As a relative newbie to the Microsoft partner world, one of the goals Mr. Noakes set for me this year was to break in to media coverage in the UK to dicuss how Microsoft is helping to build a highly skilled partner base and help them be successful. This is kind of tricky when Noakes and Alexander have their mugshot routinely appearing in the press but this week I got my shot at it and thanks to Karl Flinders I managed to break my duck! Following a brief chat with Karl he published some commentary I made around our partners partneting with other partners. Try saying that after a few glasses of Amarone.

KarlF and I had a good but brief chat about this last week when I reminded him that 97% of our company revenue comes in from partners hence we’re huge advicates of them teaming up. Not everyone can know everything hence there are plenty of great examples where one partner talks to another and they build a mutually beneficial relationship. At the end of the article I’m quoted as saying partners “must form clear contracts to avoid problems” and I firmly believe it. It was reinforced during our recent partner roundtable where Tim Wallis from Content and Code commented that they have great success with these kind of partnerships when clear lines are drawn. Other partners haven’t fared quite so well when they go in with a less structured approach and then find issues further down the line around customer ownership. Common sense, trust and a decent contract that has some fairly simple terms around account ownership, revenue split, technology focus and termination terms shoudl sort it. The guys at ALK and TBS are my favourite example of this as I helped bring them together and they’re now seeing great business success and growth from it which is quite satisfying when all I did was suggest they should chat. Stuff like Channel Builder and WorldWide Partner Conference try to do this at scale but the personal element always works best.

Coming back to the objectives thing though: whilst it’s good to be in the press and the objective had merit there has also been a shift in the last 2 months with blogs. I’m continually amazed at the level of readership and feedback I get from this blog as a way to connect with our partner community. As we’re deep in FY07 planning you can rest assured that I’m fighting the blog (and podcast type approach) as great new way that I think we can connect with partners and hopefully the channel press. Why? It’s faster, often more transparent and it’s two way. We’re listening and learning quickly on how we can connect with you better as a partner audience. In fact the next peice of press coverage I’m expecting is to be taken directly from my blog which is an interesting turnaround.