can sell directly to more than a billion customers and partners within the marketplace. They also benefit from lower deployment costs and flexible procurement models for software. Partners have and can achieve an average of 40% reduction in cost per lead, and a two-times lead conversion to sales rate compared to industry averages.
AppSource and Azure Marketplace will experience new capabilities soon; such as offering their solutions in the partner ecosystem through the CSP program with a single click. Private marketplaces will allow partners to customize the terms for any specific customer on a per-user, per-app, per-day or per-day basis to meet customer’s needs.
Global spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence systems is expected to triple from 2018 to 2022 from $24 million to $77.6 billion. Microsoft’s goal is making AI accessible and valuable for everyone by focusing on AI innovations that extend and empower human capabilities. The AI Inner Circle Partner program allows partners to provide custom services and increase AI solutions to customers. There has been a 200 percent growth in their AI practices year-over-year.
Microsoft Partner Network is an empowering aspect to the company for every organization to achieve more. Microsoft is a customer-first, partner-led company that puts the needs of their customers first. Working with partners to deliver the best outcomes for each organization as there is a continued evolution in the Microsoft-partner relationship. Within the next year there should be more innovation with AI, more co-selling opportunities, and more ways to connect partners to customers, and other partners through Azure Marketplace and AppSource.
