Enabling partner success at Microsoft Inspire 2018

Next week in Last Vegas, we will be meeting with thousands of partners from all over the world at Microsoft Inspire. The event is a forum to reinforce our commitment to making partner business opportunities the centerpiece of our investments. We continue to extend our cloud marketplace, Azure Marketplace and AppSource, capabilities to make it the best place for partners of any type to be discovered, evaluated, and ultimately have their offerings purchased and deployed by our customer base. The event also gives us the opportunity to showcase the investments we’re making to enable these same capabilities within our channel ecosystem both now and in the future. 

Empowering partner-to-partner joint selling

Next year, for the first time in Microsoft’s history, we will be putting partner solutions, applications as well as consulting and managed service offers, in our product catalog alongside our Microsoft products and services. This means our direct salesforce and partner ecosystem will be able to sell first and third-party solutions individually or combined.

For partners with applications and solutions listed in one of our marketplaces, this will enable joint selling opportunities connecting them with thousands of Cloud Solution Providers around the world. In turn, Cloud Solution Providers will have a dramatically expanded portfolio of offerings, from both Microsoft and our partner ecosystem, that they can combine alongside their own managed services to provide even greater value for their customers.

To take advantage of the partner-to-partner opportunity ahead, we encourage partners to publish their solutions and offers in one of the storefronts, Azure Marketplace and AppSource, today. These applications and services will get priority placement in our combined product catalog when the new capabilities launch.

Integrated Solutions now available in Azure Marketplace

This month, we released a set of multi-partner Integrated Solutions across three vertical areas with more coming soon.  Available through Azure Marketplace, these solutions ease many of the challenges partners face coordinating and assembling multiple point solutions to address customer needs. For customers, this means a unified buying and faster implementation experience, facilitated by a systems integrator (SI). For partners, it means delivering more value to customers in a much faster and repeatable way. To support partners in scaling these integrated solutions to more quickly meet customers’ specific needs, we also provide Azure credits to partners for their customer proofs-of-concept. New Integrated Solutions available today include:

• Customer 360 Powered by Zero2Hero by Bardess, Cloudera, Trifacta, and Qlik. For financial services and retail organizations looking to rapidly gain a complete view of their customers for actionable insights.
• Rapid Commerce by Publicis.Sapient, DataStax, and Acquia. A microservices commerce platform for retailers to enable an improved customer experience and business results.
• Healthcare Cloud Security Stack by XentIT, TrendMicro, and Qualys. A unified cloud threat management solution for healthcare entities looking to maintain cybersecurity and HIPAA compliance in the cloud. 
• Credit Analytics by RCG Global Services, Cazena, Trifacta, and Cloudera. Helping financial services organizations to manage loan portfolio risk, maximize risk-adjusted rate of return, minimize capital reserve requirements, and strengthen compliance.

Cloud+AI Partner Community now live

Our goal is to continually grow the ways we serve our partners. Regardless of whether they have technical, business or any question in between, our aim is to provide our partners with a single place to find what they need. To this end, we are launching the Cloud+AI Partner Community to act as the primary online location for partners to access the information they need. 

This will connect to the latest technical documentation, give partners access to experts in the field, and help partners learn from one another. 

We look forward to sharing more detail and hearing feedback directly from partners in Las Vegas.

Source: Azure Blog Feed