Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 — A Partner’s Reflections
This article was originally posted on July 22, 2013.
Last week Microsoft convened its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), educating, listening to, and entertaining about 16,000 of its top partners in Houston, Texas. This was my sixth WPC, and my 14 th year as part of the Microsoft partner community, and I processed the week’s events and write this series of blog posts from this point of view.
I waited a week to write these blogs because it gave me time to not only make up some of the work that I fell behind on by attending WPC, but also because it gave me time to process, consider, and connect what I learned at WPC (especially in light of the major Microsoft re-organization that occurred the day after the end of WPC). Many short-form, real-time observations were available via the tweetstreams that I and many others kept up the whole time, but this is designed to be long(-er) form prose.
A few themes emerged at this year’s event. First and foremost was Microsoft’s reinforcement of its reinvention as a “ device and services” company. As necessary as this appears to be in light of new business models, it’s a tumultuous transition, as evidenced by Microsoft’s recent stock performance.
The other themes were orchestrated by Microsoft, via their organization of conference content into the following tracks:
The Vision Keynotes were grouped with device keynotes this year, making for a marathon 3.5-hour Monday morning Vision Keynote-a-palooza. I’ll cover some high-level highlights here, then post individually on the themes above in the coming days.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer opened WPC with some highlights of the fiscal 2013 year just ended and some data points about how Microsoft is providing “High Value Experiences” for customers and partners, including:
- 90% of Microsoft’s revenue was represented by the assembled partners at WPC, and they collectively are projected to have grown 6% year-over-year on a $650 BILLION Microsoft business
- The release of Windows 8, the biggest single overhaul of Microsoft’s core desktop operating system since Windows 95, and the “Hey, we listened!” upcoming release of Windows 8.1
- Success of Windows Server 2012 for private cloud and virtualization (winning market share vs VMWare, a point underscored by COO Kevin Turner in his Wednesday morning competitive brief during the “Value Keynotes” section of WPC)
- Dynamics CRM in the Cloud — winning share from Salesforce (although I am looking for some statistics to support this — Ballmer underscored a recent defection of a key SFDC employee to Microsoft’s CRM team, and Turner’s data points on this seemed to be more centered on growth than on share, with some jabs at SFDC’s lack of profitability)
- Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — providing growth and progress in public and private cloud (cross-referenced to Amazon Web Services competitive story in Turner’s keynote)
I will drill a bit into each of the four conference themes above, and provide a summary of other miscellaneous impressions of WPC. Watch this space for more updates in coming days and weeks.
Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.
