Channels to benefit from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner division
Print21 July 2017 | 0
At Microsoft Inspire earlier this month, the tech giant unveiled its latest partner strategy, the One Commercial Partner. This move will ensure that all the aspects of partner knowledge and expertise, including business development, marketing skills and technical support, are put under one umbrella. The division was launched in February this year and combines all partner related teams inside the company into one.
According to Ron Huddleston, corporate VP of One Commercial Partner, this will help its partners orchestrate sales and form market strategies. However, Vipul Datta, CEO of Futuresoft Solutions, does not believe that this will make much of a difference to channel partners as he perceives it as an internal change inside Microsoft.
Cloud benefit
On the other hand, Devesh Aggarwal, MD of Compusoft Advisors, said that this strategy will prove to be beneficial for partners who focus on cloud-based solutions. “In the earlier structure, a partner was limited to work with only specific customer segments even if they had the requisite solutions and skill sets to cater across customer segments. The new structure provides access to all customer segments and will definitely be beneficial to a partner,” he added.
Aggarwal said, “The new structure also has a team that will work with the partner to build new capabilities within Microsoft stack as may be desired by the partner. This will help the partner move up the value chain.”
The team of One Commercial Partner division will have experts in several fields including software development, business model expertise and specialist resources. According to Gurpreet Singh, MD of Arrow PC Network, channel partners need to go through the solution route. “Today, businesses are transforming through digitization and the solution route requires domain expertise. The Microsoft One Commercial Partner program will help partners to leverage their domain knowledge and work closely with customers by understanding their business goals,” he said.
Solution building
This division is aimed at building solution maps wrapped with services to bring ecosystem-led hosting capabilities, simplifying segmentation and making the business more agile. This move not only highlights the company’s decision to move away from traditional channel acronyms, it also points towards where its go-to-market strategies are headed towards—modern workplace solutions, business applications and artificial intelligence (AI).
“The Microsoft One Commercial Partner programme will help partners to leverage their domain knowledge and work closely with customers by understanding their business goals.” Gurpreet Singh, MD, Arrow PC Network.
Deepak Cano, director of Aspire NXT, also echoed views expressed by Aggarwal and Singh. “It will help in ease of doing business. The whole idea is to ensure we get rebates for all the business that we do and aren’t segregated across the organization,” he said, “This will help us in focusing to grow the business with Microsoft better. For customers, they will be happy that they are just two segregations—enterprise and commercial.”
While the strategy is undoubtedly ambitious, it is still in its nascent phase and needs to be implemented across industries quickly. Aggarwal added, “Like us partners, even the field level executives within Microsoft need to transition to a more solution and consumption centric approach from the traditional transaction and revenue centric approach.”
IDG News Service
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