This week’s guest, Guus Krabbenborg, has worked with Dynamics products and partners for almost twenty years. He has had several roles in that time, including a role at Navision before the Microsoft acquisition. But Guus’s current role as a co-founder of QBS Group puts his team’s venture at the center of Microsoft’s partner channel transformation. MSDW has documented QBS Group’s growth over the last four years, working as a distributor of sorts, with an approach that has been broadly adopted by Microsoft’s partner team.

Guus is also a long time documentarian when it comes to major Microsoft events like Inspire. As with WPC before it, there will soon be a new report coming out about the latest event (there is also a webcast coming up), so this was also a great time to catch up and learn more about his latest observations.

Show notes:

• 2:00 – The evolution of the Dynamics partner channel and Guus’s role
• 4:10 – Why a single country in western Europe was too small for starting up a “Master VAR”
• 8:50 – On the competitive concerns of Dynamics VARs on joining an SMB distributor/CSP/Master VAR
• 10:30 – Why do VARs buy into QBS Group’s model?
• 14:45 – What does size and scale mean for Dynamics VARs and ISVs and their investments in marketing?
• 17:30 – Reflections on Inspire 2017, several weeks later
• 20:15 – Why Inspire was not so big on product news, and why that might continue
• 22:40 – The future of Microsoft’s distribution policy for Dynamics
• 23:45 – What percentage of Dynamics partners will be directly managed going forward?
• 26:00 – What does the disti world look like today, and how will traditional Dynamics partners adapt to Dynamics 365?