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Partner
Nicole Dezen Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Solutions
Jul 19,2022

Microsoft Inspire: drive growth and profitability with a partner-focused business platform

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Microsoft Inspire is one of my favorite events of the year. As our largest connection with our partner ecosystem, it offers a way for us to come together to discuss opportunities for growth, celebrate our partners’ achievements, and get excited for what’s ahead.  

I strongly believe in empowering people and driving growth. Microsoft is committed to the success of our incredible partner ecosystem, and as Chief Partner Officer, I have the responsibility of ensuring we deliver on that promise. This year, we will focus on helping you meet customers’ evolving needs, while driving business growth and profitability. Throughout Microsoft Inspire, we will talk about the key differentiators of the Microsoft Cloud, the business opportunity for you, and the investments we’re making to help you unlock new possibilities. 

Microsoft Cloud Partner Program 

Business leaders are facing a changing and complex landscape. We have had to fundamentally rethink how we lead our teams, run our businesses, build new solutions, and deploy technology to address the needs of customers and communities. We need resiliency and perseverance to meet the demands of an ever-changing market, and we are evolving our partner programs to best support that.  

The new Microsoft Cloud Partner Program starts with a simplified alignment by six commercial solution areas, representing how partners can expect to go-to-market and sell with Microsoft. By partnering with us, you will benefit from Microsoft’s technology, reputation, industry expertise, and global reach to build on the Microsoft Cloud, form relationships with other organizations, and differentiate your business in the competitive marketplace.  

In addition to our six solution area designations, we announced today that we are also adding an industry designation. As part of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, we are developing Industry designations that differentiate solutions based on their demonstrated performance with customers, technical maturity, and customer success. We’ll be aligning these across the Solutions Partner and ISV programs to help your organization’s capabilities and marketplace offers differentiate and align with the Microsoft Industry Clouds, focusing initially on the retail, healthcare, and financial services industries. Click here to get involved

As part of our evolving partner programs, the investments we’re making are part of our commitment to helping partners develop the skills and knowledge to grow your teams and your business. We are working together to stay at the forefront of cloud transformation, and I believe that through our continued partnership, we will accomplish more than ever before.  

Microsoft Marketplace 

The Microsoft commercial marketplace is how we support every partner to scale and reach millions of Microsoft customers around the globe. Last year at Inspire, Microsoft put partners first with our marketplace strategy by dropping our agency fees from an industry standard 20% to 3%. This not only extended Microsoft’s strong commitment to partners, but also illustrated the powerful investments we are making so that partners can grow and thrive. 

As we look to the coming year, Microsoft is not only continuing to support partner success through marketplace. We are excited to announce a strategic new partnership with Tackle. Tackle.io is a software company dedicated to helping ISVs launch, grow, and scale digital routes to revenue through cloud marketplaces. This exciting new partnership gives partners the ability to accelerate the path to create their cloud go-to-market strategy and get expert guidance to maximize the marketplace opportunity with Microsoft.  

Additionally, to support our partner ecosystem to work together and unlock growth—ISVs and our ecosystem of over 90,000 partners in our Cloud Solution Provider program (CSPs) can grow revenue through the marketplace with margin sharing—which is now generally available. For ISVs, this unlocks new sales channels and CSPs can rapidly add new products and services to create differentiated offerings for customers.  

Support tailored for ISVs 

As more customers shift to the cloud, the demand for SaaS and “anything-as-a-service” solutions is at an all-time high. While the need is great, ISVs must have the tools and resources to innovate rapidly and get to market faster. To support this and help ISVs differentiate—we’re excited to announce the ISV Success program within the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program.  

With the ISV Success program, ISVs can get support to build across the Microsoft Cloud—including Azure, Microsoft 365, Business Applications, Power Platform, and our end-to-end security suite—to build for any emerging customer need. The benefits include cloud credits, developer tooling, business and technical resources, community, and much more to support ISVs in maximizing innovation and go-to-market with Microsoft through the commercial marketplace. The program is in private preview today and will be broadly available soon.  

In closing 

We are positioning our partners for growth by prioritizing investments that enable new business, incentivizing partners to deliver strong results for customers, and making it easier to work with us. Microsoft is the platform for growth and the open cloud platform of choice. We have the tech for you to differentiate and are committed to helping you thrive and grow.  

You can review more about what we’re announcing at Microsoft Inspire and how we’re unlocking new partner opportunities by visiting the Official Microsoft Blog

I hope that you enjoy the rest of Inspire 2022 and encourage you to attend as many sessions as you are able. We are looking forward to a fantastic year ahead and the opportunity we have in the market together.