This time last year I was just returning from our Worldwide Partner Conference (“WPC”) in New Orleans, the main annual event for our partners to attend, to hear keynotes from our leadership and lots of breakout sessions on individual topic areas. Our Online Services had been launched internationally in May 2009 but aside from a few references by Execs and some announcements, it had a fairly modest profile.
Roll forward a year and having just returned from this year’s WPC, it was hard to find a presentation that wasn’t either about our Cloud strategy or making reference to it. I conservatively estimate there were >65 breakout sessions incorporating a cloud theme. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, the momentum has been building within the business since before Steve Ballmer’s March 4th speech. You can watch it here along with a lot of the key note content from WPC that references the Cloud and our strategy. On of Steve's main messages, was that based on 70% of our developers today and 90% within a year developing with “the cloud in mind” is that we are “All In” with the cloud. When you consider we have roughly 40,000 developers, that’s a serious investment. Since then the "field" ie subsiduary business has been focusing on integrating Cloud messaging into everything we do and its now front and centre for many in our activities this year. I’m really excited about the profile Online Services now has within Microsoft and for those (both within the business and the channel) who have been patiently waiting, now’s the time to really start capitalising on our Cloud investment!
I just want to highlight some of the key announcements from WPC for those who weren’t able to make it.
- Amendments to Online Services reseller programme. We’ve now split the programme into two levels. Cloud Essentials in the main matches the existing programme but we now have a new level called Cloud Accelerate. This is the formalisation of a programme we ran last year. For more information on both, please look at this link http://www.microsoftcloudpartner.com/ Not much detail at the moment, will post more once it becomes available
- Windows Intune. We announced provisional pricing and an extension to beta programme. You can apply here I really think this represents a green field opportunity for many partners. Its a great platform to supply a whole new set value add services into existing support contracts and help extend the annuity base of revenue. For more information about Intune go here
- Windows Azure Appliance. As Azure started life as a hosted service from us, it was great to see the model going the other way ie giving partners and customers the ability to build their own Azure platform. In a small way, similar to the Live Meeting Service followed by OCS based web conferencing…but on a much grander scale! We also showed a glimpse of our datacentre strategy using containerisation. I’ve got some pictures and more info which I’ll post in the future.
- Online Service Roadmap. We have been sharing our roadmap under NDA with partners for a number of months, so it was good to see this publically disclosed. There is more information at the MS Online Team blog here In upgraded Online to 2010, many of the key missing features v. On prem deployments will be supported.
If you didn’t think we were serious about Cloud computing and with the products and services to match, you would have been left in no doubt leaving WPC that from Steve Ballmer down, we’re All In! If you weren’t able to make it, don’t worry – you can view and access much of the content here www.digitalwpc.com
And as its a new year (financially anyway) I have a resolution, to be more frequent in my blogging activities – stay tuned!