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Microsoft’s rich partner ecosystem inspires digital transformation
Fri, 14th Jul 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

When you count up the number of people employed by Microsoft partners worldwide, you reach a number a tad higher than the entire population of the Netherlands; 17 million people.

Each and every one of those 17 million is focussed on digital transformation – and that number accounts for 300,000 Australian employees locally.

Microsoft is deeply thankful for our partner ecosystem because we know that together we can have an enormous and sustained impact.

With our Australian partners we work together every day to boost the capability and productivity of small and medium business; to digitally transform large enterprise so that it can innovate and thrive internationally; and to ensure our public sector organisations are effective and efficient.

Our partners are essential to Microsoft's mission to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. The cumulative impact that the entire Microsoft ecosystem can have in driving intelligent transformation across nations, through sectors, and empowering every individual is unrivalled.

IDC has estimated that for every $1 of Microsoft revenue, our partners make $9., supporting the millions of employees throughout the world. That signals the huge impact that our partners have for customers already - but we can still do more to support partners and ultimately customers too, so we are transforming the way we engage and support our partner businesses.

As part of our recently announced organisational strategy, we're investing in channel partners and partner development managers that work in concert to ensure customers get the best solution and partners get the best support. We're fixing our offers to partners, streamlining licensing to make dealing with us far less complex. We're pivoting around four core go-to-market solutions, again to make it simpler and more rewarding for partners and better for customers.

On the solutions side, we're embracing a fresh paradigm - the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge. By infusing intelligence across everything we do, our partners and our customers have access to ubiquitous insight.

No matter which device you use, we are infusing intelligence into the modern workplace and working with partners to empower employees, engage customers, optimise operations, and shift the dial on organisations' service or business models.

Microsoft has always invested in a big way for the future of our industry, and that $10bn+ p.a. Investment in research and product development is tightly focussed on that goal. It's also the rationale for Microsoft 365 which is a bold evolution in how we think about product creation and brings together the best of Office 365, Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility + Security.

What was Secure Productive Enterprise is going to be Microsoft 365 Enterprise, focused on meeting the needs of large enterprise. Microsoft 365 Business has been tuned for small and medium business with no compromise on capability.

For our partners and our customers, this is a complete, integrated solution that leverages artificial intelligence and infuses that across the platform to make end users more productive, lift their creativity and collaboration capabilities, and smarten up security.

We want to turn intelligence into action and action into automation - where it makes sense. With that in mind, we work with our partners to develop and deliver the sorts of solutions that transform enterprises and the end user experience.

It's why we're integrating Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and LinkedIn into one connected graph. It's why we are embracing micro services, containers, server-less computing and supporting open source frameworks.

It gives us options and opportunities; it delivers freedom and flexibility.

In combination, this is fundamentally transforming what we and our partners can do and how fast we can do it.

We want to inspire, inform and sustain our partners, because we understand that together we can deliver solutions for our customers that will have the broadest impact.

Until next year.

Mark Leigh One Commercial Partner Director Microsoft Australia