WASHINGTON, D.C. – After spending Monday telling solution providers the “why,” “when,” and “what” of its vision of the cloud going forward, channel chief Jon Roskill spend Tuesday outlining a good deal of the “how” introducing new programs, tools, services and resources to help partners add cloud to their sales mix.
“Together we’re going to succeed in this transition to the cloud,” said Roskill, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide partner group, in a day-two keynote at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010 here.
To help partners plan their cloud strategy, the company has introduced two new tools – the Business Builder for Cloud Services, which helps solution provider define cloud opportunities in small, midsize, enterprise and public sector markets, and a Cloud Profitability Modeler that helps VARs develop a three year forecast for their cloud business, including revenues and profit and loss projections. Both tools are currently available to Microsoft partners and are on display here at WPC.
Microsoft has long advocated what it likes to refer to as “dogfooding” its latest products, both internally and within its partner community. To support the idea of making sure top partners use the latest tools, the company will allow its partners 250 free internal-use seats for Business Productivity Online Suite, the Azure family, CRM Online and Windows InTune, as well as future cloud-based offerings. Roskill said that for large partners who use the full 250 seats, BPOS alone represents $25,000 of free software per year.
“We’re doing this because we want you to be running on our latest and greatest software,” he said. “It ensures we’ll do a better job of evangelizing for customers.”
