Day 3 here at Worldwide Partner Conference brought with it the always popular Kevin Turner, a “bringing it all together” with Jon Roskill, and this year’s fantastic guest speaker, Sir Richard Branson. All in all, in my opinion, a great way to kick off the third day here at WPC11. This day also brought with it some pretty exciting announcements and information for all of our partners as well. As such, I am providing this overview of some of the data points and highlights from day 3 that I thought would be of interest for you or that you may have missed.

Datapoints, highlights, etc.

Congrats to the 92 country award winners! 92Winners
  • Jon Roskill pointed out some areas partners told him were most valuable to them. Are you using these to their full potential? You should be (hint, hint):
  • Jon also announced some exciting changes:
  • “We are investing $5.8 billion into the partner ecosystem in FY12 to ensure you have the support you need,” with significant portion in channel incentives - Jon Roskill
  • Here is something Jon conveyed that I think many partners will be very happy to hear, for the Microsoft Partner Network“Expect us to manage change on a steady, predictable cadence.” He further went on to say, “Major changes will be announced in July, and they will go live no earlier than October. This gives you an opportunity to be able to plan for your own businesses.”
  • Partners who invest more make 28% more revenue per employee and they have 68% larger deal sizes
  • Two assets that are critical regardless of when a customer wants to go to the cloud. No. 1 and No. 2 are System Center and Active Directory
  • Kevin Turner, “When we sell and tell our cloud story, we sell more on-premises products. We sell more of our traditional solutions. Why is that? Because customers know they can bet on you for the future.”
  • 5 Million licensed Office 365 users already with 42,000 partners trained.
  • Great quote from Kevin Turner on the Microsoft cloud offerings: “We've got the solution that says we're going to put the cloud on your terms, private, public, hybrid. We've got it. You can go at any pace, any rate you want, but we're here for you and we've got best-in-class performance.”
  • Xbox Live – Over 35 Million people on the paid service
  • Kinect, the fastest-selling consumer electronics item of all time through this past holiday selling season (Got a Guinness Book of World Records for the sales of Kinect during the holiday selling season this year)
  • 170 Million monthly users of Skype
  • 5 key areas we are investing big bets for success:
    1. Winning in cloud services
    2. Winning with end users and consumers
    3. Winning in search and display advertising
    4. Winning in phones
    5. Windows on ARM and system on a chip
  • Microsoft investing $9 BILLION in R&D
  • Execution Excellence comes down to Microsoft and our partners doing 4 things really, really well:
    1. Leading with the cloud
    2. Driving Windows 7, Office 2010, IE9
    3. Growing share by competing to win
    4. Driving customer satisfaction
  • Bing search share up 142% over last 3 years. From 0% to 27 points of combined share in just three years.
  • Four pillars to our consumerization of IT strategy: (Kevin Turner)
    1. The reimagining of Windows
    2. Secure and manage your infrastructure
    3. Best productivity experience
    4. Unified application development
  • 5 Initiatives for partners: (Kevin Turner)
    1. You have to be running the latest and greatest versions of products
    2. Drive customer deployment and adoption
    3. Lead customers to the cloud
    4. Create business value
    5. Leverage the R&D story
  • Goldman Sachs survey on IT:
    • Question: “Who do you view as the top three strategic IT vendors today?”
    • Number 1 company was Microsoft

Once Jon & Kevin completed their sections, we had an amazing interview with Sir Richard Branson, which Jon Roskill conducted. I found it to be a wonderful part of the program and saw a bunch of great feedback online from partners during and after the session.

If you are interested on viewing the keynote from yesterday, here it is:

Want to see the details of the keynote addresses? Have a read through the keynote transcripts:

Here are also a few press releases from yesterday:

Thanks again for joining us here for Day 3 of WPC11 and I hope the information above is helpful.

Remember, here’s how to keep up with the conversations:

From a social media perspective, WPC 11 has the most social media components of any Worldwide Partner Conference we’ve ever put together. Here’s a quick post I put up on how to get the most out of WPC11 with social media that you might want to take a look at.

Did you find this information helpful? If so, you may want to make sure you are utilizing all of the areas I share information online, such as: my Facebook page, my Twitter account, my Linkedin account, and my blog. Plus, you can now get all of the latest Microsoft Partner Information right on your phone!

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Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman – Follow me on TWITTER, LinkedIn, and RSS and see “What I’m thinking”
Director, Worldwide Partner Experience
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

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