Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : WPC

ISV & Partner awards at WPC09

girishr — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:37:07 GMT

Seems like WPC08 was just a few weeks ago but WPC09 is already upon us. This year WPC is at New Orleans from July 13th through 16th.

Every year, top Microsoft partners are recognized and honored with “WPC Awards”. There are several categories of awards includes the coveted awards

ISV/Software Solutions Partner of the Year
ISV/Software Solutions Innovation Partner of the Year
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year

Partners can nominate their solution/company for these awards and do so immediately as the nomination ends April 9, 2009 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

If you don’t know what WPC is, it is a partner event that provides a fantastic opportunity to connect with Microsoft folks and other ISVs or Partners just like you.

I also noticed that registration for WPC 09 is now open and you can register here: https://partner.microsoft.com/global/trainingevents/wwpartnerconference

These days unborn babies and even plants start to socialize early enough through social networking sites! So check out the below links to “socialize” during WPC this year :-)

http://twitter.com/wpc09

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WPC09-July-13-16-2009-New-Orleans/50554356818

WPC Wrap up

girishr — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:40:02 GMT

WPC was indeed Texas-sized this year with over 10,000 people in attendance and 4 days of packed action. Needless to say, I'm yet to fully recover from all that happened in Houston :-)

Software+Services and CRM both were heard all across the conference. Even though wall street doesn't very much agree on Microsoft's online investments, like Ina Fried, the attendees of WPC knew Microsoft's huge potential in this market. Of course Microsoft will continue to invest in its on-premise software and server applications as well.

On-demand software will be hot in markets like US and Europe. However partners from the Middle East and Asia seem to disagree. After talking to them, I realized that infrastructure improvements still needs to happen in many places around the world. At the same time, industries with enough wealth and resources don't want to cut corners by moving to on-demand software. No wonder making CRM 4.0 available both on-premise and on-demand resonates well with our customers.

By the way, don't worry if you missed the action at WPC. You can always watch the major keynotes and breakouts from WPC on demand at http://www.microsoft.com/digitalwpc/.

Pre-conference day at WPC 2008

girishr — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:14:37 GMT

Monday was the pre-conference day at Microsoft and we had a blast at the ISV track. Judging by previous experience at conferences, I was prepared by wearing sneakers and rolling laptop case to make that 5-mile walk across the conference center from session to session. This year the WPC organizers have that through this and made all of the ISV sessions in the same room and most of the other session I wanted to attend were pretty nearby. Nice!

Eric Weis, a program manager for the Metro program hosted a great session for ISVs titled "Making the Decision to Adopt the Latest Microsoft Technologies" to clear the myths and doubts on early adoption of Microsoft software. BTW, if you are not aware of the Metro program, it is Microsoft's structured program around early adoption of our technologies run by the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group. In this session, one of our very own CRM partners RDT was showcased. Mark Bates, CEO of RDT spoke clearly about the good, bad and ugly of early adoption.

The next session was by Eddie Amos, the GM talking about the Software+Services. The surprise of the day was the final session on how learnings from gaming software could be applied to enhance business applications. Entellium showed how you could build a WPF application that acts as a smart client and provide amazing User eXperience such that the users will love what they're doing. Working on the CRM demo where we did WPF and Silverlight samples for CRM Online, I was totally able to relate to that. If we could collaborate with our friends and intuitively play the games, why not our business applications!

Houston - Here we come

girishr — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:21:11 GMT

I will be there at Houston for the World Wide Partner Conference 2008 along with several of my colleagues in Dynamics Evangelism group. If you're an ISV and are interested in CRM, please do come talk to us.

You can also find me wandering in the CRM booths, so please feel free to stop by and chat about the ISV opportunities in CRM.

Texas is always an exciting place for me. It is where I first landed in the US and spent 4 years of my life doing my Masters and my very first job. After spending the last couple of years in New York and Seattle, I'm not sure if I can sustain the hot, humid Houston for a week. Maybe a quick little trip to Galveston should help.

See y'all in Houston. Adios for now!

CRM ISVs at WPC 2008

girishr — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 23:34:11 GMT

Partnering with Microsoft is a wonderful opportunity for the partners and a huge bonus to our customers. Seriously, I haven't seen any other major software vendor having such a great partner eco-system.

To illustrate that we're not just ranting about it, Nikhil Hasija, a Senior Product Manager for CRM team showed us a preview of some of the ISV solutions that'll be showcased at WPC this year. Ben, Sanjay and John have covered the solutions in details and the sessions you wouldn't want to miss at WPC.

What's interesting to me is the way ISVs have creatively used the CRM platform and how they've seamlessly integrated with products like Silverlight, Virtual Earth, Live Messenger,...

If you are at WPC, do attend these sessions and find out how you as Partners, can leverage solutions like this in the eco-system to help your customers.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft CRM,ISV,Microsoft WPC