Ultimate Partner®

With Microsoft Inspire only a few days away, I’m bringing back this fantastic episode to help you better understand from a Microsoft Partner’s Chief Brand Officer. If you wish to hear from this amazing leader, please join us on July 20th for his panel session where he will teach us about effective brand marketing with Microsoft and the Ecosystem.

Register here – https://www.learninglibrary.tv/ultimate-partner/3620042

I find that technology organizations often struggle to invest in successful brand marketing. They are not crisp on their value, brand, and delivering it effectively. It is why I’ve invited one of the best in the business, to help by showing us how it is done right. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Dux Raymond Sy, the Chief Brand Officer at AvePoint. In this episode, Dux and I discuss why technology organizations struggle to invest in successful brand marketing and the steps that technology organizations can take to drive an effective brand story.

I was delighted to welcome Dux back to the podcast, he is a dear friend and now a three-time guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Quite a bit has happened since we last spoke, AvePoint became a public company and launched its own Partner Strategy with Jason Beal, who was a guest earlier this year. See link below.

This episode is exclusively for technology organizations looking to drive greater results through effective brand, marketing, and brand storytelling.

It was great to have Dux come to visit this platform again. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming back Dux Raymond Sy as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Ultimate Partnerships. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

For this Microsoft Inspire special edition, I’m joined by two industry friends, Per Werngren and Rob Fegan, for a chat about the renowned event and what to look for this year from Microsoft.

You will hear from two industry veterans about how they prepare for the big Microsoft Inspire Conference, what sessions they are most eager to view this year, and what’s in store for Microsoft’s new fiscal year.

I’m excited to announce Ultimate Partner’s first live digital event, “Winning with Ecosystems, ” on July 20. A production with LLTV and in partnership with Tackle, this event will feature Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to Cloud GTM and Ecosystem Led Growth. As a unique “companion event” to the Microsoft Inspire conference, you will learn how to apply the principles and learnings to achieve your most outstanding results in FY24. Registration is limited; SIGN UP before it’s too late!

At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, who drive the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems.

With this exciting new Masterclass Series, Ultimate Partnerships becomes The Ultimate Partner™ More than just a new look, Ultimate Partner is doubling its commitment to helping YOU become the Ultimate Partner by getting it right. Do you want to be The Ultimate Partner? Visit our NEW website.

Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth.

Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® -, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success.

In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead.

Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?”

If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

microsoft, partners, fy, business, conference, rob, microsoft cloud, strategies, event, great, fiscal year, session, inspire, good, talking, excited, share, focus, ecosystem, align

00:05

I’m excited to welcome to Industry friends and Microsoft experts for a discussion on the upcoming Microsoft inspire conference. Bear Warren grin. You’re the founder of the iamcp and a five time worldwide president and a successful entrepreneur and CEO of identities. So welcome. Thanks for yours. And Rob, you’ve been in the Microsoft ecosystem for over 15 years and lead a successful firm, then vido focused on helping partners achieve their greatest success with Microsoft. And I love all your your LinkedIn posts and advice you give to partner so so happy to have you on board as well.

01:27

Thanks for watching. I’m looking forward to our call today.

01:29

So why should partners watching or listening today attend Microsoft Inspire?

01:35

Well, as you kind of mentioned, travel is light. It is easy to travel to this conference. And the fee is not excessive, because it is free. But the true value lies in the content and the content will be awesome. I would say that the keynote the first day. When Satya sets the scene together with Jensen alto, Nick of the Sun is the most important session. That session will give you a guidance for the rest of the conference and help you prioritize but also help you navigate your own companies year ahead, serve this conference is a goldmine for knowledge has always been will always be.

02:19

Yeah, as Paris said, I think this is a goldmine for partners. But for me, it’s really about their Microsoft is sharing their focus and strategy for the upcoming fy 24. And what we can do as partners is we can translate that into sales tactics into solution plays and sales motions, where we can turn those strategies and those ideas into actual solutions for our clients. So I’m super excited for the conference. And like Carrie said, it is just an absolute goldmine of information for partners. So I encourage everyone to

02:51

attend. Yeah. So Rob, specifically for you? What areas are you most excited about as we move into fiscal year 24?

02:57

For me, in FY 24, I think that Microsoft has made some really big investments in the Microsoft cloud partner program. And that’s something that I think is really helping partners set themselves apart. It’s really letting them differentiate themselves in the market. So I’m excited for that I’m excited for what partners can do to translate the strategies from Microsoft through their solution designations and their specialties. So for me, that’s a big part of FY 20.

03:25

I’m glad you mentioned that Rob. In fact, this week, we rerelease the episode we did earlier last year with Dan Rippy, where we talk specifically about that. So I want to put a link in that for our viewers and listeners in the show notes. But how about you pair? What are you most excited about?

03:42

Well, first of all, it is important to see how the new Microsoft cloud partner program is progressing. The house is under construction, it is not finished. But there are several rooms that are finished. And I like those rooms. And hopefully the new rooms under construction will be equally good. And by that I mean that we will probably see more tailored stuff geared to partners that felt that they were not part of the first face will probably see more support for ISVs. And the cloud partner program. Well, it has been evolving for two decades, and I’m pretty sure that it has continued to evolve. And it is important to pay attention to what is happening so that you can navigate your own firm and you can navigate your relationship with Microsoft and make sure that you’re well aligned, like healthcare. That is something I like. And if I would single out one session like out of the blue, it is F s 401. I did some prep work. It is called Microsoft cloud partner program. The road ahead. Let’s pull light Natori Yeah,

04:55

really great points here apart from keynotes.

04:58

Yeah, and it’s not session is on two Tuesday and I’m excited as well pair to join that session. So thanks for sharing. Yeah,

05:05

you know, some so many great sessions. Thank you both for providing that information for our viewers today. You know, we had been talking about this, I’ll call it the tectonic shifts we’ve been seeing, right, we had COVID, we’ve had these economic headwinds these last 18 months or now, these last 18 months or so, what are you seeing the best partner is doing differently now than they were perhaps a year 18 months ago?

05:28

So for me over the past 18 months, what I’ve seen the best partners should do and make a shift from is talking speeds and feeds or talking about the technology and really focusing on the business problems. How are they revolutionising their customers business processes. And I think that is where the real goal is, in terms of helping your clients as a Microsoft partner, find out how you can reengineer their business process, how you can streamline the business process, and I think the person that have done the best and made the biggest steps forward in the Microsoft ecosystem, are those that can really envision the change they can bring to their customers in terms of business process, business reengineering, and then align the technology that helps to achieve that, versus coming at it from the technology first standpoint.

06:15

Yeah, really great points about standing out in this ecosystem of 470,000 partners, working with this Microsoft field organization, right.

06:25

I’ve always been a big fan of recording and revenue. So I see that more partners are embarking on this road, trying to shift from selling hours per product based hours, and sell recurring revenue services. That is good for profitability. And it is good was for enterprise value. I see that to answer more successful except as Rob said, they are focusing on business problems and not so much on technology. Of course, technology is an enabler to solving these business problems. And they are also paying attention to a certain industry. So they build knowledge about an industry that also makes it easier to partner with Microsoft. I also see that the successful ones are less sentimental. When it comes to coding. They are embracing power platform and other low code, no code platforms, and are open to try out GitHub co pilot coding will never be the same as before and as good for profitability.

07:31

What about the organizations that struggle here? Some organizations come to Microsoft expecting maybe results or an unachievable? What guidance do you have for them?

07:41

Wilson did JFK that said, Don’t ask what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country did better Potter’s they don’t ask Microsoft what they can do for them. They instead make a case what they can do for Microsoft. And that Microsoft loves that that makes pottering so much better.

08:00

I love that point there. Rob, what about you?

08:03

That is such a great point. And for me I share with partners that are struggling is there’s really three things in my mind that you have to align with Microsoft first is mindset, you really have to have the mindset to work with Microsoft and think of a win win mindset. It’s not just you as a partner winning, she was a partner, your client and Microsoft need to win in this engagement. So that’s the first thing I share with them as mindset. Next is messaging partners have great messaging to their clients, but a lot of partners Miss messaging to Microsoft and really sharing with those peers at how am I helping you Microsoft and get aligning that message. So that resonates inside of Microsoft. And then finally is the mechanics, you really have to understand the mechanics of working with Microsoft. And that includes the Microsoft cloud partner program. It includes Microsoft Partner center, you need to leverage all of those components to really work seamlessly with Microsoft. So again, it’s mindset and messaging and mechanics that you really need to focus on to execute at the field level.

09:04

So what’s some of the advice you have for our viewers and

09:06

listeners as they go into Microsoft’s fiscal year 24. Vince, my main piece of advice for Microsoft partners heading into FY 24 is really to understand and align their business with Microsoft’s FY 24 priorities. And we’ll see those priorities come out in the Inspire event. And then I know you’re hosting an event on July 20, where I think we’ll get to even go deeper into those priorities and understand what those priorities are and how we as partners can align our business and our strategies and our tactics to Microsoft’s larger vision for FY 24.

09:45

I’m glad you brought up that event. Rob. We are hosting. Microsoft’s will call it the unofficial after party. It’s a companion event to the Microsoft inspire conference on July 20. We’ve got some of the leaders from Microsoft coming in To help our viewers better understand, like what they just heard, how do they take that and I’ll use Microsoft parlance here landed in their business. And then we have some of the practitioners and experts coming to help you as a partner better understand how to take that and make it relevant to your business strategy for success in fiscal year 2024. Pair, what do you think? What are you What is your advice departments,

10:26

I think that identify what waves of change that there will be this fiscal year, find one of these waves, and focus on that many Potter’s tried to do a little bit of everything. And if you want to be successful, find one thing, focus on it and specialize on it so that you become master on it. And that will help market communication because everyone wants to do business with someone that is best in a field. And that also opens up for partnering with others. When you’re specialized, there is a need to partner with others that are specialized in other areas. And that is good for customer satisfaction. And customer satisfaction is good for profitability. So we as your event are attentive, what is the main things that you will talk about, I know that your cannot reveal all your wonderful guests. But this give us a hint?

11:25

Well, first of all, we’ve got several executives from Microsoft coming. I’m calling it the red carpet, they’re coming in after the event, right? We’re doing these fireside chats. And you’re going to hear from them specifically, how to take what you heard the last two days, the 18th and 19th. And applying it to your business, you’ll hear directly from Julie Sanford, who’s the CMO for the partner business, you’ll hear from Kevin P skirt, who runs the SMC business, which is a massive $70 billion business and Microsoft. And you will also hear from the leader of the marketplace organization, Jake Swenson and from Nicole Harding, who is the partner leader for the Americas. So each of them will share specific highlights and things that you need to do now, leading into fiscal year 24. We’re also joined by some of the top practitioners in our partnership with tackle IO, we’ve got some of their leaders coming in to help organizations better understand how to implement marketplace strategies into their organization. We have two workshops, a co sell workshop, and a go to market workshop. And we have a spotlight session on AI specifically, to help partners better integrate AI into their business strategy. So lots of great learnings that will be shared uniquely the day after the Inspire conference. So I want to thank you both. So great to see both of you, my good friends, pear and Rob and I’m excited to share more with each of you watching today at our live event, our live digital event winning with ecosystems, July 20 11am. Eastern time, I hope you join us there and pear Rob will be coming in for the after party at the end of the event and open for questions and giving advice back to us partners. They’ll share some of their best learnings coming out of the Microsoft inspire conference as well. So hope to see you all thank you for joining the ultimate guide to partnering. Today I’m excited to announce ultimate partners first live digital event winning the ecosystem taking place on July 20. We’re all be joined by Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to cloud go to market and ecosystem led growth. This will be a companion event to the Microsoft inspire conference where you will learn how to achieve your greatest results in 2024. Please follow the link in our show notes. To sign up for this exciting event. You’ll learn about the speakers and agenda that are shaping up to help you achieve your greatest results. Thank you for joining us

With Microsoft Inspire in one week, I’m bringing back this amazing episode to help you better understand from a top Microsoft Seller effective Co-Selling strategies to grow your business. Carson Heady is a best-selling author, award-winning seller, recognized thought leader, and podcast host. Carson joins this podcast to help you learn how can Microsoft Partners achieve their greatest results in co-selling.

Carson Heady has authored four books including “Salesman on Fire” & Birth of a Salesman”. His prolific career includes awards at every level of selling and he consistently ranks as a sales industry thought leader. With over 330K social followers, he has been recognized as the #1 Social Seller at Microsoft. He is also a podcast host, frequent interview guest, and event marketer.

I was excited to welcome Carson to Ultimate Guide to Partnering because partners often miss the key attributes to successful co-selling. Carson is a real-world, “in the trenches” seller and field leader. He understands and articulates what makes a successful sales engagement. In this episode, Carson helps Microsoft Partners better understand how to be most successful partnering with his organization and the Microsoft field organization.

NOTE: This episode was recorded and initially released in October 2022 and does not reflect enhancements or changes to Microsoft’s Partner Program since its recording.

Register here – https://www.learninglibrary.tv/ultimate-partner/3620042

It was great to feature Carson Heady. I hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming this extraordinary sales leader to Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

My advice is to figure out what is your brand? What do you love? What are you passionate about? What’s your superpower? And how can you use your superpower to equate to wins for other people, for everybody you touch. Double down on your network. I wish I’d done that earlier on in my career really minded my network and focused on network and things of that nature. How can I be a better version of myself? How can I say yes to opportunities? How can I solve problems that are out there for my boss, for my leadership team, for other people that I touch?

With Microsoft Inspire less than two weeks away, I’m bringing back this fan-favorite episode of Ultimate Guide of Partnering® features Dan Rippey, one of the most influential people shaping the future of Microsoft’s partner program. Dan is its Senior Director and joins to help you best align for success by understanding what rolled out in October so that you are best prepared to understand what plans Microsoft has in store. This is an important episode.

I lead partner programs, strategy, and digital experiences for Microsoft’s Global Partner Solutions organization. Agile trainer and coach. Weekend warrior for a Battalion of service members who defend freedom and democracy on behalf of the United States Army Reserve. Awesome jobs on all sides of life.

Where I’ve been: MIT, EMC² / Dell, Microsoft, Afghanistan, and about a dozen other US & foreign military bases worldwide. I speak a lot of SQL, a little C#, a bit of Arabic, and even less Spanish.

I’ve Contributed a billion USD to Microsoft’s top-line revenue. Returned $20M to Microsoft by removing complexity in the systems/tools that service their customers & partners. Saved EMC² from software bugs that would have otherwise knocked their storage management systems offline. Built custom server hardware (pre-Cloud) for missile defense researchers at MIT. Led teams in combat on foreign soil.

NOTE: This episode was recorded and initially released in October 2022 and does not reflect enhancements or changes to Microsoft’s Partner Program since its recording.

Register here – https://www.learninglibrary.tv/ultimate-partner/3620042

What You’ll Learn

+ What the New Microsoft Cloud Partner Program IS & ISN’T
+ What Partners Ask?
+ What is in store next for ISVs?
+ Should being a managed partner be your objective?
+ Why Do Partners Need a Marketplace Strategy?
+ His career path – Military + Microsoft.
+ How partners can best align for success with the new program?

Released the day of the NEW Microsoft Cloud Partner Program launch, this episode should clarify how partners can benefit from optimizing their businesses for success to achieve their greatest results this new fiscal year.

WARNING – This episode is exclusively for leaders who care about the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem, the evolution of Microsoft’s Cloud Partner Program, Industry Solutions, and other business priorities from Microsoft. This is a MUST LISTEN for any of the 450,000+ Microsoft Partners.

I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Dan as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

“Okay, so what happens to me in October, I lose everything that I had? Do I need to scramble my team to go after a bunch of things that are different? I’m just kind of confused, right? I don’t really understand what my transition process is going to be like from MPN into the cloud partner program, a lot of anxiety on the transition process.”

Related Program Resources:

Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub 

PartnerTap is the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partner, microsoft, isvs, isv, cosell, customer, built, services, program, business, market, industry, capability, solutions, marketplace, areas, big, storefront, year, solution

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Dan Rippey, Vince Menzione

Dan Rippey  00:00

Okay, so what happens to me in October, I lose everything that I had? Do I need to scramble my team to go after a bunch of things that are different? I’m just kind of confused, right? I don’t really understand what my transition process is going to be like from MPN into the cloud partner program, a lot of anxiety on the transition process.

Announcer  00:16

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven sales and partner executive brings together leaders to discuss transformational trends and deconstruct successful strategies to help technology leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  00:39

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right. Optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. Coding Microsoft’s new cloud partner program, why it’s shaping the future direction of the channel, and how you can optimize for success as a partner. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering is one of the most influential people shaping the future of Microsoft’s partner programs. Dan Rippy, is the director of the new Microsoft cloud partner program, and joins us to help you best align for success by understanding what just rolled out and what plans Microsoft has in store. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed welcoming Dan Rippy. Dan, I am so excited to have you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You’re the director for the Microsoft cloud partner program, a topic clearly on the minds of most Microsoft partners these days. So I’m really excited for this conversation.

Dan Rippey  01:55

Oh, it’s my pleasure. I’ve been following the work that you and your team drive. And I’m just so thankful for everything that you do for the channel, the advice that you give is always rock solid. And I see our partners benefit from modalities like this. Thank you for driving us.

Vince Menzione  02:07

So July was a really big month for you. But October promises to be even bigger

Dan Rippey  02:15

is a perfect starting point. On October 3 This year, we begin to say goodbye to the NPM program, and its legacy, silver and gold endorsements, and we welcome in the new Microsoft cloud partner program. This aligns our program structure to Microsoft’s six core solution areas. And so one of the major initiatives behind the change is to create clarity for our mutual customers. And really to simplify things for you as our partners, we do that by dropping our 18 Silver and 18 gold and market competencies. And we simplify the program. So the way that we go to market and sell as a business is now aligned with the way we go to market and sell programmatically with you with our partners.

Vince Menzione  02:53

Such a big announcement. And I want to highlight a few things from this conversation right Microsoft has been doing partnerships better and longer than just about anybody. First off. And I’ve always talked to partners about aligning with Microsoft’s priorities and scorecard, what I believe you’ve done here this simplification process is you’re helping the partners better align to what’s important to Microsoft.

Dan Rippey  03:16

Yeah, if you look at the way we build capacity, we Microsoft has a big and diverse business. But it’s actually much simpler than most people think our business groups and our product teams are aligned by solucionario. And so we have three that now are core to the Azure business with digital app innovation, data and AI and infrastructure, one with modern work that you actually used to be combined with security, but we’ve recently pulled out and elevated security as its own solution area. And then the last one with business applications, which covers dynamics and the entirety of the power platform, you had to be on the inside with Microsoft to understand how we were structured and understand how to plug your sales motion into that business model. But now it’s front and center. Everybody sees it we’ve exposed ourselves and the way we’re structured and the way we go to market so that our partners feel like they can plug into that without this need for a translation dictionary, and trying to map their business model to ours.

Vince Menzione  04:08

Many of our listeners may want to better understand from your perspective, what changed about the programs at Microsoft, and what has stayed the same. Our starting

Dan Rippey  04:17

point is always customer trust. If we have any potential for erosion of customer trust in the channels capability. It’s hugely detrimental to our business, and even more detrimental for our partners. And so when we looked at where we had come from, there was a lot of strength in the competency ecosystem when it was first built. When you flash back to the early 2000s. Right? The cloud didn’t even exist yet or soft, hadn’t birthed or killed a Windows phone. We didn’t have a search engine, none of that stuff existed. We had a Productivity Suite with Office, and we had an operating system but we were also in the early stages of building our business applications, our Dynamics business out and the multitude of acquisitions that created that. So when we started with a competency structure, we needed a way to classify partner capability And we decided that competence was a strong market word and competencies would be the way we represent that. And they serve us the business really well for a long time because it led us segment partner capabilities that lead partners pick up multiple capabilities and areas representative for their business. And we could tie things to it we could tie incentive programs to it marketplace presence to it cosell motions to add all of that. But in the end, as the business got bigger, and the portfolio got more diverse, what we realized we had was this house for everybody. We had one home for our services partners for ISVs, our OEM device partners, our IoT, and mixed reality business, all these things emerged along the way, and we just shove everybody in this house, and we had genericized, the look and feel of the home to accommodate the needs of everybody. And in the end, what we realized is that our customers really had a hard time stepping through that house and understanding based on these endorsements that we had given on silver and gold competencies, what our partner’s core capabilities were, because the truth is, most of our partners just went to market buy the precious metal designation they had, they said, I’m a gold Microsoft partner, I’m a silver Microsoft partner. But what really mattered was a differentiator tied to that say I’m a I’m a cloud vis apps partner at the gold tier with Microsoft. But we started to lose our way in the market with that. And so we said, You know what, we don’t need one house for everybody, we needed a neighborhood of homes, we need a house for services partners house for IoT mixed reality, a house for OEM devices, a house for ISVs. And even each one of those houses might have a couple of doorways might have a door for startup businesses might have a door for breath businesses who are just trying to get established in market, maybe only working in one or two GEOS might have a doorway for big multinational, well established technology firms. So that’s what we’re building now is that neighborhood, the first house on the street is our house primarily designed for services partners with the solution partner designations. And I’ll say the paints kind of drawing on the walls of that one, but we unlock that house on October 3, and we start welcoming partners into it. It’s not to say that a house is exclusive for services partners, we would welcome a partner of any type into that home. But the business model that was used to create that house and kind of the furniture, the fit and finish, the design and structure, the house is really built for that services model is assessing our partners based on three things, a portfolio of skilled professionals, a track record of driving successful customer outcomes, and a history of performance, we know that we also need to build houses for all of these other partner types that I’ve mentioned, and ISV is certainly front and center at the at the entryway to the neighborhood to say, hey, this house has long since passed to do, let’s get to together and let’s start constructing this as quickly as we can. But I think the same is can be said for all the other homes. When you look at mcpp. When you look at the cloud partner program a year or two from now, what you’re gonna see is that full neighborhood built out.

Vince Menzione  07:40

So what I heard you say is that the Microsoft cloud partner program is going to be a neighborhood, and there’s going to be separate homes or there’s going to be differentiation between and I think there was a level of ambiguity, I would say when the announcements were made back earlier this year. So I appreciate the clarity. Is there anything else from frequently asked questions that you get today from partners that you believe needs clarity,

Dan Rippey  08:06

good, one lot of anxiety on the transition process? Right? Change is hard. And we get feedback from partners constantly that says, keeping up with the pace of change at Microsoft can be burdensome. And I think we’ve really tried to take that common in stride. And we tried to learn from areas where changes landed Well, we’ve enabled our market makers to really slingshot ahead of our business and set the pace with the market and where we’re going together. And also looked at some of the changes where we’ve had negative reaction to and say, Could we have landed this a different way? Could we have given partners more notice? Could we have opened up opportunities for engagement and feedback. And so on the backside of those learnings, I think there’s two things that really stand out for me. First one is, the way we deployed, the new cloud partner program changes was really the first time we’ve tried to write this playbook on saying, let’s announce this at least six months before it goes live. And then let’s just go into listening mode. Let’s do world tours, let’s talk to partners, let’s set up advisory councils, let’s do co design sessions with our ecosystem. And let’s figure out in these changes, what’s working and what’s not. And that six months has been an incredible runway for our team to learn from partners on some of the things that we’ve had to adjust along the way. And we’ve actually made those adjustments we’ve recently we’ve made adjustments to the business applications designation, we’ve rolled back some of the requirements out of the Azure data and AI solution partner designation for some exams, that didn’t really make sense there. Because our partners came with that feedback. And the market validated it right when we bring that to customers and say, Hey, how do you perceive this? What do you think? What what do you think of a partner who has this capability? It helps us fine tune these programs before we ever turn them on. The second piece is partners are saying okay, so what happens to me in October, I lose everything that I had, do I need to scramble my team to go after a bunch of things that are different. And in this, we’ve actually tried to make FY 23 A year of transition and telling partners benefits that you had most partners really lean heavily on software licenses, Azure credits, partner technical consultation pre sales advisory services, we’re not going to change anything. So if you’re a silver or gold partner today, you’re going to go into this year, and the benefit package is going to be completely unchanged this October, we’re also going to extend that. So when you hit your normal annual renewal phase that happens to every year, we’re going to let you renew those silver or gold benefits next year. And we currently have no plans sunset date for those legacy benefit kits. The other big piece partners asked about is lots of things have used gold competency status as a precursor requirement, right? You look at our incentive programs, you look at our commercial marketplace and the ability to publish services into our app source storefront, you look at our cosell ecosystem and the requirements to get cosell ready. All those things have always hinged on gold status. We’re not going to change that this year. And so everything that you’ve qualified for historically, you’re going to continue to qualify for in FY 23. And we’ll make adjustments along the way as we approach fy 24. We’ll start rethinking our incentive program qualifications are cosell programs. But we want this year to be about a soft landing for partners that says, hey, take some time, understand how you want to invest and structure your business with Microsoft move when you’re ready, and give us feedback. If there’s something that’s working for you let us know. But more importantly, if there’s something that’s not working for you, you’re probably not the only partner that it’s not working for. And we need to hear from you. Because if it’s an area, we can help rethink some of the structure of the program or rethink our transition timelines, we’re going to do that

Vince Menzione  11:22

what are the key watering holes or listening mechanisms that you’re using today, Dan,

Dan Rippey  11:27

there’s three. The first one is upstream. We’ve now started a process of doing co design sessions with partners. And we talked about this quite a bit it inspired. But for our ISV programs, we’re actually bringing in ISVs of all different types, sizes, geographies, maturity models, and saying, Hey, come on up to the dry erase board. And we’ll hand you a pen uncap the pen and help us design the program that works for you, and the program that works for your customers. And those have been so valuable for us, because in the end, you end up with a lot of different drawings from a lot of different partner types. But you can create commonality and start to build program structure that works for most partners. And then you can think about those outliers and say, how do we embrace their business models as well. The second one is we have partner advisory councils, where we do a lot of pre testing with partners and said, Hey, this is the direction Microsoft thinks we’re gonna go, what’s your feedback to this, and they really help us get deep in program requirements. For example, this partner capability score that’s now core to the cloud partner program, they helped us right size, the weighted metrics, we put on each score, how many points you should get for a person who passes in the intermediate skilling exam versus an advanced skill exam, all those things where you really need to get in the minutiae of the program. And you need feedback from a representative sample of partners that said, hey, if we were to turn this on, would it be met with resistance? Or would it be met with celebration? And then the last one is as our support team, honestly, I mean, we obsess over the data that comes in every ticket, every phone call to our support staff, whether the partner saying something as tactical as hey, I understand my capability score. And I think the numbers that I’m seeing in the skilling metric are wrong, too, as broad as saying AI, I’m just kind of confused, right? I don’t really understand what my transition process is going to be like, from MPN, into the cloud partner program, we aggregate all that data up. And we go back to the drawing board and say, how could we have fed answers to this so that partners don’t have to be on the phone for hours with our support team. And we can give them quick answers in the experience to give them clarity on where we’re going and how they’re going to get there and what their footprint looks like today, and what it’s going to look like tomorrow, we strive to build those digital experiences to be self service as much as we can. Our support teams really are the litmus test, when the things that we are attempting aren’t working really well of what we can go back and fix.

Vince Menzione  13:34

I love what you’re doing here. And as you might know, I work quite a bit with ISPs. And you mentioned ISPs here in terms of working through and whiteboarding, what needs to happen. I was hoping you could share more about the emphasis on improved engagement with ISPs. I know you and Julie talked about Industry Solutions is a big topic area. How can ISV partners best the line and engage to drive deeper here,

Dan Rippey  13:57

this topic probably gets the most attention from almost anything my team’s talking about these days. Number one, because there’s just a massive army of people at Microsoft that are embraced and working to build for this ISV model success. And number two, because I think we’re a little bit late into market with ISV offers. And I’m open to say that because it true Microsoft fashion, we try to get things right on day one. And we’ve watched our competitors kind of work around this area. And we’ve seen some things in the market that work really well. And we’ve seen the market attempts and things that aren’t working really well. And we’ve taken those learnings in stride and said how can we when we deploy things for ISVs we really got to hit the nail on this one. And so that when I talk about the neighborhood of homes, this is the next house that’s going to under construction. If you imagine if you’re on a walk into the halls of Microsoft and you walk down the hallway for the partner team, you’d see this house being built right now in conversations that are happening in conference rooms with our executive leadership team with leaders across our global demand Center, our global partner solutions organization or commercial marketplace team, our partner center engineering team, everybody’s really rallying around this ISV persona. on making sure that we get this right. And there’s a couple of things, I think it’s good for the ecosystem to know. And so this house, if you can envision the house for ISVs, in the front of the neighborhood is going to have a couple of doorways, we know that we need a door for startup ISVs. And we’ve actually delivered that it’s in market right now under the founders hub, you can go to your favorite search engine and search Microsoft founders hub, you’ll see those offerings that are in market for early stage startups. And there’s actually a whole maturity model that for startups that the founders hub team has, and they try to right size, the level of benefits based on where you are in the startup process. For our breadth ISVs. Really the big kind of core base of technology partners, many of these partners are trying to get their first or second solution in market, they may be trying to Geo expand a solution they’ve had some success with and they want to start evolving that into be available for other markets. When you look at our ISV Success program, you can go to your favorite search engine and search Microsoft ISV success, or you can just shortcut it go to microsoft.com forward slash ISV. What you’re going to see is a program that really embraces that and they’ve actually accumulated a set of benefits, I think the total value of those is worth almost $130,000 that are designed for ISVs software, licenses, Cloud Credits, technical consultation, pre sales, advisory services, all the things that an ISV needs not only to get into our marketplace, but also to be very successful once they’re in market. And that becomes really a bridge to selling and CO selling with Microsoft. The last door we’ve got to create and this is the one where we started co design sessions around the time of inspires that third doorway for well established technology providers that probably have a number of solutions in the market. They’re probably representing the saleability of those solutions in multiple geographies. These partners are telling us, hey, we want to be badged and branded differently. We can do business at a level of scale, that is globally we can we can close multimillion dollar transactions with Microsoft’s field sellers very quickly. I know that this ecosystem wants to be endorsed that way. And they also want to be endorsed by industry, they want to say these are the solutions we built. There are certain key industries, we target these four that we have a depth of expertise on. And so that’s my team’s job right now is building those programs for those ISVs. Once that’s ready, I think we’ve got to package this house a little bit better, I think we can go to market and say, Hey, ISVs, here’s your home, you’ve got a couple of different doorways to enter the home, you get to pick based on where your business is, at this moment in time, what’s the right door for you. And we’ll show you the pros of each one. And we’ll help you we’ll help lead you through that doorway when the moment is appropriate. But we’re trying to get this right, as much partner feedback as we can get on this one. I would love for that to come back in from the channel.

Vince Menzione  17:29

Yeah, I would love to provide feedback back through this podcast to you, Dan, I think they’re doing some really great things. I think about this when the program was first launched. And I think about don’t forget ISVs stand for independent software vendors, which have their own standalone businesses that don’t necessarily just rely on Microsoft, and you need the program needs to support that which I believe you’re doing here. And these well established organizations as well. Like how are you thinking about the alignment there is there’s a maturity model, I gather from here, right? Founder founders have taken care of startups ISV success dealing with what we call breath ISVs. That means certainly earlier stage, not necessarily managed by Microsoft Partner Manager. And then the well established where there’s, I call it more white glove support for their relationship. Yep.

Dan Rippey  18:15

Yep, you got it. And I think one of the key pieces is everybody makes this assumption like that there’s this pyramid, and you’ve got to climb to the top of the pyramid as fast as you can. And actually, I don’t think that’s true from looking at a lot of different partner models. And looking at the ways partners have found success for us. A lot of times I get asked, Hey, how do I get a partner development manager and account manager PDM, from Microsoft? And I’ll counter that question, say, Why do you think you need a PDM? And what do you think that person is going to do for you? I think the answer is when you look, programmatically these different doors, understand a set targets for where you want your business to be with Microsoft. And an easy example I use is imagine if you are getting a new cosell engagement from Microsoft’s field every couple of days, every two or three days, right? Everybody thinks man, that would be great. My sales teams phone rings every two or three days from another Microsoft seller trying to bring the business. But what happens if they’re bringing you business in markets, you’re not ready to scale into yet? What happens if they’re looking for capabilities in the solutions you haven’t matured to yet, you now have aced engagement with Microsoft’s field sellers that’s bringing you into sales engagements that you your business might just not be prepared for it this time. And that’s okay. You may find, hey, the solutions aren’t as customizable as we want them to be. We’re still building towards that. So you get in front of these customers, but with Microsoft’s field and you realize we’re not really set up for this yet. We need to we need to grow a little bit more. We need to invest in our solutions a bit more. We need to invest what Microsoft a bit more so that we can be invited into these sales engagements. Take the time that you need to do that, whether that’s weeks, months or years, think about how and where you want to scale with Microsoft and adjust yourself programmatically to that. Let that be the guide that starts to show Microsoft hey, here’s what how we want to engage with you Microsoft. Here’s the level of here’s the geographies we want to work with you And here’s the solutions that we’ve really invested deeply in our business. Here’s how customizable these are, here’s the customer scenarios, we can really tie these into, or the sales plays using Microsoft vernacular, where these solutions that can be directly correlated with, here’s the industries we sell into. But more importantly, here’s what we don’t, here’s the industries we’re not ready for. Here’s the sales plays or solution areas that were not fully capable. And it’s okay to tell Microsoft that it’s okay to ask Microsoft for that level investment to get ready. But just find the place that works for you and let the program cater to those needs.

Vince Menzione  20:31

I’m happy to announce that partner tap has become a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering partner tap is the only partner ecosystem platform designed for the enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align channel teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share, while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have them on board, be on the lookout for events, content and more. And I’m so excited to continue working together and our exciting year ahead. So I want to come back to something you said you mentioned this, I hear this all the time, right? We want to be a managed partner, we want the attention of Microsoft, if you’re not a managed partner, how do you get the attention? We grow? We’re going to talk about marketplaces here in a moment. But like how do you think through this? Like, what does it mean? Why do I need to go put all my deals in partner center if I’m not managed by Microsoft, I guess is what I would say. Yeah, this

Dan Rippey  21:32

question comes up all the time. I think the key is two things. One, when we structure the program, we set targets for every every step of the program, right? So the solution partner designations, these new six designations that are landing in October. And then if you look at each designation, there’s generally five, six or seven specializations that nest into those they used to be called advanced specializations. Now they’re they’re just called specializations. These are effectively our our sales workloads, right? So we call them sales plays in years past, we call them solution plays now, but what we’re doing in all of this is we’re looking at incoming customer demand globally global customer demand and saying, how many partners do we think we need in every solution area and every subordinate specialty, or specialization of those solution areas? What do we think the right number of partners is in our ecosystem to be able to service that global customer demand. And it’s hard to get that right, because if you have too many partners, instead of managing expectations, you all you do is manage disappointment, where the partner says, Look, I did all this work, I got this endorsement, I build capabilities. And I waited, my sales team waited for the phone to ring and it never rang. We didn’t get any leads from your commercial storefront, we didn’t get any leads from your qualified referrals program. We didn’t get any leads from the partner directory, we didn’t get any leads from Microsoft’s field sellers. And that’s the worst outcome for me, because I looked at I’m like you, you’ve already executed the investment. And you can’t, there’s no refund on that. And it didn’t yield any net new business with Microsoft, we also look at the opposite of the deficit of capacity, where we have so much customer demand coming out in the workload, and we’re trying to connect that demand with partners who can service it, and we don’t have enough partners, because then we start that’s where we’re Microsoft really falls down because customers are coming saying I want this thing. We’re saying, Okay, our partner channel drives most of the business for that thing that you’re asking for. But our partners are busy, they’re fully saturated with business against that workload. And that’s where we leave money on the table, right? So it’s a loss for our partners, because I wasn’t able to make that connection is a loss. For Microsoft, it’s a loss for the customer. It’s everybody loses. What we strive to do is we strive to right size, that model between incoming customer demand and the number of partners that we need globally to service it. We slice that by region, and we say we need this many partners in Western Europe has many partners in Southeast Asia, this many partners in North America. And we try to make those connections and recruit partners into those programs to make sure that we’ve got the right number within that threshold of service capacity without either an abundance or a deficit. So for our partners, what this means is look at where Microsoft is going. And I think this like influencers like you events do a very good job at this, at creating a roadmap for the channel is saying, this is something Microsoft is investing in. If you look at something as simple as what we did two years ago, when we split, modern work and security used to be together as a combined solution area. When Microsoft split that out. What you can see between the lines is happening is Microsoft’s making a big investment in its security solution area by bringing that up as a standalone, and then creating specializations that nest within that, because security is an area of focus and investment for our business and for years. And so as a partner, the key piece is figure out how to plug into that look at the areas where Microsoft has deficiencies and partner capacity. And your organization has the capability to build solutions, services, intellectual property offerings against those that you can bring to market because as we start to saturate our field and our commercial marketplace with incentive programs to prioritize those things, that’s when we can start bringing you new business faster. I’d say that if you have an account manager, they’re probably helping doing some of this mapping with you right there. be creating a multi year investment strategy for your business. They’re investigating areas where your business can make new growth investments in areas where Microsoft is going to start to incentivize down the line. And so it might speed up the conversation a little bit. But honestly, if you just follow Microsoft closely and you follow the influence for communities that track our programs, you can get the same level of information. What you

Vince Menzione  25:21

said is so profound, I talk about agility is one of the seven key characteristics of successful partner, and what you said regarding that listening mechanism. Listen to where your partner is going, where is Microsoft headed, and intuitively knowing and investing in areas, maybe micro investing in areas where you might fail fast. But ultimately, you’ll find the areas where your greatest source of success or future success lies. I want to dive into one of these actually, so marketplaces, people are still questioning like, why should I invest in marketplaces, these ISVs are saying like what is important to me, I already have a channel, I already have a go to market. But marketplaces were front and center at the Inspire conference, and you had featured previous guests, Jake Swenson and tackle with regards to an announcement. Why do ISV partners need a clear marketplace strategy?

Dan Rippey  26:16

Yeah, this one comes up constantly. And I think the buying patterns in our industry have evolved, what used to be centralized in big central IT shops, and then that kind of CIO to CTO transition that It’s decentralized. Now, you look at if you look at some of the work Gartner has done on the new chasm of buying in a typical SMB or enterprise organization, there are so many decision makers involved in the buying process, not necessarily in these big central IT firms anymore, that you’ve got to create this credible place where customers can go and say, okay, when I think about any Microsoft workload, where do I start? Where do I at least see a catalog of solutions that have been designed to solve as a customer our needs at this moment in time, so we can deploy something quickly celebrate a rapid win. And if we need to customize, we can work with a partner who has the capability and competence to be able to do that to customize the solution for our business. Our commercial storefronts app source in the Azure marketplace are really designed to do that. And so when you think about this, where the storefront started in their infancy, it was effectively a directory of solutions, right? As they were, we call them contact me listings, where the partner could showcase the things that they had built. They could align those by industry by solucionario, by workload, by technical capability by region and GEO. But at the end of the day, you are clicking a big blue button that said, I’m a customer, this thing looks interesting. I want a salesperson to call me and give me a demo or a test drive or maybe talk about what my challenges are, we’ve evolved from that. And so now it’s really the center stage is transactional offers in our marketplace. And it’s always a couple of things. One that our many of our partners actually need, they want to host billing and invoicing on Microsoft, they want the solutions to sit on subscriptions that are hosted centrally, so they can get accountability and record of all the transaction and Azure consumer revenue they’re driving, but they want their customers to have a trusted way to transact those offers through multiple gos multiple currencies, to be able to deploy things quickly. If you think about a smaller mid sized partner who’s trying to build all those capabilities, it’s incredibly burdensome to have to create all that from scratch, or to have to go to another independent provider and put all those marketplace logistics in place. You can walk onto our storefront today, and you can have these things deployed in a matter of days. Now, the other piece is customers want a sense of security, right? They want to know, every solution that’s in Microsoft storefront. Has it been vetted by Microsoft? Does it contain malware, is it well architected on whatever Azure services it’s going to use? Are there principles and practices of security that were implemented in the way the solution is deployed, and was initially architected, we do all of that. And so for a partner who’s never been through this, this process of deploying a transactable offer on our storefronts, I can tell you, it’s pretty rigorous. When you go and click the Submit button to get your offer deployed. We have a certification team that’s going to look at everything, they’re gonna look at your technical architectural diagrams, they’re gonna look at the Azure services you’re using, they’re gonna look at the way you’ve deployed, they’re gonna look at the bench of your sales team, and where that sales team sits, to be able to answer the call, they’re gonna look at whether or not you have a demo, or test drive available for partners to download and start interacting with this thing, before they ever enter the process of a sales engagement. The marketplace is enabled all that. And so for many of our partners, it’s been a game changer to be able to just walk onto that infrastructure that’s already built for them. And I think for some of our bigger partners, there’s a maturation process of getting them ready for that for those partners that say, look, I already have all this I don’t why do I need to do this? I think there’s a reality of you look at our even our partner reported ACR programs and our CO sell business transactable offers and market actually solve for a lot of that it lets us reliably know how’s a partner transacting their business with Microsoft? How much consumption are they driving because we want to give partners credit for all that hard work. And we don’t really want to burden you with having to report all that manually. We just want it to flow through the marketplace. And that’s where we’re going with cosell.

Vince Menzione  30:01

He said some very interesting things here, I just want to amplify a few points, right? The customer buying decisions are happening differently today are happening in the lines of business. It’s not the CIO shop that’s making all the decisions, right. And the seats at the table that are helping influence that I think about this ecosystem strategy and how marketplaces become the aggregator of your ecosystem strategy. And allowing you to point customers or point a partner, in fact, might be an influencer partner might be a transactional partner might be a support partner, back to the marketplace solution. It’s fun, it’s a fungible offer, then also just the simplicity of driving the solution. And let’s not forget leveraging, right, the what is it 50,000, Microsoft sellers, the 17 million partner feet on the street. And, in fact, the millions of customers that can access and buy off in the marketplace.

Dan Rippey  30:54

Yeah, this is what a lot of the a lot of our partners actually never see this. There’s another side of our storefront that’s not exposed publicly. And we’ve called the cosell catalog, but it’s really a it’s a different entry point into app source in the Azure Marketplace. That’s designed just for Microsoft employees. And imagine if you could walk into favorite store, right? You go into Costco, and it has a little placard on a product, it says the price, couple features of the product, maybe the manufacturer’s name, the SKU, whatever the item number that the store has on it. But if you could flip that over, and you can see, how many times is that product been transacted this month? What’s the rate of return? What’s the level of customer satisfaction with the product? How many people who look at the product actually execute a purchase on it? We effectively have that for our field. Because when we are going to cosell with a partner, we want to know all those things, right? We want to know what is the time that transaction between Microsoft requesting cosell engaging with the partner and the partner actually accepting or rejecting that opportunity to engage with us? What’s the win rate? What’s the average deal size? What’s the deal? Velocity? What’s the partners track record of cosell with us historically? How many markets? Is that product co sold in? Where does that partner have their Salesforce positioned and oriented globally so that we can call salespeople in that partners organization and whatever market we’re trying to close the deal in all those things, right, we make a multitude of data we make available to our field sellers, because it helps them be better informed in the buying process. And there’s this stigma that like to get into this cosell world, you got to be the best partner, you got to be Microsoft’s top 1% or top 10% of partners. And that’s actually not true. Every marketplace solution that we have, we expose and make available to our field sellers. There may be areas where sellers on the phone with a customer customer defines their needs, sellers immediately translating those needs to workloads to products to industry to line of business. And they’re narrowing down their search results in the catalog saying how many partners do we have that built this thing that can solve this customer’s problem as quickly as possible? That’s so powerful. Yeah. Oh, power. Yeah. And they might find, I mean, that may be a top to your partner, the sellers are certainly looking for certain endorsements to know that we have, we can reliably co sell with a partner. But a lot of times when we look at like niche solutions and things that some really interesting breadth partners have built, the sellers are discovering these in their catalog and saying, You know what, I think that’s a perfect match to what this customer needs. And it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re not if you don’t, if you’re not an Azure expert, MSP or you don’t have an advanced specialization, if that seller can quickly discover that solution and find it’s going to be a great match for their customer, they’ll take a bet on you. And I think for partners, keep that in mind. And like, let them roll the dice and give them the ability to find you and connect with

Vince Menzione  33:34

you some really interesting food for thought for me, and for the partners that are listening today. So I want to make sure we amplify that. But this is the ultimate guide to partnering. And from your perspective, what do you see from the best of the best partner? Stan,

Dan Rippey  33:49

I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. One is clarity of understanding. And we touched on this earlier, but clarity of understanding on where Microsoft is going with its product roadmap with industry prioritization, new solution areas we’re investing in, and really staying with that. I think the second thing is, as a partner, especially if you have a big business, really understand what’s working for you, and leverage that and more importantly, understand what’s not, and either fix it or deprioritize. It there’s, you’d be surprised when I look at partners that how many solutions they have in our marketplace, or in our cosell catalog. And I’d say hey, you got 100 solutions here, nine of these are driving big business for you. And the 91 of these are doing almost nothing for you. Why are you carrying around this baggage of the solutions that have like either the market doesn’t want or they’re Miss position in the market doesn’t understand what they do fix them or get rid of them. And so I think that like ruthless prioritization of how can you find success with Microsoft, and as soon as you see that inkling of success, accelerate those factors as much as you can, and deprioritize the stuff that’s not working anymore. And then the last one is connections with each other like this p2p concept, and Microsoft’s tried to get involved in this before we’re always awkward and how we facilitate these collaborations but I look at the relationship between a services partner and an ISV. And what a good services partner can do for an ISV that’s built really interesting intellectual property. Microsoft can’t broker those relationships for you. But industry events, a lot of these big service partners and CSPs are doing these kinds of Shark Tank style opportunities for partners to come in and showcase what they do. Think about that. Think about the durability of your business, not just between your business relationship with Microsoft, but your business relationship with the entire community. That is the cloud partner program.

Vince Menzione  35:28

So Dan, you’re joining us for a very special event, or partners are going to be in the room and you talk about partner to partner I think there’s a key that’s a key aspect of what this event will be about this ultimate partnerships mastermind, what should partners attending the event expect or look for from your keynote session?

Dan Rippey  35:45

Now I’m going to talk about one of your peers Vince and another big industry influencer recently published an article where he, he calls Microsoft’s partner ecosystem, a bellwether for the industry, as humbled as I was by that the reality is the big four big five in the in my ecosystem, my big competitors in the partner space, we all kind of chase each other every everybody thinks that man, what we’re doing is messed up. And let’s go look at our competitors and see what they’re doing. And let’s figure out how to respond to what they’re doing. As I recruit industry leaders and have worked with a team that’s been moved throughout the ecosystem, I always realize that we all have the same perspective of each other, everybody thinks that their competitor is doing it better than they are. And what I realize now is that there are a lot of eyes on Microsoft’s on where we’re going, not only from our partner ecosystem, but the competitive landscape as well. And that puts a level of pressure on the team to keep us competitive and keep opportunities in the market that are very much relevant for our ecosystem, I think what differentiates Microsoft is, we’ve got almost half a million organizations that work with us. That is, when you look at the number of employees of those half a million companies, it is millions and millions of people that come in inside Microsoft’s ecosystem, every week, every month every year to work with us and transact. And where we work really hard is to take care of numbers that large, right, and we’ve got one of our starter kit programs, we have over 100,000 partners in that one alone. And so anytime you make adjustments to these programs, you’re not impacting a couple of partners, you’re impacting 1000s of partners, and you want to make sure that you’re getting it right. But you also want to be a bellwether for the industry, you want to go bold, you want to make big kind of industry market making decisions, and you want to signal to the channel and your competitors channels, this is where we’re going. This is how we are going to go to market and sell with our partners for the next probably one to two decades. And so when I meet with your event that’s coming up, really, I want it to be a bi directional exchange between me and the industry leaders that you invite into that session, to just let’s get real about that. Let’s get real about what we think the next decade in tech looks like. Let’s get real about the value of these channels and the way we will go to market and sell together. Let’s talk about what’s working, and celebrate it. And more importantly, let’s talk about what’s not working and come up with a plan to fix

Vince Menzione  37:54

it. So excited to have you, Dan, come to our event. So as you might know, from previous interviews, I’m fascinated with the career journey. And I’ve also had the opportunity to work in public sector with some amazing leaders in the military. In fact, my 911 post, I talked about my really profound respect for those who are been in service for our nation, your are major in the Army Reserves, you’ve been active service. I’d love to hear more about how you got here at Microsoft into this role. How your career and your journey led you here.

Dan Rippey  38:28

Yeah, that’s a great question. And what First off, I want to thank you, I read your 911 posts, and it was very much relevant and moving. Thank you for it was incredibly well compiled. So thank you for putting the time I think you really paid an honor and a tribute to the sacrifices that that day and the fact that even though a lot of years have passed between now and 2001. But I think for the generation that was there was alive and very much present when that moment unfolded, that stays with us, right? I mean, we’re never going to forget that. And I appreciate you keeping that memory alive. On the army side, I’ve got kind of a cool story I was. So I’ll at the end of this, you’ll be able to guess my age. But I was in university at the early stages of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars happening simultaneously. And I come from a long line of service members in my family and I had made the decision as a very young man that I was going to join the military. I just didn’t really know how to do it. And I when I figured out college was going to be for me and I wanted to commission as an officer because I was I always kind of envisioned life beyond the military and what would be next. And so I did an ROTC program at my school in Boston, and I was ready to go. The mantra then for ROTC cadets is when you graduated, you were going to go to your basically an infantry school, all of us would go to Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and you go to a short specialty school beyond that, and then you would deploy to the Middle East. That was the plan for all of us from like day one of those commissioning programs. That’s what they told you. And so you had that mindset. And I got really lucky that school I was in was a co op school. And so we would do these six month inter extended internships in the industry while we were going through school, and I was I was in a computer engineering program. My last Co Op I did with Microsoft. I was like This is the 21 year old version of me. And I got accepted by Microsoft. I moved from Boston to Seattle for six months, I had an amazing internship, I actually worked for the team that was building the partner membership Center. This is the thing we now call partner center. I was an engineer on that team. Last day, my internship, I walked out of the building for the last time after saying goodbye to my colleagues, and I could feel somebody behind me. And so I turned it looked over my shoulder as I walked out the door, and it was my manager, and she had an envelope in her hand, and she handed it to me, and she said, hey, when you get home, open the envelope and call me when you’re ready. And so I didn’t, I think I made it three steps out of the building before I just tore the envelope open and ejected the contents. And it was an offer letter from Microsoft. So I like any college kid who just got their first full time job offer, I don’t know, probably sprinted back to the car, called my parents first, and then went back to school a week later, and I sat down with my ROTC Battalion Commander, I showed him the letter, and he said, Dan, you’d be crazy not to take this for a company with goals as audacious as Microsoft, he said, let’s set you up, take this job offer, because you’re still gonna go to the Middle East, you’re still going to do your army stuff. But let’s get you set up in Redmond first, then we’ll get you back down to Fort Benning, Georgia, we’ll get you through your training. And we’ll figure out next steps beyond that. So they switched me over to an Army Reserve commission. And I’ve been with Microsoft. And the Army actually the same length of time, both started the same year, and now of almost 16 years in the Army, and in almost 16 years at Microsoft, a couple of trips to Afghanistan between then and now. But the company has been incredible. I just the amount of resources they make available for reservists and veterans and National Guard’s men and women has been really, really phenomenal. And it’s been a good pairing, because what I do in the military is totally different than what I do at Microsoft. But the fundamentals of leadership and building direction and motivating people, those things are evergreen, right? It doesn’t matter where you go, the fundamentals of leading human beings is always the same. And so it’s been a lot of fun to have those two parts of my life working in tandem. Not always easy, but always, always a lot of fun. And I’m proud to say that I’m going to stick up for Lieutenant Colonel in the next couple of years, I’m going to stick with the Army Reserve for a bit longer until I meet everything that I feel like I came to do there and just incredibly proud of the men and women that still put the uniform on. And despite a world of uncertainty and global conflict, the fact that we still have men and women step up willing to serve, it always just reminds me of how inspired I am to be in the position that I am and how lucky I am to have the honor to serve these men and women that are coming through in their young careers as well.

Vince Menzione  42:20

So well said, Ben, thank you for your commitment. And thank you for your service. That was such a amazing story. Such a profound story. I love the fact that Mike Microsoft’s respect for an inclusiveness for those who serve. Thank you for your service.

Dan Rippey  42:36

Appreciate that, Vince, thank you.

Vince Menzione  42:37

So let’s have a little bit of fun. So one of my favorite questions, Dan, you’re hosting a dinner party, and an amazing dinner party. And you can pick any place in the world to host this dinner party. We could talk about that also. But you can invite any three guests to this party from the present? Or the past? Whom would you invite? And why? And this

Dan Rippey  42:58

is a tough one, I think I’m gonna give a kind of different answer on this one. The first one I would do is Gordon Moore, because I won’t restate Moore’s Law on this call. I think there’s probably enough familiarity with it. But to have the foresight of how fast technology would move when you look at the adoption curve of anything else in the history of humanity, the way technology has accelerated in a way it’s changed adoption curves, since then, on everything that we produce and technology to have had the foresight that Mr. Moore had when he founded that principle at Intel, I think was just like, I mean, he just have that lens to see in the future. And there’s not like a there’s always a few leaders who have that. And you don’t know how they have it or how they built it or if they’re just brilliant or just lucky. But Gordon Moore had it. And he’s certainly Moore’s law. Certainly what define that for us. The second one, I’d say George Washington, I think just the founding father of the nation that I’ve had a chance to serve for 16 years would love to pick his brain on kind of where his priorities were in that era of our nation’s history. And it’d be able to fight for what was the vision of at the time of freedom and independence, I think is a pretty special thing. And it required a lot of gusto and an amazing leadership capability to get people on board with that vision. And what it’s created. Now, hundreds of years later has been shaped my life and probably many of your lives as well. And then the last way, one is it’d be it’d be a dinner for for Thomas Watson, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Like, imagine me imagine a dinner for for with those with those brilliant minds and knowing what we know now being able to hash out what was happening in our industry at the time, and where things came from IBM were things and then what, what happened on the backside of that, with what two of the major players in the tech industry did it really the formation of the personal computer and the way Tech really took its foothold in the world, I think would just be such a, like a profound discussion to have, as it informs where we’re going and what the next 50 years of tech looks like. And I would love to inform my perspective on that. A journey where we’re headed. Based on a deeper understanding of the past, it’s more

Vince Menzione  45:03

or less, I think more than a dinner party might be a summit. I’m looking at this guest list. And it’s amazing, right, Gordon Moore, first of all, Intel, so much good and amazing, profound knowledge came out of Intel, right? Moore’s law being one of them. Okay, are some of the other things that Intel? Did they led the way in so many ways? George Washington, what else can we say about this amazing experiment? And hopefully, we’ll continue our democracy moving forward. I think the experiment is just in its early days. But then the leaders in tech, right, you got Watson and Kate’s, and jobs, what a conversation that’ll be,

Dan Rippey  45:39

yeah. And to hear, I think, to be able to revive Watson and jobs to see where we’re at and be able to pick their brain and say, where you think we go from here? What does the next half century a century look like? And I bet they would place and if you could bring Gordon Moore into that conversation to I bet between the four of them, they could place a couple of bets that are that are probably end up paying off, and just how insightful it would be to look at the future through the eyes of the past,

Vince Menzione  46:03

I think I’m gonna have to come by and bring a bottle of something or a beverage, because then I want to be a fly on the wall. This conversation

Dan Rippey  46:10

is join us more than one. I

Vince Menzione  46:11

love it. I love it. Well, you, Dan, have been a truly amazing guests, such a great leader at Microsoft, all the work you do, I’ve gotten to see a little bit behind the scenes, as you’ve built out some of these programs. And I just want to thank you for all that you do for our partner listeners. Any final words, for partners, we’ve covered a lot of ground here today, but how they can align for success for Microsoft 2023?

Dan Rippey  46:37

Yeah, I think I’ll respond to the feedback I get from a lot of partners that talks about the pace of change that we move at. And change costs, time change costs, money change, change puts a lot of burden on our partner organization. So number one is just a sense of deep respect and appreciation for every single organization that calls on Microsoft Partner both now and in the future of how much we appreciate the business. Like I’ll tell you, my entire team and the entire division, I represented the company, we wouldn’t exist without you. So number one, my message to you is thank you. And just a sense of deep committed gratitude, and your capabilities and your teams and your sweat equity and everything you drive and bring to the table. And my call to action is give us feedback. If we’re moving too fast. Tell us tell us where we’re moving too fast. Tell us where he needs to slow down. If we’re not moving fast enough. Tell us tell us where you want us to see us accelerate where you want incentive programs and cosell motions and programmatic endorsements and benefits to align to. And if you feel like we’re getting it right, tell us that too. We actually we get pretty special to have that affirmation to say. And I’ve seen a lot of this and these changes that we’re making on the backside of the Microsoft Partner Network and the birth of the cloud partner program of partners saying, you know, at this was past due, we’re glad that Microsoft’s taken the steps. We’re nervous for the future. But we’re glad to see these steps finally being enacted. And my goal in the future is let’s not ever let this get past due. Let’s move at the right pace with our partners to respond to your needs and help you build clarity, sense of purpose and direction to be able to plug into the engines at Microsoft that are going to help drive success for your business. Just keep that conduit for conversation open. And my ears are always open and my team’s ears are always open as much as we can connect with you. That’s the best outcome I can foresee. Thank you so much for the business. And thank you Vince today for the time

Vince Menzione  48:14

on behalf of the over 450,000 Microsoft partners. Dan, thank you for this great discussion today. So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it. We all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail, and that ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. I am so excited to announce the ultimate partnerships mastermind. For more details, follow the link in the show notes. I hope you join us my friend at the beautiful Gaylord hotel, October 9 and 10th.

Announcer  49:30

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering

Are you ready to learn how to leverage the massive $200 billion cloud opportunity in Cloud GTM working with leading providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google? Are you interested in learning how to leverage the power of marketplaces to grow your business and reach new customers effectively? Are you dealing with the economic headwinds we’ve all seen this last year? And if you want to hear from an expert, the CEO of a leading company driving effective, go-to-market strategies with the leading cloud providers, you’re in the right place.

John Jahnke is the CEO of Tackle, a company specializing in helping SaaS (Software as a Service) companies accelerate their Cloud Go-to-market strategies. And he joins to share how you and your organization need to take advantage of this massive opportunity we’re all seeing around marketplaces and hyper-scalar co-selling. If you’re ready to accelerate your success, you’ll enjoy listening to this insightful interview with this fantastic leader.

John Jahnke was an early investor and advisor in Tackle and now serves as the CEO. John has spent the last 20 years in executive leadership roles with B2B technology companies like Pivotal, Greenplum, EMC, and Cognizant. John is passionate about remote work and helping software companies with their go-to-market strategy. He leads Tackle from Buffalo, NY where he lives with his wife and 3 children. John is an active member of the Forbes Technology Council.

I’m excited to announce Ultimate Partner’s first live digital event “Winning with Ecosystems” taking place on July 20. A production with LLTV and in partnership with Tackle, this event will feature Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to Cloud GTM and Ecosystem Led Growth. As a unique “companion event” to the Microsoft Inspire conference, you will learn how to apply the principles and learnings to achieve your greatest results in FY24. Registration is limited, SIGN UP before its too late!

At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, who drive the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems.

With this exciting new Masterclass Series, Ultimate Partnerships becomes The Ultimate Partner™ More than just a new look, Ultimate Partner is doubling its commitment to helping YOU become the Ultimate Partner by getting it right. Do you want to be The Ultimate Partner? Visit our NEW website.

Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth.

Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® -, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success.

In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead.

Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?”

If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

cloud, market, company, people, journey, marketplace, channel, isvs, organization, revenue, strategy, product, buyers, talk, cfo, cosell, part, customers, partner, years

SPEAKERS

Vince Menzione, Announcer, John Jahnke

Vince Menzione  00:00

Are you ready to tap into the $200 billion cloud opportunity? Working with the leading providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google? Are you interested in learning how to leverage the power of marketplaces to effectively grow your business and reach new customers? Are you dealing with the economic headwinds we’ve all been seeing this last year? And would you like to hear from an expert, the CEO of a leading company driving effective, go to market strategies with the leading cloud providers, then you’re in the right place.

Announcer  00:38

This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  00:57

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to bartering.

01:01

I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And today I will John Young

Vince Menzione  01:06

geek, the CEO of tackle a company that specializes in helping software as a service companies accelerate their cloud go to market strategies. And he joins to share how you and your organization need to take advantage of this massive opportunity we’re all seeing around marketplaces, and hyper scalar. CO selling. If you’re ready to accelerate your success, then you’ll enjoy listening to this insightful interview with this amazing leader. Thank you for joining the ultimate guide to partnering. Today, I’m excited to announce ultimate partners first live digital event winning the ecosystem taking place on July 20. We’re all be joined by Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to cloud go to market and ecosystem led growth. This will be a companion event to the Microsoft inspire conference where you will learn how to achieve your greatest results in 2024. Please follow the link in our show notes to sign up for this exciting event. Thank you for joining us. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Jahnke  02:17

Thanks for having me, Vince Great to be here.

Vince Menzione  02:19

I am so excited to finally welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering we’ve been trying to do this for quite some time. You’re the CEO of tackle a company that specializes in the SAS and ISV. Space, accelerating cloud go to market strategies. So welcome. Thanks. So I did Jack, you know, we had the opportunity to finally meet in real life. And you know, I know quite a few of your team. I’ve had your chief cloud officer Sonjay as one of my earlier guests. But for our listeners that may have missed that episode, can you tell us a little bit more about tackle.

John Jahnke  02:54

So tackle we actually got started in 2016, and co founder and CTO Dylan had the idea that the clouds would change the way that software was sold. And he was part of one of the cloud providers beta programs for marketplace. This is hard. And in general no one wants to build software to sell software. There’s there’s a repeatable product here. And you know, we raised a seed round with that hypothesis and started to invest and found pretty early success helping make it a business decision to launch cloud go to market instead of a product and engineering challenge. And we were able to work with some really interesting ISVs who who saw the future as well. And we’re investing ahead of the curve because back then it was not as clear what was happening with this movement as it may be it is today. New Relic was our very first customer. And I remember the conversation where they’re like at half of what you say is true we’re in because we’ve been struggling with this. And we really think there’s something great here for our business. And we were born on AWS, but our customers really, it was clear to them. They’re like, hey, we want to meet our buyers where they want to buy. And that’s across the hyper scalars. And this movement is happening across the hyper scalars. And we want a partner who can help us go on that journey. So that led to a phase of innovation to expand in cloud go to market across the hyperscalers. And then, you know, really marketplace was where we started. But that’s kind of the last mile. It’s like the execution of a transaction. And a lot of our customers would say, Well, I really want to better understand how to align cloud go to market with my pipeline. How could we accomplish that this cosell thing is really interesting to us. We think there’s magic to unlock and to sell. But the process is still very human centric, like how could we take that platform style thinking all the way through and that’s where we expanded our capabilities that allow an ISV to analyze their pipeline and make decisions about which of their customers whether their new customers or renewal customers could go on a cloud go to market journey we make that process of partnering with the clouds from a coastal standpoint really seamless, make executing a marketplace a business problem. And we allow you to do that at Super scale. And then the last thing we’ve seen happen, a lot of companies who maybe weren’t ready for it come to the table and say, okay, like the proof is there, how can we do this for all of our products? So it’s a really fascinating time in cloud go to market.

Vince Menzione  05:22

Yeah, it is fascinating. In fact, I had been working with an organization that’s just at that point, right now they’re finally jumping in the water, so to speak, and they’ve been holding back, they’ve been resisting. And it’s funny, I think back to 2016, like, marketplaces, were really not a thing yet. CO selling was at its early days, I was still at the Microsoft side of that equation, and then moved over as a channel cheap. And we were still struggling to get some organizations to understand the value of the whole co selling methodology, why that was important, and why you needed to invest resources in that. So it seems like you got to it early. And then we’ve been talking about these last, well, I’ll call it the economic headwinds we’ve seen since COVID. We’ve seen most recently layoffs and what’s happening in the SAS economy. And then marketplaces, this whole notion around marketplaces being more of a thing. So you’ve coined this term cloud go to market. But can you tell us what it is? And perhaps for our listeners, what it isn’t?

John Jahnke  06:21

Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s funny, we’re always trying to figure out how do we meet our customers where they are on their journey, because go to market in general, is really complicated, and is only getting more complicated. And I think cloud Gouda market is becoming part of that story. But if you rewind a few years, the way people thought about go to market 10 years ago, it was maybe direct and channel, they have their two options for sales. And then you saw, like marketing become a real integral part of go to market as people started to think about their top of funnel differently, and how do I better instrument sales and marketing system together? And then you layer in product lead growth, and everybody was thinking about, Well, how could I make it easier to land, or get people into our product sooner, so they could think about how to get value without ever actually having a formal relationship with us yet. And then you layer cloud into that as a way to complement all of those motions. So we’re on this journey where we think cloud go to market will become a default part of everyone’s sales tech stack. And they’ll be all of these different tools available to companies as they’re being born, to think about how they scale their go to market systems. And I think we’re seeing this shift where companies today are being born, more cloud go to market needed, where they’re saying, hey, as I’m building, as I’m building my go to market system, I want to be able to align where my buyers operate, which most likely is in the clouds. And I want to be able to capitalize on the budget that the cloud providers have in order to make it easier for someone to get started with us. And I think that’s an interesting part of cloud go to market for new companies. But for all these other companies who have all these different layers of glue, go to market clouds a complement to them. And it’s a way to either give your sellers more way to win, give your sellers access to a budget that didn’t exist before, which in this current economic time is a really powerful thing. Give your buyers access to solutions they need faster in order to solve problems.

Vince Menzione  08:40

Well, you bring up an interesting point as you went through that journey, this both the buyers journey and the SAS or ISP vendors journey. And one of the things that strikes me is you look at the hyperscalers, the three hyperscalers, primarily here, and then you look at some of the ISV companies that are moving to SAS, right, not the born in the cloud talked about the board and the cloud ones, we talked about those cloud natives. But those organizations through the model, where I’ve got a channel, I’ve established a business process around the channel, I talk about how the organization is aligned and how it needs to align differently today, because generally the channel is like bolted on to the sales organization. It’s not integrated. And what I think I hear you talking about too, is this integration component, like how do we get as an organization more effective at co selling, not only with our hyper scalar vendors, but with our channel, even within our own organization, driving the resources that are directly touching the customer, with the alliances and partner facing parts of those organizations? Do you agree there?

John Jahnke  09:40

Yeah, I think especially in companies of that vintage, who were maybe born in an era where the capabilities go to market work as significant or robust. Aligning cloud as an option for them to sell in new and modern ways is where we see the benefit happening. And it’s not just the go to market side, these companies are thinking like the nature of the way their buyers using products is changing. Now, these products may have been on prem at one point, they may not have been operating in a SAS or a SAS hybrid style. And so their products are going on a journey, how their customers run are going on a journey, which means go to market has to go on a journey with them. And I was thinking about this from what’s the macro level, who’s met, that’s underway. And you know, there’s this $755 billion of b2b software duckets. And some percentage of that is migrating to the clouds. And is that 1%? Is that 10%? Is that 50%? I think we’re still in the early days, you know, Canalis talks about how, by 2025, they think it’ll be $45 billion, go through it. You know, today, we estimate it right around 15 billion, those numbers are growing about 100% year over year. But if you said 15,000,000,755, it works out to roughly 2%. Today, yeah. And a lot of times when we talk to these more traditional organizations, they’re in the earliest days and the first transaction like changing the way you sell, it’s just like any new channel, when you when you turn the channel on getting your first win is the hardest one. But that helps you build the pattern for repeatability. And a lot of those companies have seen they’ve either done their first win, or they’ve had buyer demand in this new way. And they’re like, how do we capture that? And then how do we go on a journey to what percentage of revenue makes sense to us? And then we do this Data Cloud Marketplace research every year. And this is one of the questions we asked were like, first ISVs? What percentage of revenue Do you think cloud go to market will make up in your organization’s here? And the most common answer was 10%. This year. And when we first saw the data, we’re like, is that a lot? Like? How do I think about that, and when you boil it down here, like a $10 million error, or company having a million dollar channel, it’s probably their first meaningful channel, right? $100 million company having a $10 million channel, it’s likely their fastest growing channel, a billion dollar company having $100 million channel, it’s probably the largest channel in the world, globally scalable, powered by one of the fastest growing budget line items and enterprise technology. So that that story of where people are at in their journey, and even what they think that destination wants to be I love to have that conversation with more mature ISVs to be like, what does good look like to you? Is this the ability to capture a deal or a couple of deals? That’s one thing this is you want to get to 10% of revenue? I mean, this is literally a revenue transformation.

Vince Menzione  12:43

I want to hone in on that Canalis study the 2025 study, right? So for 15 million, I think is the number you use 15 billion

John Jahnke  12:53

to a 45. By 2025. Our data actually said 50 by 2025. But we’re in the ballpark today, like we’re both in both feels like

Vince Menzione  13:01

a pretty aggressive number to achieve in two years. Do you think those stats are accurate? I mean, you said 50, they said 45? Do you feel confident about those stats?

John Jahnke  13:10

I do. I actually think like this is where the current economic climate could we could see acceleration. And I think there’s the opportunity for acceleration for two distinct reasons. One, the durability of the cloud budget during this time of economic instability is really powerful, which I think will drive an acceleration for ISVs, to think about selling the other clouds. And the second is the movement that’s happening channel. And how there has been so much focus from all the cloud providers around this first wave of cloud go to market has proven the second wave is coming. And the second way really does think about how do you align an ISV and our channel partner together to be able to meet the buyer, the way they need to be met with appropriate combination of product and services in order to solve their business now, so I think channel is a turbocharger for this cloud, go to market movement. So those are the two things that cause me to believe, like this actually becomes a gravitational force around this. And the bigger it gets, the more it could excel. Yeah, yeah.

Vince Menzione  14:22

I think you’re right on with that, by the way. And I’ve been in the room with the channel partners and the ISPs having these conversations. And really, the blockers right now have been things like compensation for sales reps, compensation at the channel side, right? top line revenue or versus bottom line. And how do we make it whole for everybody? How do we make this achievable? And a win win win across the organizations? I come back to this a little bit here because it feels like a momentum around marketplaces. We could all feel it right now. Right? We were in the room a couple of weeks ago with a with a host of ISVs and one of the hyperscalers is Seeing it across what are some of the other hyperscalers? You doing? Microsoft has a big event coming up soon here. I’m certain there’s going to be some announcements where marketplace will take center stage. So where are we in the lifecycle? I think about Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, and like one of my favorites, and probably one of their classic books on technology adoption lifecycle. Have we crossed? Are we crossing? Like, are we mainstream yet? And where are we in terms of getting those later adopters? And laggards onboard? What do you think about that, John?

John Jahnke  15:30

Yeah, I think we’ve crossed the chasm. And I think we’re in like, using Geoffrey Moore’s actually, I think we’re in that early majority phase where you see the upslope of the curve, which ties to the growth rates that we’re talking about. And the thing that changes from the early adopters are the pioneers, the visionaries, they see things before, there’s real proof, and they’re willing to make a bet. And that was the people who embarked on this journey back in 2018 2019 2020. Today, the proof is there, there’s so much proof where the mainstream is saying, Okay, there’s clearly something here is this 50% of my revenue, like some of these Borg cloud, go to market needed companies, maybe not, but it’s definitely not zero. When you talk to some of those companies, and you have that percentage of revenue conversation, they’re not talking about $10 million, or $100 million, a percent of revenue is hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which I think is further fuel to those projections, because I had this conversation with someone recently, where they’re like, well, is the cloud, who owns the cloud budget? And how why would that work? Like why would that make sense? Isn’t this owned by like it, or the engineers are? Like, no, actually, Cloud has gone on this journey were in 2018, the cloud budget was probably a departmental budget line item, it was owned, either by like infrastructure, or application engineering, or development or product or whatever you would call it inside your company. And then as it got bigger, it started to move to be a CFO own budget line items where these oftentimes, especially as people are getting out of data centers and rebuilding platforms and products run in the cloud, the cloud becomes one of their top five budget line items. And that’s when the CFO and procurements engaged in thinking about how do I optimize, like, even that shifting of the ownership of budget inside the buyer, I think is another factor outside of that large company transformation.

Vince Menzione  17:32

I would agree there on the CFO side, it’s certainly a large line item, large budget line item. And I’ve seen firsthand the CFO negotiating directly with the hyper scalar leadership team, on those numbers, the whole notion of the durable cloud budgets, I feel like you’ve brought that really to light, I don’t think a couple of years ago, maybe it is because of your focus, and the research of your study. It really helped bring that crystallize that for a lot of these organizations that are there on that journey. What about the ones that aren’t there yet? Like what would you say to them now? Like how would you get them on board with driving this? Obviously, the ones that are resisting the most whether it be channel strategy, whether it just be laggard, mentality mindset within the organization? What do you say to those organizations? Yeah,

John Jahnke  18:18

I actually, this is an area where thinking about just tackle and the journey we’ve gone on as a company, we’re a SaaS company, we built a platform. And that’s the way we thought about the world. How could we help people use our platform in order to go on the street. But as we’ve shifted in the technology, Adoption Lifecycle curve to this more mature company approach, we’ve actually had to evolve our approach because companies like that, they don’t want to start with products, they actually want to start with strategy. And that strategy, oftentimes looks at the executive team, where there’s some education about what’s happening in the market. There’s some storytelling about customers who’ve had success and what powered that success. And then there’s execution, like, how can they get started? Because in in these larger organizations, oftentimes, it’s not a single product discussion. It’s a portfolio of products. And they often have a huge range of buying centers, then I think the best way to start is to focus like choose the spot that makes the most sense to initiate this journey. And you don’t have to go all in you don’t have to say day one, I’m going to get to 10% of revenue, you can say that’s, that’s part of the possible, but how do we go do a real experiment and see how this fits into the system? And I think one of the things we’ve seen over the last three years with large companies is oftentimes they get ground up in their own like, internal discussion, like how is if I launch a cloud, go to market strategy, how is my existing channel going to think exactly? Well, that’s an at scale problem, like, we can self contained that to a spot we’re This is an experiment, our buyers want us to meet them where they want to buy, this is a proven place, we have to experiment and understand how it fits in. And we’re not changing our whole business strategy, we’re doing a go to market experiment. And so back to how do we advise people who are stuck at that spot, we oftentimes will reverse the order and say, let’s start with the executive team. And let’s actually go through that education and enablement process to define what the right strategy is. Because you go too big, too fast, you’re probably going to spend too much money and too much time and not actually have success. And what you really want is the tailwind of revenue and deal acceleration to drive your transformation, not some big picture, press release, and launch that doesn’t actually turn into value for your buyers and sellers.

Vince Menzione  20:50

I’m glad you brought up the C suite or the executive team, because I always talk about this lack of a partner lead mindset and a lot of these organizations, right? Some of these companies that SAS in particular, just a few years ago, the CROs primarily came from a direct selling motion, you didn’t need a channel to sell SAP. And then you’ve got this, I called it the appendage of the channel that’s bolted on to the organization and might be under the CRO it might be in a different pocket. Generally, it’s buried someplace. And it’s owned by a channel chief. And some of these channel chiefs had been around for 30 years. They came from the old. I call it the Boca Raton model, right when IBM launched the PC and the channel got created that whole movement there. And then you got the CFO sitting in the middle saying why am I spending more money on an alliance strategy? I’m giving up revenue here on partners on channels. Oh, I’ve got to pay marketplace fees? How do you think through? Is there a pat answer you have on how you get the alignment at the C suite?

John Jahnke  21:47

Yeah, it’s a great, it’s such a great question. And we haven’t seen like the silver bullet answer here. It ends up being who inside the organization sees the vision, and how to help them go on a journey to bring alignment across the stakeholder gaps. And I’ve had a few conversations with ISVs lately that highlight this, I was talking to a how to channel medium size ISV earlier this week, and they’re like, hey, in this economic downturn, if we can’t tie our impact directly to top a funnel and revenue, people are going to ask questions about why we’re here, right? Like this is the era of productivity. And I think being able to think about it not just from US Strategic what’s our strategy from a partner standpoint, but it’s strategy and execution, which brings that partner leader in the Alliance building the revenue leader directly together? So I think those are traditionally the two spots we’ve started, if we’re talking about launching cloud, go to market, who in the revenue team is on your side, to bring this to life? But what does good look like? And if you don’t have that stakeholder day one, you need to figure out how to get that stakeholder to the table with you to launch and sell. Yeah, okay, we’re in the era of productivity, what value do I get out of the costs in our go to market Cisco? And where do we want to invest more? And where do we need to think about investing less, and there’s complexity here with channel like the cost of channel layered into the cost of selling, but we’re seeing CFOs emerge in those conversations in ways that they weren’t. I’ve seen this happen, where CEOs have a strong desire to evolve their company towards cloud. And they’re disconnected from an execution standpoint, and they actually really want to be able to bring the team together to get to like, how do we go do something together. And we’ve seen that in some of the largest ors in the world, so it’s mostly figuring out who has the vision and how to connect the dots to success, and then use that success to help them drive that broader engagement.

Vince Menzione  23:47

You know, you mentioned peeling back on that client acquisition costs, like if you could get into the numbers that an organization is spending all up on their go to market and their client acquisition costs. And you can say, this is what it’s like in the model today. And this is what it would look like in the future. I think you’ve got a brilliant

John Jahnke  24:04

analysis, there. Still, it’s selling and maintaining your customers is the most expensive part of every software company, and really has yet to be optimized. And we’re not simplifying the problem. We’re making the problem more complicated. So costs are going up in some ways. And I do believe deeply the order with which this happens, we’ll change company by company based upon their product strategy, but every company will have direct sales, every company will have channels, every company will have product lead, and every company will have cloud and those four things will enter their go to market system at different times based upon age of the company, the type of product that they have, and how they think about prioritizing.

Vince Menzione  24:45

good segue here. I got to listen in on your big event. You talked about five steps to successful cloud go to market during that session. Could you take our listeners through what those As five elements were sure,

John Jahnke  25:01

I think when we think about cloud go to market, it starts with strategy. And really your strategy ties to a lot of this executive alignment conversation we’ve been having. But it’s also about your product strategy with the clouds. It’s about your go to market strategy will pick clouds, and then how you’re aligning resources and resources or a combination of people and technology in order to set your destination. And I think about a product person A grew up a go to market person became a product person over time and inside a product you’re constantly iterating are constantly experimenting, you’re constantly seeking to learn from your users. And I think that’s a era we’re in and go to market. We’re in this rapid experimentation era, but you need a strategy. So the second part of that becomes how do you power your strategy with data. And we think very much in like, the outcome that matters to our customers is selling, they want to sell more, they want to sell faster, they want to sell more efficiently. In order to determine the opportunities to go on this journey, you have to start with data and be able to analyze your existing pipeline and your existing customers to make decision about who you can deliver more value to with Cloud gemondo. The third part is around your pipeline for cloud, which really centers around taking the intelligence you get from analyzing your existing customers and existing pipeline, distilling that down to where their focus and then leveraging this magic of cosell, in order to start to accelerate that pipeline. So the third phase is all about connecting with cosell in order to improve the quality of your cloud pipeline over time, the fourth phase is all around marketplace, and really being able to take that pipeline and turn it into revenue in a fast and efficient way. And this is where you get to tap into the cloud budgets, you get to tap into all of the benefits, clouds are investing in order to bring this movement to life. And then the last piece is all around scale. Because doing one deal looks very different than doing 10 looks very different than doing 100 looks very different than being 1000. And this is a multi year evolution, your first deal will be the hardest deal. And they will only get easier from there. But they will create different pain. As you go on that journey, we’ve helped customers go on that entire journey from single transaction to 1000s of transactions. And those who take a long term view are the ones who acknowledge that, okay, we know we’re going to wrap more resources around this in the early days to learn to build the patterns of the future. And then we’re going to take those patterns and teach our organization how to change with success. So those are the five steps that we think about when you go on

Vince Menzione  28:00

this journey. It’s a lot of organizational change in there creating the operational excellence as well to drive that new initiative. And that new model for the organization that use put a stake in the ground with the strategy.

John Jahnke  28:10

Yeah, and this is where, four years ago, there were a lot of unknowns today. Honestly, there are success patterns, at scale, across ISVs of all shapes and sizes, from seed stage, startups being board and cloud go to market needed to growth companies who are investing much more in their go to market and are trying to think about which investments to layer and when to add scale sellers who are selling 10, or 10s of percentage points of revenue to the largest software companies in the world, mostly, are doing this big revenue transformation. There are success patterns across an entire ecosystem.

Vince Menzione  28:50

So that brings up a good point. So what do you see from the best of the best here and the success patterns,

John Jahnke  28:55

starting with the end in mind, like this is a strategic layer to your go to market system. So I think people who win, think about this in a long term way, and then work their way back to what are the steps we take to get to the destination that we want to be. If you are thinking about cloud, go to market for one deal, that can be success, it’s not going to be durable success, it’s not going to become an integrated part of your go to market. So I think the other part, going back to that first point around the like building your strategy, the ISVs who go fastest, have executive alignment, have product strategy alignment, have go to market alignment, and know that they’re going to invest in both people and technology to bring this to life. You can’t make this a side project you can’t like and I say that because so many people have done this as a side project that became their next career. So if you’re starting today, you want someone who’s going to own it and focus on it you want to Tigard To clearly identified who’s going to go execute on transactions, I think like that strategy part is a really key formula. And don’t try to do too much too fast. Oftentimes, we encourage people to start with one hyperscalers, start with one product start with one deal. And people are like, no, no, no, we know this is going to work. We want to launch in all three at the exact same time with all of our products. And really, you can’t, we just do not see that as the success pattern. This is an evolution, I spent a lot of time in the application transformation world like moving applications from on prem to cloud, and it all started with one, what’s the one, we’re gonna go change? And I think this revenue transformation all starts with, what’s the one deal? You’re gonna start with? And then go, I’m not sure,

Vince Menzione  30:49

yeah, I love what you had to say, here, I was thinking about the ones that just do it as a side project, or do it that check the box with the hyperscale, or to say, yeah, we’ve got this marketplace, solution and market now, versus being all in and doing all the things you just discussed. I mean, as this is

John Jahnke  31:06

not the easy button, like there is no magic button for revenue in a software company, especially at this time, if you’re gonna do it, you need to invest in bringing it to life, that’s no different than any other channel partner relationship. And even if you think about you hire a direct seller, and you don’t invest in helping them be successful, odds are, they’re not going to be successful. We all have to acknowledge the fact that selling today is harder than it’s ever been. And we need to lean in to make it successful. If you’re going to take it from a we’ll just throw it we’ll just hang a shingle and hopefully some more calls us on Czar’s animal.

Vince Menzione  31:40

So let’s talk about the hyperscalers. For a moment here, we discuss them briefly earlier. But it seems to me that they’re at different stages in their maturity models as well, I suppose first out of the gate, the most advanced, Microsoft will probably this is just a hunch is going to put big investments when they do their 2020 for Microsoft Inspire. And we were both at the Google event a few weeks back, right where they laid out their plants. What are you seeing from the big three? What is your observation or predictions for the coming months,

John Jahnke  32:12

this is working for all three, sellers are selling buyers are buying. And they’re all at slightly different points in their evolution. And they’re focused on different things. And they’re all going to continue to innovate, which I think will continue to make the domain more complex. And I think with that, the coming together marketplace and cosell has been really fascinating to see over the last couple years because I do think like how those who nail cosell when and when that scale, because it’s one thing to enable someone to list and launch in your marketplace, it’s another thing to be able to let them use your budget, in order to make it easier for their buyer to get access to your technology. It’s a whole nother thing to help them actually sell revenue is strategic to every software company, fast, efficient, productive, global, which I think is another super interesting spot. Because you think about building a go to market team in Grow SAS company, one of the hardest things to do is go global. It’s expensive. When you talk to people, a lot of times they’re not successful, or they take repeated iterations. It’s very channel rich, a lot of channels history there, which increases complexity, like other clouds can help with global, I think is a really interesting spot. So I think we’ll just see more, we’re going to see a lot more innovation, both from a business model standpoint, as well as a cosell plus marketplace standpoint. And a lot of times going back again, 2018. I remember having a conversation with a buyer who was talking about their enterprise agreement. And this is like the earliest days of this idea of drawdown. They’re like, Could I actually sell more to my customer, if I could convince them to use marketplace as part of the overall agreement. And that was like the earliest indications of Yeah, people are starting to understand this ecosystem effect at a cloud seller level could help them increase their share of wallet, as well as deliver a lot of value to the buyers like, hey, we have all these first party services, but we have all these third party services, put them together in a way that gets you your business outcome as fast and efficiently. Since then, there’s been like waves of these enterprise agreements that have gone through. We’re now it’s much more common to see that CFO think about okay, I got my cloud agreement. How do I complement those two together? Like that’s becoming more real, but we’re still really in that evolution because we talked about the dura ability of the cloud, those agreements oftentimes are durable or multi year in nature, right. And now we see that across all the hyper scalars, it’s a much, much more common pattern, the clouds, investing more in helping the buyers understand how to do this, I think helps the whole seller ghost,

Vince Menzione  35:15

it talks to also the power of the hyper scalars to enter the C suite of those organizations and have those more relevant conversations than a startup SAS company would and having those budgets aligned.

John Jahnke  35:28

And yeah, as a cloud seller, you have a better reason than ever to talk to the CFO, not maybe not only the CIO, or the head of infrastructure that had a product that the the CFO, the CEO, and now even the CRO, I just bought, how many salespeople actually got the attention of a CRO and software company?

Vince Menzione  35:46

That’s right, not very many. So I’d like to pivot here. John, we talked a little bit about your career journey. But was there like a pivot or a spark that got you to become the CEO of this amazing organization?

John Jahnke  35:59

Yeah, it’s a fun story. So maybe going way back, because there’s first that when do you decide you want to do this point in your career. And I remember I worked for EMC, I started my career as an SC actually was a customer prior to being an SE. Joe Tucci was our CEO. And I’m an SC and Buffalo, New York, like, and Joe’s doing some big oil company meeting. And he talked about how he started his career as an SAE, and then went on this journey to your product leader, and then went on the study to be a revenue leader, and then ultimately a CEO. I was 23 at the time, and I’m like, you know, that sounds pretty awesome. Like, I think I could do that. So there’s this like, distinct point where you’re like, because people always ask me, When did you decide you want to do that? And I remember that point as a point in time where I’m like, that sounds like a really interesting journey. And then you get to the, how do you come together around an idea, and not really starts with people. So I was at EMC, we acquired this company, green plum, I joined Greenplum. To help them scale. I was in like, field ran pre sales and professional services. I’m always a field person, always in emerging tech. And a couple people from Greenplum ended up on my team, Brian Denker. Until woods, my co founders, and they were super smart, super curious, like fun to be us. We did a lot of work together. And they like many startup people didn’t want to go on this big company journey. And I ended up going off and doing a couple other things. And we always stayed in touch. And those relationships. We had this synergy were When Dylan had the original idea, he came back and we came back together. And we talked about it. So there was that, like, I love the line from Hamilton, where they’re like you never know who will tell your story. You never know who you meet, who will become part of your story. And that’s been so true on the startup journey. So many people have helped us along the way and reached out and introduced us to a customer reached out and introduced us to an investor. Sometimes people you don’t talk to for years, and you’re like, wow, let’s just never know. So be a good human. Always try to maintain and develop those relationships, because who knows where they go. So that was the second part like us coming together. And then I originally was an investor in tackle. And I said to Dylan O’Brien, I’m like, I love what you’re doing. I love the space, I want to stay involved. I’ve never done a day zero company, smallest company I’ve ever worked for was 140 people. I know again, and we’d love that that’d be great. And Brian tells a story about how a lot of people say that when you’re starting a company and how few people actually show up. And we just started doing the work together. And it became really natural and got to the point where I was going to start a different company. Brian’s like, we’ve gotten to product market fit. You’ve been here since day one, why don’t you just join us full time and help us scale. And again, we kind of just grew together it was startups are very much about timing. There’s a lot of great people out there. But getting the timing right, like getting alignment. And then the timing right is really tricky. And having grown up in SE, thinking about N v and se in the year 2000 like.com Mania, I wasn’t in sales, but I was just observing the crazy behaviors and like this, this really bananas and being able to play a part in changing the way that software is sold, which is ultimately what I think we’re doing. And that was the thing guard early customers. They weren’t saying that, but that was the signal you were seeing and feeling. That’s the thing that even we didn’t fully understand it in those early days. And it’s just come to light in different ways over the years. And I think there’s so much we’re in the earliest days of this revenue transformation. We’re earliest days at his club go to market movement. So it’s a bit of a longer like, there’s a lot of twists and turns along the way. But that’s maybe like an arc of what that journey looks like.

Vince Menzione  39:46

It strikes me as we think about beginning with the end in mind being that marketplace offer which I like to refer to as a non fungible token really becomes the objectification of bringing all those elements together and changing and Shifting this movement, if you will, shifting this go to market motion across internally within the organization and then across your ecosystem. Yep. So this is a fun question I like to ask just about every guest. John, I know you know about this question because we’ve had Sanjay on and Aaron on the podcast, but you are hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past, to this amazing party. You could even decide where you want to have this great party, whom would you invite? And why?

John Jahnke  40:33

It’s funny when you ask this question. I thought about it a lot. And I actually have two answers. And there’s two distinct answers. And one, I live in Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised my whole family’s around me and my wife’s whole families around us are like, and that’s like, what we live for. And so my first answer would be my mother, my grandmother and my father in law, we’ve all passed on and being able to come together one more time would mean the world to me. So that’s like answer number one, the more business relevant answer, I think, you know, probably, so two of these are very famous people. And one is probably less known. So the first ones, Warren Buffett, I just think, like, such a fat, like such a fascinating story in so many ways, so much wisdom, so humble. And then one of his best friends is Bill Gates, who I also think like the learning arc on Bill Dietz from the journey at Microsoft to being a philanthropist and everything he’s done. So that’s really part two. And part three is somebody Robert Cialdini, who’s a professor at Harvard. And he wrote a book about influence, which I read when I was in grad school. And it’s one of the things that I think most about, just on this career journey of just trying to understand people and understand how they think and why is research really connected with me when I was in grad school, and he’s someone that I’ve always wanted to meet. So those are very cool for two sets of three.

Vince Menzione  42:05

I think we could bring them all together, you know, just have them all the same. Where were you going to host this dinner party, John?

John Jahnke  42:11

Well, it’s funny because I actually talked to my wife about this. And I’m like, because originally I was like my mom, Warren Buffett. And I’m like, my mom wouldn’t want to go let dinner and she’d be like, No, I actually want to spend time with you. And like, maybe bring your sisters like that would that would be

Vince Menzione  42:25

good. Oh, so we’ve met.

John Jahnke  42:29

Yeah, she’d be like, I don’t care about those other guys. Like, it’s so where would we host I mean, honestly, at home, in our backyard, at a table like good people, good food, good. times. I’m a pretty simple, pretty simple, but I love fine things. But at the end of the day, I’d rather a barbecue on good money over fancy food.

Vince Menzione  42:50

And we’re talking about the weather getting nice now. So if you don’t mind, maybe I’ll bring a beverage and come along. I’ve only met one of those people, Bill Gates, and certainly only got to work with him for a short period of time. But Warren Buffett so irrelevant at his age, and do you know the book by Cellini? What is that title, and

John Jahnke  43:08

it’s been republished, it’s a principles of influence, but there’s a lot, there’s a lot of different versions around it. And there’s like seven principles of influence and understanding, like how it really comes down to just like the way people react, and you see these principles and use and especially like, all forms of marketing, like scarcity is a principle of influence. So Taylor Swift tickets right now are the greatest example of scarcity applied, and she’s not really benefiting from that, but the system is benefiting from it. People do unusual things for things they perceive to be scarce, right, like understanding that changes the way you think about them. So it’s that, that those are the liking principles. And other one, like, people want to work with people, they like Linux, in general. And it’s funny, you see it all the time, if someone shows up in a way where they’re like, I don’t know, if I want to be around that person. That person doesn’t give me energy, like so. It’s a fascinating read.

Vince Menzione  44:07

We’re gonna put a link to it in the show notes. I appreciate. Okay, so any last words, calls to action, if you will, for our listeners, many of which are in the ISV community, the independent software, vendor, community SAS community, about optimizing their success, and perhaps engaging with you and your organization.

John Jahnke  44:25

I think, like tackle, we’ve evolved a lot as a company, and we continue to evolve on behalf of our 600 ISVs we support with and that number is growing every day. And I love when Nicolas, like almost call it a boomerang like someone we worked with at one point in time on our journey comes back around because they’re like, Hey, we actually, yeah, we worked together for a little bit. But now, with everything you’re doing, we want to work together a gap. And I think we’ve invested a lot in this idea of services on strategy. and being able to meet customers wherever they are on their journey, and even just to be able to share some expert advice. So that’s a common thing. Like, everybody knows they want to do more. And people aren’t exactly sure how they what the best practices are. And that’s the thing that in this next era, the evolution of tackle our continued growth, we want to be able to share those stories more. And those we try to like club go to market XP, we try to bring the voice of our customers forward is it’s their success that matters, right? But how we help people build their strategy for success. And I’d say, we’re here we’re here to help, like we live, to help sell or sell like, it’s the most fun thing. I’ve got to pee. I feel like I’ve gotten a PhD in the software industry go to market over the last seven years. And that’s been the greatest part of this technology. So we’re here to help. And I’d say, even if that’s just engaging and sharing what’s happening in the industry.

Vince Menzione  46:00

Well, thank you so much, John, I was excited to have you as a guest today. I want to thank you for your time know how precious it is, as CEO of a fast moving organization, a rocket ship, if you will, in this space. So thank you for your time.