[click the image for a high res view of what you get]

Last week at the WorldWide Partner Conference we launched the Demo Showcase for the People Ready Business (hereafter known as Demo Showcase by everybody I expect). I’ve blogged about this before as 30 of our UK partners have been testing this new toolkit that leaps us forward from the Tech Demo Toolkit to a solution oriented demo suite.

I commisioned a UK paper from IDC to look at the success of partners in the UK with multiple competencies. This followed the US based research earlier this year and our UK paper is now available.

Download the IDC white paper on Competency attainment as a PDF document (194KB / 28 secs at 56Kbps)

The paper highlights that whilst many of these UK partners had moved to solution selling already, competencies had helped them to accelerate this shift and acted as a “glue” within their companies to drive the organisation collectively towards this. They considered this shift (from product or box shifting approaches) to be something of a chasm though and we’re hopeful that resources like Demo Showcase can help shorted and de-risk this path for other partners. Ultimately, the more partners we have selling true stack solutions the better for them and Microsoft. 

I helped to shoot this video with Steve Sydee from the Touchstone Group talking about how the company makes use of the Demo Showcase 

The Demo Showcase DVD’s were given out at WWPC and will appear in the next partner box with a next update excpected in September. You should also expect to hear a LOT more about this from my team and I’ll have a video interview with the owner of the initiative (Nigel Postings) up on PTS-TV soon.

 

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