Microsoft Partner Conference and the Cloud

WPC 2010 Washington DC

This week is Microsoft's Worlwide Partner Conference, also known as WPC 2010, where over 14,000 attendees are in Washington DC learning about Microsoft's strategy for their business partners.

Business partners are organizations like consulting firms, hardware manufacturers that build add-ins for Microsoft products, software utility and application organizations, software licensing organizations, Microsoft product training organizations, etc (commonly called SIs, VARs, OEMs, etc).  Even organizations that are commonly seen as competitors to Microsoft like Symantec, Oracle, etc are big "partners" of Microsoft in that their products are sold to work with Microsoft's "stuff", so a big gathering of all types of organizations attend this annual conference.

The event is one of the largest conferences Microsoft puts on in a year as it brings together all of the organizations that help Microsoft drive sales / product awareness, implementation of Microsoft technologies, etc on a day to day basis.  These partner organizations to Microsoft drive over 80% of Microsoft's business.

The event was kicked off by Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) himself and will have guest speaker, President Bill Clinton, give the keynote later this morning (Weds, July 15th).  Did I say yet that this is a BIG conference for Microsoft...

The focus of many of the keynotes and conference sessions are around Microsoft and the cloud...  No doubt from Steve Ballmer's message earlier this year that Microsoft is "all in" to the cloud, Microsoft is better defining what that means to their partner/sales/support arm how the cloud (and Microsoft's traditional on-premise model) work hand in hand providing customers a choice of either/both traditional on-premise network as well as cloud computing.

I led a session earlier today on the Microsoft Datacenter, which I covered the traditional Windows, Exchange, SharePoint, Forefront security, System Center management, Hyper-V virtualization, etc around selling and business development best practices.  Interestingly, all of the questions in the Q&A section of my session were focused around "the cloud", which clearly identifies that Microsoft partners really are in tune with the cloud messaging...

Questions were things like "if my business has solely focused on selling and support Microsoft servers on-premise, won't the cloud destroy my business model?", with my response being that my organization's experience has been that while we've been doing traditional on-premise consulting implementation and support for the past 20+ years, we jumped into the Microsoft Online Services business 2+ years ago and have found it to be a GREAT supplement to our business.  That customers are looking for "choice", they're looking to understand how the cloud helps them on a day to day basis.  As a consulting firm, we have to speak intelligently about both the traditional on-premise as well as the new cloud stuff, so our adopting "cloud" as an option for our customers has been very strategic.

We can assist our clients make decisions when on-premise still makes sense for them, and when cloud might be a better model given their requirements, needs, and constraints.  Like with any technology, there are pros and cons, and we most certainly aren't recommending the cloud for 100% of our customers for 100% of their application needs.  Cloud, just like traditional server apps of the past, have their specific niche areas of service fulfullment, and if there's a match, then it's the right solution.  We still find on-premise makes sense for a lot of organizations, so it is a very valuable discussion on Cloud vs On-Prem, and something we help our clients understand their options and assist them in making a decision that makes sense for their organization.

So far, the Microsoft WW Partner Conference has been a great venue to understand more about Microsoft's future strategy around the cloud as well as on-premise technologies, I'll post more as the week progresses...

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