In a move that should prove significant for the Irish IT channel, Microsoft has said it will spend $10bn on the SME sector over the next five years. Speaking at a press briefing in Dublin last month, Laurent Delaporte, vice president, small and mid-market solutions and partners, EMEA, confirmed the $10bn figure, which had emerged in reports from the US.
Delaporte said that although the small and medium-sized space is where Microsoft started out 20 years ago, this is a new focus on SMEs. Such a focus was likely to be strong here, given that there are 180,000 small businesses in the Irish market.
‘SMBs tend to use small size partners, so we need to be able to reach the large number of small sized customers here,’ said Delaporte. He also confirmed that 50 per cent of Microsoft’s business in the EU was through SMBs.
The channel is going to be engaged to a greater degree as a result of the focus, confirmed Paul Mason, SMB group manager for Microsoft.
Microsoft has just confirmed details of its new consolidated partner programme that will bring together roughly 20 different programmes, including the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) programme, under one umbrella. However, Mason said that the new programme ‘is not designed to consolidate the channel. The aim is to improve the experience of the customer’.
Colin Cassidy, channel development manager, said an issue with Microsoft’s old channel strategy was the sheer number of programmes available, which tended to create confusion for potential partners.
The new selection criteria for the programme, which has a working title of MPP (Microsoft Partner Programme), will be introduced in December 2004 but in the meantime, the company’s current partners will be automatically ‘grandfathered’ into MPP. The new criteria will take into account a variety of factors, including Microsoft revenue, the number of certified professionals and number of customer references.
‘There will be no change over the coming year, but come December next, we expect to see a lot of partners starting to panic,’ said Cassidy. Microsoft has identified 11 different competencies that it expects to see covered, such as security, OEM hardware, network infrastructure, integrated e-business, and licence and software asset management. The programme states that partners can either be specialist or generalist, but that Microsoft’s preference is for partners to develop specialities.
There will be three tiers to MPP: a registered member, a certified partner and a gold certified partner. There are currently 148 gold and certified partners and about 500 registered members, but Cassidy said the company expects this number to increase significantly.
Products born out of the company’s Navision and Great Plains acquisitions in recent years comprise the unit now known as Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS). MBS will form part of the suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) products for the small and medium-sized business market that the company will be launching in Europe in January.
23/02/04
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