Channel Chief
“We Haven’t Lost Any Large Deal To Google”
By Dhaval Valia
 Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Group Jon Roskill, was recently in India to address the Microsoft Partner Summit. He spoke to Dhaval Valia about the new Partner Network and Microsoft’s strategy to increase cloud adoption
According to several partners attending the India Partner Summit, the big message from Microsoft this year is to get partners on the cloud.
The big message is to enroll, train and enable our entire partner network to move to cloud services. Over the past one year, we have seen a great momentum globally for BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite)—particularly for Exchange Live.
In the last fiscal, Microsoft has seen nearly 5 percent of its Exchange seats sell through BPOS. The second half (January to June 2010) of the last fiscal particularly saw great momentum, with 8 percent of Exchange seats going as a part of our BPOS offering.
Globally, we have more than 16,000 partners registered to sell BPOS, of which nearly 10,000 have sold to more than two customers during the past one year.
Specifically in India, we have managed to create a base of 100 active partners who have sold BPOS to at least one customer so far. We recently touched the 1,000 customer mark and have BPOS deployments of over 25,000 seats.
How does India compare to other emerging countries when it comes to cloud adoption, especially in the SMB segment?
It is apparent that India’s manufacturing sector is trailing compared to its peer countries China, Brazil, Mexico and Malaysia. The contribution of the manufacturing sector to the overall Indian GDP is much lower than that from other emerging economies. That’s because the adoption of IT in the sector is far lower. Only one-third of the manufacturing SMBs have some semblance of IT.
Recently, Microsoft conducted a research in India and found that significantly higher number of SMBs—especially those stung by the economic slowdown—are looking at IT as a strategic investment to help them overcome economic adversity. There is a growing belief among SMBs that cloud computing could be a good way of deploying IT in core business areas. Hence, we see a huge demand from the manufacturing SMBs.
We are in the process of expanding our channel engagement on the cloud front. Since July, we have taken Ingram Micro India onboard to drive the channel training and enablement program for BPOS. We have jointly charted an aggressive go-to-market strategy.
What are the programs launched to enable partners?
Particularly for VAR partners, we have unveiled several programs, tools, sales support services and other resources to help them make the transition to become cloud service providers.
Initially, we provided internal user rights for 250 seats of BPOS and CRM Live each to our partners so their entire organization can experience the cloud offerings, before pitching them to their customers.
We have launched Cloud Profitability Modeler, a business-planning tool that helps solution providers develop a 3-year forecast of revenue, profits and losses, and other metrics for their cloud business. Further, we have created a Microsoft Cloud Accelerate designation for partners. To participate, partners must sell online services or have an application certified for the Azure platform, complete training and assessment requirements, and provide cloud computing customer references.
Also new are tools for managing cloud customer accounts, including a dashboard for managing BPOS sales pipelines, BPOS readiness workshops, and services for supporting customer deployments of Microsoft cloud applications. Paying heed to partner feedback, we have introduced a new set of tools called Administration-on-Behalf. These tools will allow partners to manage their customers’ Online Services, thus addressing their concerns of losing control over customer service delivery.
An issue that has hindered the adoption of BPOS in the SMB segment is the absence of rupee-billing.
You are spot on. In India forex transactions of any size attract RBI scrutiny, and SMB customers are shy of using credit cards. Hence, the Indian team has worked out a rupee-billing option for such customers. We have introduced a cheque pick-up service as well.
Another issue highlighted by Indian partners is the pricing of BPOS. While the current pricing structure sounds attractive to US customers, in India it is a bit steep. Also, it’s higher than Google Apps Premier.
We have rationalized the pricing significantly since BPOS was first launched. Early this year, we cut the price of BPOS from $15 to $10 per seat monthly. We also slashed the price of standalone Exchange Online offering from $10 to $5 per user per month and boosted mailbox capacity from 5GB to 25GB.
Looking at the features and familiarity the customers have with Exchange, our price—as compared to Google Apps—is justified. Also, over the past few months
Microsoft has built stringent SLAs for Online Services with guaranteed uptime and optimum service availability with a penalty clause. This has given customers a lot of confidence in moving to cloud services. In the last one year, we haven’t lost a single large deal to Google.
There may be a case for differential pricing. We have done that with our OS products with Starter edition. But whether we will have a differential pricing strategy by geography or product offering is something that needs to be debated.
How will the outcome of the current tussle between the Indian government and the Research In Motion (BlackBerry) over providing access to mail and messenger data in real time impact Microsoft?
We are closely watching the developments on this front. As of now we have no plans to open data centers in India or China. Microsoft has a policy to comply with policies of the local governments in countries we operate. But, let me stress that our commitment for data security and privacy is to our customers, and hence customer interest will reign supreme in any decision we may take.
The new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) goes live from October. Could you please update us on how the transition is progressing?
Under MPN, we have created partner-tiers—Community, Subscriber, Silver Competency and Gold Competency. Community resellers will largely consist of the registered and new resellers. Subscribers will be partners with a focused practice, targeting a specific customer audience. Silver and Gold will be the top-tier partners.
Under these tiers we have created 26 solution competencies that partners can certify for. For example, core infrastructure competencies include virtualization, desktop platforms, and identity and security. The business productivity competency includes business intelligence, content management and unified communications.
The new MPN has been created to ensure that our partners perform the role of trusted advisors effectively for the customers. Over the last few months, we have automatically transitioned partners’ old competencies to the corresponding new ones. Also, we are helping partners earn new competencies to help them differentiate themselves.
To assist partners that enroll under the new MPN competencies and take certification exams but don’t pass first time around, Microsoft has been offering Second Shot. It’s a program that lets them take the exam again free of charge within a period of time. |