Microsoft invests in new technologies and programs designed to support its partner ecosystem

Microsoft Corp. has announced new investments in technologies and programs designed to support its partner ecosystem to help optimize Microsoft’s partner engagement for the cloud era.

Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner group, says, “Customers and partners alike continue to move to the cloud and accelerate their digital transformation, leading us to new and different levels of partnership. Our portfolio of programs, offers and resources for companies partnering with Microsoft is transforming to help them capitalize on this opportunity.”

Investments in products and programs -

* Microsoft Teams extensions and adoption - Just two years after its launch, Teams now has 13 million daily active users and 19 million weekly active users. The company also announced new features in Microsoft Teams for every worker —including new ways to support healthcare organizations and first-line workers. Additional new partner integrations include support for contact centers, compliance recording and cloud solution providers.

* Dynamics 365 updates - The company announced significant updates to the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator and two new integrations for Dynamics 365 that address the automotive and financial services industries. In addition, the Business Applications ISV Connect program is generally available, with new development tools and guidance, marketplace resources, joint field engagement processes and go-to-market support.

* Introducing Azure Lighthouse - Azure Lighthouse gives partners a single control plane to view and manage Azure at scale across all their customers. This provides a better managed Azure experience with higher automation and efficiency, resulting in greater visibility and security for customers. This marks the first time Microsoft has architected a solution at this scale, with partners and for partners.

* Azure Migration Program - The new Azure Migration Program (AMP) helps customers accelerate their migration to Azure. AMP offers proactive advice and tools to help mitigate risks and address common issues associated with moving workloads to the cloud.

Broadening partner opportunity

Since the inception of Microsoft’s co-sell program 24 months ago, the program has seen $9.5 billion in annual contracted partner revenue. The investments announced this week are designed to build on that opportunity -

* General availability of the Microsoft Security competency - This new competency allows partners to market their expertise and provides access to a range of benefits designed to enable business growth and profitability.

* Five advanced specializations - These include Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure, Linux and Open Source Databases Migration to Microsoft Azure, Data Warehouse Migration to Microsoft Azure, Modernization of Web Applications in Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure.

* New advancements in marketplace - Additional pricing models, a rewards program and a new route to market are rolling out in July for companies that publish transactable offers in Microsoft’s expanded commercial marketplace. The pricing models include monthly and annual SaaS billing, flexible, custom-metered billing options, standard contracts, and free SaaS trials that convert to paid engagements.

Business Applications Total Addressable Market (TAM) is predicted to be at $125B by 2022, and 57 percent of this will be driven by ISVs. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are an important area of investment for the company, and represent a significant growth opportunity for partners in this market.

Partners are critical to this story, whether they’re ISVs building solutions on top of Dynamics 365, ISVs connecting their solutions with Dynamics 365, or systems integrators providing customization and integration for the customer’s environment. These partners bring deep industry expertise that helps customers solve important, industry-specific challenges, so Microsoft has been investing in technical and business solutions to help accelerate their growth.

Business Applications ISV Connect program

Microsoft’s newly branded Business Applications ISV Connect program will help drive a healthy Dynamics 365 and PowerApps ecosystem by helping ISVs get to market faster, simplify publishing their solutions to both Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, and promote their solutions with customers. Microsoft is moving beyond transactional partnerships to a world where partners are encouraged and incented to innovate on top of Microsoft products, adding value for customers and creating new solutions and revenue opportunities. This program is built on a revenue sharing model so we can reinvest in our ISVs with technical, marketing, and sales enablement benefits.

Many ISVs would also like help in reaching customers and for those that choose to try and enter the premium tier of the program for their app(s), there is co-selling and co-marketing support. Co-selling provides ISVs with the ability to leverage the Microsoft sales force to magnify their reach with Microsoft’s customers globally.

Technology investments for ISVs building on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform

At Inspire, Microsoft will be talking about its plans for Azure DevOps and GitHub integration and will be launching a new solution called ISV Studio that provides a consolidated view into how ISV apps are performing across their customer tenants. Now in public preview, the ISV Studio will enable access to insights about key adoption metrics such as the number of tenants and install successes/failures, empowering ISVs to identify and act on bottlenecks slowing down adoption.

Continued investment in Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators for ISVs

As part of its continued investment, Microsoft is making its latest industry accelerators, automotive and banking, generally available.

* Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator: The automotive sector has a customer journey that involves several parties resulting in many data silos. There is an additional complexity in that vehicles are always moving. With the automotive accelerator, we worked with Annata, Oxlo, and others to help ISV partners quickly develop customer experience management (e.g., marketing, lifetime engagement, etc.) solutions that can serve, for example, franchised dealer networks. It is open sourced on GitHub and available in AppSource for a test drive.