Helping partners grow business application practices with new investments in their success
Next week we look forward to hosting more than 16,000 partners, customers and business leaders at Microsoft Inspire, our largest annual partner event. Presentations from our CEO and leadership will have a common thread – the critical role our partners play in enabling customers to transform their businesses across industries.
We’re constantly striving to enhance our approach to accelerating partner growth because together we can achieve more. Today, we’re introducing new investments in their success, enhanced opportunity with our ISV Cloud Embed offering, and continued technology innovation across Microsoft Business Applications.
New programs for partner success
Over the past 12 months, we’ve celebrated partner achievement in business applications across the globe. Building on this progress, we are increasing our investment in partner success for the coming year:
- Growing partner incentive programs and rebalancing rewards with greater opportunity for new customer acquisition and increased cloud consumption. In addition, we are investing to make it easier for partners to receive incentive rewards. Partners attending Inspire can learn more at our dedicated Business Applications incentives session.
- Improving partner readiness with new free, unrestricted access to Dynamics learning with thousands of self-service technical and sales resources for all MPN partners. Next month, we’re also introducing a new 4-day intensive architect bootcamp training along with implementation coaching and continued learning programs free for every partner solution architect assigned to a FastTrack engagement. Interested partner architects can pre-register for upcoming trainings.
- Offering access to rich telemetry-based business insights so Dynamics 365 partners can make better decisions, differentiate their offerings and ultimately improve how they track success even across complex worldwide deployments. In the future, these contribution indicators will help partners receive credit for their role in driving adoption and customer satisfaction. For partners that meet the program requirements, this data will be easily accessible from Partner Center and also from Microsoft Partner Network.
Investment in driving ISV momentum
Last year we announced a new program called ISV Cloud Embed, designed to make it easier for partners to modernize existing business applications, and build new ones. Partners also receive tiered go to market support and an opportunity to reach millions of active monthly users through Microsoft AppSource, where partners continue adding to the thousands of apps and connectors available for industry-specific finished apps or extensions that enhance our platform. This year at Inspire, we are continuing that momentum with:
- Enhancements to our ISV Co-Sell program that give incentives to Microsoft sellers to accelerate co-selling with ISV Cloud Embed partners, creating a programmatic way for partners to engage Microsoft sellers, and providing a dedicated support infrastructure for co-selling efforts.
- Optimized support for industry solutions with specific extensions to the Common Data Model, starting with Healthcare. This month we are introducing a new Microsoft Health Accelerator, which contains pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data, as well as other tools to help partners build and deploy new healthcare solutions. Customers and partners will also be able to leverage Microsoft’s Common Data Model to rapidly develop and implement applications mapping to pre-defined business and healthcare entities and enable easier compliance with health standards like HL7 FHIR and HITRUST. Interested partners can register to work with us.
Examples of partner momentum include CUNA Mutual Group’s AdvantEdge Analytics offering that will use Power BI and Dynamics 365 to help deliver industry-specific innovation in the cloud atop our Common Data Model. Advvy has built an advanced Relationship Management solution atop our Business Applications platform and PowerApps so that planners and buyers at enterprise media agencies work smarter with real-time campaign insights. KPMG Australia is partnering with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to deliver Wiise, an integrated, cloud-based business management solution for mid-market financial services organizations built atop Dynamics 365 Business Central. These are just a few of the ways partners are taking advantage of our modern, adaptable business applications platform.
Continued technology innovation
We give partners seeking to expand their Microsoft practices the most comprehensive and intelligent cloud offering. Partners can take advantage of the billions of dollars Microsoft has invested over the last two decades in cutting-edge AI research. For example, at Inspire we’ll be demonstrating a preview of Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI for Sales that will offer out-of-the-box insights that help maximize sales productivity by providing insights into which opportunities are at risk and which leads have the highest propensity to convert allowing salespeople to focus their time for the highest impact.
We’re also introducing new preview features for Power BI that will begin appearing in the service in July. Because it’s important all users throughout an organization operate on the same data, we’re fueling collaboration across roles by unifying access to data between Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Data engineers can add, enrich and orchestrate data; data scientist can build machine learning models; and business analysts can benefit from the work of others and the data available in the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 while continuing to use the self-service tools in Power BI to build and share insights broadly.
Learn more
Along with the packed line-up of over 60 business applications-focused sessions at Inspire, we invite current partners and customers to attend our Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Seattle July 22 – 24. For those interested in a deeper technical discussion about what’s coming in Microsoft Business Applications and Platform this Fall, there’s still time to register and join us in Seattle for a firsthand look at all things Dynamics 365, Power BI, Excel, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow under one roof.
Whether in Las Vegas next week, or in Seattle later in July, we look forward to connecting with you, introducing you to the engineers behind your favorite tools, and sharing the opportunity to get hands-on with immersive breakout sessions and workshops.
