Trent Burns is the Sr. Director for the Global SI and Advisory partners in the US One Commercial Partner team. Trent has 13 years at Microsoft and 20 years’ experience in the technology industry at companies like IBM, HP, and Vignette. His experiences include direct sales and sales management positions and alliance/channel management all focused on the largest system integrators.

Trent joined the podcast to share with our listeners how his team thinks about these large strategic relations, what makes great partnerships, how other partners can collaborate with his team and lessons from his career journey.

Q: So, for our listeners can you spend a few minutes explaining your role in Microsoft's OCP organization?

Trent Burns: Absolutely. So, I run a team of folks focused on the "build with" side within one commercial partner. We manage our largest global system integrators and also we call them advisory firms and the high-value management consulting firms. So it's a portfolio of about 14 partners and these partners obviously would be well recognized brand names that you'd hear in the marketplace from kind of the traditional SIs all the way to some of the advisory firms that I discussed before, ENY, KPG, PWC as well as what we're calling now, high value management consulting firms. Companies like McKinsey and Bain and Boston Consulting Group and so forth.

Q: So how has that evolved since you started and where is the organization focused more on? Is it focused in on the large system integrators, is it on the influencers, how do you think through that?

Trent Burns: So we sort of grouped them into these three categories, right. I'll call the like, traditional, global SIs or commercial SIs. So these are the folks like Accenture, and IBM is in the portfolio, Capgemini is in that portfolio as well. We also have Dell, too, right. So a lot of people think of them as a traditional resell but with a large Microsoft consulting firm as well. So think about just kind of traditional SI work, which is that first group I just described.

And then if you moved to the next bucket of partners would be more what we call advisory firms. So this is the E&Y, PWCs, KPMGs of the world and it's really fascinating to watch the development of these partnerships. These are new for Microsoft and new for these partners too. As you think about our digital transformation story moving from really kind of IT and to getting into line of business and the whole digital transformation evolution that's taking place, these folks have relationships outside of IT where, quite frankly, Microsoft struggled. And so the partnership is very collaborative there and very fascinating. So those are taking off like wildfire. And just learning how to work with them because they're different in their approach in the work that they actually do for customers.

And then the last group, which is really brand new, which is kind of high value management consulting firms. So, these are the folks like McKinsey and Bain and Boston Consulting and A.T. Kearney. And we're just learning like how to work with these folks. Like these folks have board level relationships, right and really are having strategic conversations around the future direction on a company. And so how do we build relationships and partnerships where technology becomes part of their consulting work or their recommendations to customers. And so those are the three groups and they're different and unique in their own way and just as valuable each uniquely that way too.

Q: So how do you set objectives and how do you measure success with these types of partners?

Trent Burns: We try to keep it simple. Obviously I think when you think about ... When you think about success, we gotta put the customer first, right.