Last Friday along with Claire and Mike, I hosted a Partnering for the Future roundtable at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. We invited 11 organizations along to meet with our Director of Partner Group (Scott Dodds) and our UK Managing Director, Gordon Frazer. We talked about much more than Web 2.0, including SaaS, creative design, .com bubbles, transparency at Microsoft and more and I thought it in the spirit of transparency I'd share as much of the conversation as I could here on the blog. In fact, one of the questions on the day was "is anyone going to blog about this from Microsoft?" and I duly stuck my hand up and went "yeah...me". This isn't another echo chamber or talking shop so here goes:

The Agenda (verbatim from our invite)

This goal of this roundtable is to help shape the future direction of partner relationships with Microsoft. Based on that goal, our objective for the event will be to discuss these areas with a small group of leading edge technology adopters who are either current Microsoft Partners or future potential partners. The types of questions we’d like to explore in the roundtable are

• What effects are Web 2.0, SaaS and broadband having on your business and your customers businesses?
• How can Microsoft help in this new arena with its partnership approach?
• What would you like to see from a relationship with Microsoft in the next 6 months?
• What are your experiences (good and bad) in working with Microsoft as a partner?
• Which other software companies do you envisage forming closer partner relationships with over the next year?
• What 1 thing would you change in your engagement with Microsoft to date?

The Attendees

• Cary Marsh: CEO, Mydeo
• Tom Keane: President, Nitrosell
• Ben Way; MD, The Rainmakers
• Sally Anne Ernst: Chief Executive, Sinocode
• Matthieu Jonglez: Chief Technology Architect, Smartlogic
• Graeme Duncan:Chief Operating Officer, Caspian Learning
• Richard Sedley: Director, cScape Customer Engagement Unit
• Matteo Berlucchi: MD, Skinkers
• Nigel Pocklington: Horsesmouth
• Rob Noble: Director, Lightmaker Group
• Rob Blackwell: Director, Active Web Solutions

• Gordon Frazer: MD, Microsoft UK
• Scott Dodds: GM, SME and Partners Group, Microsoft UK
• Claire O'Halloran: Channel Development Manager, UK Partner Group, Microsoft
• Mike Pallot: Solution Channel Development Manager - Search and HPC, Microsoft
• Annemarie Duffy: Executive Business Manager to Gordon Frazer
• Steve Clayton: CTO UK Partner Group, Microsoft

The Conversation
We broke the roundtable down in to two "conversations". I say conversations as I was chairing and now I know how hard that job really is. Trying to ensure everyone from a fairly wide audience got involved and could contribute was tricky and exhausting. When your director and MD are there it's doubly exhausting but by the second conversation, people were really in the flow and it was a shame we had to end so soon. Rather than cover it in laborious detail, here are the main points I pulled out from each session with some initial feedback from me:

Conversation 1 - the icebreaker
Richard from cScape kindly kicked off this conversation with some of the output from cScape's recent customer survey. He highlighted the loyalty of customers is waning, broadband adoption, the impact on marketing of the web's 2 way conversations, the 13% drop in skilled workforce in the UK, clients increasing request to make them "look cool" and the challenge of providing ROI in this web based economy. All great food for thought which led in to a discussion about Web 2.0, SaaS and the potential for another bursting bubble. The latter comment was pretty much shot down (as expected).

• Tom Keane kicked us off with his infamous "life is about sex and shopping quote" which got the laughs rolling!
• A big change from the first .com explosion is the barrier to entry cost is much lower. You can start a business and a website for £100 and startups are not hemorrhaging cash like they did in the late 90's. Less fast cars around was my less than brilliant observation here.
• The advertising model was discussed for a while and it was generally agreed that this was a weakness that was going to become more exposed
• Hybrid SaaS was introduced by Tom who suggested we're still on dangerous ground with pure SaaS
• Ben discussed the changing nature of the web and in particular mobile consumption with products like the Nokia N95 heralding a change
• There are real companies making real money on the web with real applications. Rob from AWS noted their success with RNLI and we have Tesco and Rightmove doing similar
• The significance of mashups was discussed with a platform in the cloud allowing an app to be built in a matter of hours that was previously a lot of client side code. This led to a discussion on the quality of the building blocks of the web with solutions such as storage, search and location being key assets.
• Rob from Lightmaker brought us back from the techno brink to discuss the quality of the customer experience being key and it not mattering whether Flash was better than WPF/E in this context.
• Ben talked about the humanization of companies being critical going forward. Made me smile as that is what Blue Monster is all about :)
• Matteo pointed out some things are cycles and some are not. Broadband isn't a cycle, it's a continuum.

Conversation 2 - the action sequence
This is where the rubber hits the road. We asked our guests to let us have it with both barrels (and they did, though kindly!) as to what Microsoft's role in this changing world of partnerships was. I sensed we could have been there a lot longer and I boiled it down to these 3 things. There was a lot more in terms of verbatim commentary of course but I've chosen not to publish here (for now) as I collate and share internally - plus it would have made this the longest blog post in history if I had put it here. I couldn't resist adding a few quick responses though.

• What will the output be from this event? You can't let it just happen and then do nothing
  We totally agree and publishing the output here so you can hold us accountable is the first step. Suffice it to say, we learnt a lot. Mike, Claire and I have been learning much of this stuff over the last year or so but getting the executives to hear it first hand, directly is invaluable. It will help us change some things immediately but the tanker adage is true - some things take longer though usually for good reason - they need careful consideration. This conversation will absolutely help shape our plans for the next financial year (July onwards) though. In terms of how we build partnerships with new organizations, how we evolve our partnerships with existing partners, how we engage in more community activity, how we learn to listen better and more.

• Provide a Microsoft "people finder"
  We've actually talked about this a fair bit and things like Partner-TV are one way of addressing this request as well as helping to put more of a face on our organization. I've been playing with the latest version of DotNet Solution's Wikipedia Explorer as a potential solution. Have a look by searching for someone like Robert Scoble to see how it works. What do you think?

• Get involved in Universities
  We're doing more regional work at the moment in places like The Black Country and Yorkshire and Claire is involved in work such as Developing The Future which look to drive the IT skills economy in the UK but we can be doing more.

• Go where we go, get some scouts out there, make us your ambassadors
  Enough said. I couldn't agree more. This isn't marketing programmes or a set of stickers. This is a community that is open to our presence. Tell us where to be and our team will do the best to be there. I'm at the next Chinwag event, Girl Geek Dinners etc. Where else?

• Do you plan to host more of these events and give us more time to network? How are you going to make this room work for you?
  Yes. My initial thinking would be a quarterly meeting (at least) either in Cambridge or London. I noticed the room next to us at Cambridge was more theatre style so perhaps we could organize a full day where companies could join us to show their products/solutions and share ideas with other and generally network. I have to confess that until now, we'd thought more of getting involved in other events like Chinwag, Second Chance Tuesday and the like but it seems there is interest in Microsoft hosting something. The challenge will be how to manage the invite process for the benefit of all involved. I'm thinking of having this set of partners each invite 1 new partner and the membership extends through their network rather than ours. At the end of the day, they know the landscape better than we do. Comments welcomed on this.

Summary
Trying to summarize over 2 hours of conversation down to a few things is tricky as there was much discussion and lots of interesting points raised but I think these are three key ones that it's likely we can have the most impact on - please feel free to correct me:

1. Microsoft people: the overriding feedback for the first 20 minutes of conversation 2 was access to people. I loved this feedback as I think it's crucial to our success. We need to get our people out of the building more and out meeting partners and potential partners. Microsoft has truly wonderful people and when they connect, they make a difference. I was struck by Ben's comment that 3 weeks ago he'd NEVER have though of talking to Microsoft and now he loves talking to us. People like Claire, Chris Bright, Alistair Beagley, Simon Davies and others are making the difference. How many others don't come near Microsoft because they don't know how to or who to talk to. Okay, it's hard to scale the face to face connection but we need more of the 4500 Microsoft bloggers to be from the UK. We can start the conversation there I hope. The feedback was loud and clear though - find a way to get the Microsoft UK people out in the grass roots some more and make connections.
   
2. Lower The Barriers To Entry: for some it can be too hard to partner with Microsoft initially and some of the stuff that they'd find valuable needs to come sooner in the relationship. Specifically stuff like access to software for building prototypes etc. We do provide this but don't do a great job of communicating it me thinks. Stuff like our Empower program and Action Pack get missed. These aren't the only answers though and we need to do more on this topic.
   
3. Connect With The Community: This one really resonated with Scott, Claire and myself and it relates to the first point. It's about understanding that some of the new partners we have will not necessarily fit in to our current Partner Program and we need to be more flexible and adaptable and work with them on their terms. There were several suggestions on how we make the people in the room our brand ambassadors and I totally agree. When Ben or Cary or Matteo talk about their relationship with Microsoft within their community it resonates about a million times louder then when we do. We're going to do a lot of thinking about this one and I'd personally like to find a formal way to endorse these guys in the same way we have stuff like MVP programs.

Thanks
Our sincere thanks go to all of the people who came along - they're all busy people and hauling up/across/down to Cambridge takes their precious time and we appreciated it. In the spirit of full disclosure, we offered all 11 attendees a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. They were under no obligation to accept but I'm pleased to they all did and I hope one or two have installed already. It's the least we could offer and we look forward to another session to provide more detailed feedback.

Should you have been there?
We asked a group of organizations that we know - not necessarily all "pro Microsoft" but certainly ones we knew we would get candid feedback from. They definitely delivered. There will be more of these sessions though so feel free to comment back here if you're interested.

Links: Richard's Tumbleog, Claire,