Ultimate Partner®

I was pleased to have Warren Wilbe, who leads Microsoft’s U.S. efforts recruiting Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) join my podcast to discuss Microsoft's efforts to recruit software companies to its Azure Cloud. Warren's team of Partner Business Managers work with key ISVs across the United States as part of Microsoft's One Commercial Partner organization, or OCP.

In this episode Warren* and I discuss his teams focus, how he gauges success, how partners can engage with he and the team, and what makes a great partner.

If you are an ISV that is a Microsoft Partner or want to learn how to become one - you will find this episode of particular interest.

* Books Warren has  read or gifted often - Phule's Company - Robert Asprin. 

* How to reach Warren - [email protected]

*About Warren - Prior to joining Microsoft, Warren spent 18 years working as a technical leader and architect across the U.S. and Canada with various ISVs, primarily software companies focused on providing ERP Solutions.

Warren lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and five children. When he isn’t enjoying time with his family or exploring technology, you’ll probably find him reading science fiction/fantasy or cruising on one of his motorcycles.

You can listen to the podcast or view the trascript below. You can also find Ultimate Guide to Partnering on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.

As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach out to me on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or on email at [email protected]. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the rating link. This helps others find the podcast.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Cloud Wave Partners.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW

Warren. Welcome to the podcast.

Warren Wilbee:              Hey Vince. Thanks for having me on.

Vince:                               It is great to have you on. You lead a team focused on helping independent software vendors, ISV's, and are very focused on recruiting great companies to the Microsoft as your platform. I'm excited to have you join today to tell our listeners about your business,

This episode of the podcast focuses on the role of channel marketing to help many of our listeners accelerate growth and scale their businesses.

In this episode of the podcast, my interview guest is Mike Moore, a seasoned Channel Marketing executive whom I had the opportunity to work with at Microsoft. Mike has spent twenty-three years in the IT channel as a channel partner and as a channel and field marketer for software companies like Microsoft, GE Healthcare, and Progress Software. 

Today, Mike serves as the VP of Channel Strategy at Averetek. Averetek offers channel marketing automation software, delivered in the cloud/SaaS, that has been used by more than 70,000 channel partners in 21 languages across 260 countries to generate more than $600M in partner pipeline.

In this episode, Mike joins me to discuss his company, the role of Channel Marketing, his career journey, and his new book "Marketing Multiplied: A real-world guide to Channel Marketing for beginners, practitioners, and executives" which he coauthored with Averetek CEO Peter A. Thomas.

Marketing Multiplied is a comprehensive guide to indirect channel marketing. Building on more than forty years of combined experience, Mike Moore and Peter Thomas explore topics such as how best to engage channel partners, how to create programs that generate outcomes, how to develop the right mix of content, recruiting and hiring talented people, and how to provide meaningful incentives to your channel partners that motivate them to deliver results.

Whether you’re new to the field, or a seasoned executive looking for fresh ideas, Marketing Multiplied uncovers the channel marketing concepts and tactics that will kick your channel into high growth.

* You can get the book here. 

* Connect with Mike on LinkedIn or Twitter.

* To learn more about Averetek:  https://www.averetek.com/

* You can read the transcript of the interview below.

You can listen to the podcast here or on iTunes, SoundCloud,

Like many of my colleagues in the technology sector, I've been incredibly excited to witness this amazing time in technology - driven by the advancement of cloud technologies and platforms, the aggregation of big data and advances in AI, machine learning, IoT and the like. The future promises to be incredibly bright.

If you’ve been paying attention to recent headlines as I have, I’m sure you’ve become increasingly concerned by some dark clouds that shed a negative light on technology's unintended consequences and misuse to enable malicious behavior, cyber terrorism, and cybercrime. The New York Times recently referred to the current time as a "Second Inning".

I believe that technology organizations and technology leaders have an opportunity, and potentially an obligation to inform and educate lawmakers so they better understand both the potential for good and the possible threats. My belief is rooted in what I’ve seen first-hand in my work and advocacy. I was recently reminded of this importance on a trip last month to Washington, DC and a series of conversations with technology leaders from Microsoft, elected officials and technology partners who met at our Nation's Capital in an effort to harness technology for a greater good.

This most recent episode of my podcast, Ultimate Guide to Partnering is a first-hand report back from this field visit on my findings. In this episode you will learn about a framework developed by Microsoft - A Cloud for Global Good, outlining a series of initiatives and recommendations around a cloud that is trusted, responsible cloud and inclusive. You will also learn about an organization featured in Episode 6,  Voices for Innovation that works to inform legislative officials of key policy matters that shape the future of technology. In addition, I spend time with a Microsoft partner, learning first-hand about her recent experience visiting with lawmakers.

My interview guests include two technology policy leaders, Jonathan Friebert and Owen Larter, who discuss Microsoft's commitment to this framework and how technology organizations can get involved. And the Microsoft partner is Carol-Lynn Grow from LawToolBox.com, who shares why these issues matter to her and how her involvement has impacted the work she does as technology business leader in Denver, Colorado.

If you'd like to learn more or get involved to ensure the technology we create and advance ultimately serves the greater good, then please join me to stay informed. There are links below to learn more about the framework and the book, A Cloud For Global Good as well as links to learn more about Voices for Innovation.

Important Links:

* A Cloud for Global Good - https://news.microsoft.com/cloudforgood/

* Owen Lartner Email -  [email protected]

* Voices for Innovation - https://www.voicesforinnovation.org/

* LawToolBox.Com - http://www.lawtoolbox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's been about 8 months since the new OCP organization and design was rolled out at Microsoft Inspire. I asked Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's  "Channel Chief", to come to the podcast and share with our listeners her thoughts on what's been going well thus far and where she sees the opportunities for continued growth and improvement in the Microsoft Partner business.

My questions for Gavriella focused on the state of the partner business, what's she seeing during this amazing transformation, what in store for all of the attendees this year at Microsoft Inspire, leadership lessons from her career, and her interaction with Satya Nadella.

 Q: I've heard positive feedback from both interview guests at Microsoft and partners regarding the change in transformation, but change is not easy. Based on the feedback you've received, and I know you just recently returned from an overseas trip where you met with partners, if you could go back to last year, is there anything that you would have done differently when you were planning the new OCP model?

Gavriella:           That's a great question, Vince. I mean I say that this is such a significant change in how we've approached partnerships and basically with the changes we've made really tied to our whole sales model, how we've approached customers that we knew that there were really going to be areas that would be revealed after we rolled out the model and I would say that the things that I would have changed in doing a Monday Morning Quarterback is more communications, more frequently to drive clarity with our field teams and with our sales teams. Because this was such a significant change, it's taken awhile for people to really internalize and understand what their new role is and all of the tools and the resources that we've made available to them. I think I would've spent more time out in the field with each of the teams and then really driving cross team collaboration between our enterprise sales teams and our partner teams because we give that a little bit later when we saw some of the seams between roles. I would have done it earlier.

Vince: You bring up a really great point. I started this podcast because I believed from my talks at Microsoft and Partners that Microsoft needs to scale this message more broadly and we have a growing set of partners in the ecosystem and partners need to stay in greater lockstep through all the change.

Q: What steps are you thinking in terms of how to better scale programs and resources so that partners can stay better connected during all of this change and transformation?

Gavriella:           One of my key learnings is the first thing we need to do is make sure we simplify because when we have a simpler program or simpler sets of engagement, simpler tools, it is easier for people to engage on it and understand it. It's more intuitive so we need to continue to derive for simplicity and eliminate the noise. There are always so many things that we want to do. I think we tend to put too much into the market at the same time. So that's one thing is to clear the noise. I think the second thing is just to have communication all the time in an ongoing business through blogs, through ongoing emails out to our partners and then we have a lot of webcasts and calls and constant conversations with our field. One of the things that we've put in place since we started this change in July is regional business leads and those regional business leads are part of my team, but they actually live out in the regions and we do ... they sit in every single one of our meetings in corporate, but then their job is to help us land that both with the partners locally as well as with our field.

Q: What are the one or two things you believe the changes have had the most positive impact on the business and for partners?

Welcome to the 42nd episode of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Josh Waldo, the Chief Customer Officer for Nintex, a Global Leader in the Business Process automation market.

Josh brings more than 20 years of experience leading partner strategy, partner marketing, product marketing and customer advocacy to Nintex. Prior to joining Nintex, Josh held a number of channel leadership positions at Microsoft during his nearly 10-year tenure there, including a role as the senior director of the Global Cloud Partner strategy where he helped the company transition partners to the cloud.

Josh and I both worked at Microsoft and on Episode 33 my Guest Toby Richards referenced Nintex as a great example of a Microsoft partner that had mastered partner to partner engagement building out its own channel as many of Nintexs partners closely align as Microsoft managed partners.

In this episode, Josh and I discuss Nintexs value proposition for customers, use Case examples and market sectors they serve,  how he thinks about his channel strategy, how the technology integrated with Microsoft, what he looks for in partners and his career journey.

In this interview episode you will learn:

* What is Business Process Automation, key customers, markets, use cases and case study examples.

* How the company got started and how it has evolved with the shift to the cloud.

* The Nintex Partner Program and what he looks for in partners.

* How Nintex drives O365 utilization and Azure consumption and opportunities for growth.

* Advice for companies looking to partner with Nintex.

* Why it's important to be focused in the line of business.

* "Top 10 do’s and do not’s to partnering with other partners".

* Career insights - early career, insights moving from Microsoft to Nintex, best career advice given and received.

You can listen to the podcast here or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.

As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach me on Linked In or on email at [email protected]. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the ...

Welcome to the 41st episode of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering, I can't believe it's been almost a year since I started this podcast.

During my first 40th episodes as a podcast host, I’ve had the unique privilege of interviewing scores of leaders in the technology industry during this amazing transformation. I want to thank each of them for taking the time to be part of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering.

I started my podcast to share my experiences building partnerships and channels that ultimately transformed businesses. Rather than write a book that would have been outdated by the time it was completed, the podcast created an opportunity to interview leaders and document rapidly evolving and transforming technology trends.

This year has been an amazing time in technology, precipitated by the movement of business applications to the cloud, the rapid aggregation of data, driven by this movement and the development of tools in the realm of AI, Machine Learning and the like to harness the power of this vast aggregation to improve outcomes in business, in health, in education and in many other areas that ultimately promise to improve the human condition.

When I started I didn’t see it coming. This was supposed to be a podcast on the art and science of partnering, but what it’s turned into is a real-time chronicle of the widespread digital revolution happening across every sector empowered by data and the cloud's ability to make business applications ubiquitous. Entire industry sectors are being democratized because they now have access to capabilities and data like no other time in history.

My interview guests have been the leaders driving the change. Business executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce and VMWare and their technology partners have taken their platforms and tools and made them palatable to a host of clients and industries.

Based on my discussions and interviews, these hyper-scale organizations did not expect this revolution to happen as fast as it has, and neither did their technology partners. One organization focused strictly on migrating data centers and applications to the cloud was responsible for sun setting and migrating 167 data centers alone in 2017. Another premier partner to the technology giants has grown to over $100 million in annual revenue this past year. The amount of progress is astounding and yet, we are still at the very beginning of this adoption cycle with only perhaps 6 or 7 percent of the world data and applications currently in the cloud. The future looks incredibly bright.

During my pause, I recently scanned my 40 episodes. My interview guests did an amazing job sharing transformational strategies, technology trends, leadership advice and lessons on the art and science of partnering. It's a pretty decent compilation for technology professionals looking to stay current on the market forces, industry advances, and partner strategies at companies like Microsoft, with a little Google, Amazon, VM Ware and SalesForce thrown in for good measure. You can access the full list of episodes here - http://bit.ly/2DOrzch

In episode 34, I interviewed Jason Rook. Jason is the Vice President of Market Development for 10th Magnitude, an early Born in the Cloud Partner and Microsoft chose 10th as its 2017 Partner of the Year for Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud. Jason was an early guest on Episode 13, Anatomy of a born in the cloud partner, Jason Rook. http://bit.ly/2BuUNIW

In our most recent discussion,

For my very first interview episode with Amazon Web Services (AWS) I was pleased to welcome to the Podcast Dan Kasun, a former colleague, who leads the ISV Strategy for AWS' Worldwide Public Sector Business.

Dan and I met and discussed how his team is organized, what makes the AWS core value proposition unique for partners, the company's culture, how he thinks about great partnerships and his career journey.

His team works with solution providers that develop finished applications for government, education, and nonprofits. We discuss how his team engages with these organization on business and technical enablement.

We discuss why partners chose AWS the sheer scale of their infrastructure high availability and redundancy and the vast array of services AWS offers to partners and customers.

Most customers are choosing a multi-cloud strategy today, so this episode should be particularly helpful and interesting to any technology organization or partner considering this approach.

Some  highlights from the interview include:

* Dan takes our listeners through how Amazon's core set of leadership principles guide his business and partner engagement. You can access them HERE.

* How partners select and engage with AWS, how his team recruits partners and why they always need more partners to satisfy the demand for cloud and SAAS based solutions.

* What makes a great AWS partner - leadership, clarity of vision, high-quality technical talent, effective sales and marketing, high bias for action, experience in the industry, trustworthy and credibility - these are some of the traits we discussed.

* How his team facilitates cross partner engagement and is organized to foster it.

* Common myths working with AWS.

* Partners that have failed, why and what he would say to them now.

* Advice for partners looking to work with his organization.

* As with each of my episodes, Dan shares his career journey as a computer programmer and engineer and how that led to this spot in his career.

* Best piece of advice he received when he joined AWS.

* Quote he lives by and thinks of often - "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has", by Margaret Mead

* Book he's gifted often - "Most likely to succeed", By Tony Wagner.

* How to reach Dan - [email protected]

You can listen to the podcast here or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.

As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach me on Linked In or on email at [email protected]. You can also review this podcast by going to 

I was delighted to have Eduardo Kassner, the leader of the WW One Commercial Partner (OCP) Strategy and Innovation Team, join the podcast for a lively discussion. In this episode, we discuss the fundamentals of innovation for partners to transform and how he and his team address the key areas where partners need the most support, guidance, and enablement.

Eduardo brings a rich set of business, technical and leadership experiences to this role. His deep background as a cloud business leader lends itself to a  deep discussion on the fundamentals for success.

It’s a rich business and technical discussion and points to the work he and Microsoft are doing to enable the partner ecosystem to accelerate and push through the change. Eduardo brings a wealth of resources, highlighting links available to help partners innovate and transform.

In this interview, we address four fundamental focus areas:

* The Skills Gap - helping partners understand and address the skills gap, including how to locate, identify, attract, hire, onboard and retain talent. Change is happening so fast, how do you stay current? Check out Eduardo's Blog Post on the topic HERE.

* Practice Development - how partners can develop the right practices to grow and optimize their businesses. We share a link HERE to the Practice Development Playbooks with more details.

* Marketing / Selling - how partners can build a reputation and differentiate themselves in the market, find the next area of opportunity, build on it, and co-sell with Microsoft. Read more HERE.

* Profitability - how partners can achieve and maintain profitable in this new digital age. Read more HERE.

In addition, Eduardo and I discuss how his team is working to evolve Microsoft Competencies to make them more relevant, measurable and deliverable to joint customer satisfaction. Its a continuation of a discussion from Episode #33 with Toby Richards. In addition, we discuss his book “Enterprise Cloud Strategy” with former Microsoft CTO Barry Briggs, which explores the why what and how of an "enterprise-class" IT environment. Eduardo also shares his career journey and how it prepared him for this unique role.

Listeners and readers will find the following links from Eduardo valuable:

* Ebook blog https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategy-2nd-edition/

* Ebook link h...

I was thrilled to welcome to the podcast Margo Day, Microsoft's Vice President of US Education since 2012 and no stranger to the channel. Margo leads Microsoft's largest business focused on this segment and was Microsoft's US Channel Chief for 5 years from 2001 to 2006.

In this episode, Margo shares with our listeners the US Education business, Microsoft’s focus on outcomes, how she thinks about partners in her business and her career journey.

Margo's enthusiasm and passion for education and empowerment are contagious and come through in this interview. Her business role and her life work are both closely aligned with Microsoft's mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Toward the very end of our interview, Margo shares her personal story of the incredible and selfless work she does in collaboration with World Vision to make a difference in the lives of girls in Kenya. That work has been game-changing and has created new opportunities for thousands of girls whose only other path was Female Genital Mutilation and early marriage. Here's a link to Margo's personal blog about this work*.

In addition, in this interview you will learn:

* Skills and competencies critical to success in preparing for the jobs of tomorrow - excellent communications skills, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and traits such as character and citizenship.

* What Microsoft is doing to help students use the tools of tomorrow in the learning of today.

*  How Minecraft with Code Builder is being used in Education to develop computer coding skills and understand big data.

* Hacking Stem and how it is making learning experiential - data, coding, engineering students can see and visualize data examples in lessons plans to help democratize STEM and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math).

* How Microsoft tools in the classroom like One Note, Microsoft Learning tools, and Translator are helping students acquire skills to compete.

* How institutions are thinking about cost and optimizing operations by shifting their data centers to the cloud and how cloud tools can improve operations and create new scenarios by leveraging predictive analytics.

* Managing the campus - how ISV applications can greatly improve business operations leveraging IP that's been developed for other customers outside of Education.

* Security and developing an Identity Based Security Model

* What's she is seeing in the transformation that she didn't expect to see a year ago.

* The work in research and how Research Institutions are using big data to do breathtaking work.

* Where should Microsoft partners invest in 2018?

* What characteristics make a great partner?

* Top challenges organizations in technology face today?

* How Margo got started in technology.

* How to reach Margo Day -