Microsoft Inspire Day 1: Digital Transformation

At the core of today's opening Vision Keynote at Microsoft Inspire was simplification - how we make it easier for our partners to do business with us, connect with customers and expand into new markets.

Dedicated to partner success

Ron Huddleston, CVP, Microsoft One Commercial Partner, shared how the team are transforming the way we work to be even more focussed on partner success with one voice as the partner advocate, and one team to help you build your business, go to market and to sell your solutions.

We are investing $250 million to help you better connect with your customers and will now be rewarding our sales teams based on Azure consumed revenue and generating new sales incentives to co-sell with Azure ISVs.

"One team that's not just partner led , it's partner first" - Rob Huddleston, CVP, One Commercial Partner

The introduction of the One Commercial Partner team will really help to simplify the way that you do business with Microsoft so you can focus on your customer success with one organisation and three motions to help you succeed and grow.

Find out more about One Commercial Partner

Supporting customers with digital transformation

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, then came onstage to talk through the Digital Transformation opportunity and what is next for us as a partner ecosystem. Microsoft is a partner-led company and what defines us is how we welcome new partners and help them thrive. Everything that we do at Microsoft, and within the ecosystem, whether that be building products or how we connect with customers, is guided by our mission to empower every person and every organisation to achieve more. To do that, our ethos of being partner-led is essential to enable customer success and to celebrate what they can achieve with technology.

Our opportunity with Digital Transformation is greater than ever before at $4.5 trillion and it's important that we collectively work together to address customer needs by industry. We've simplified our solutions into 4 key areas to align our pillars of digital transformation so that we can better support our customer needs.

As part of the "modern workplace" solution area, we announced the launch of Microsoft 365 which brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility and Security so we can talk in customer terms to help them get the most value from a complete solution.

Microsoft 365 represents a fundamental shift in how we will design, build and go to market to address our customers' needs for a modern workplace. It's a more cohesive approach and reflects the shift our partners and our mutual customers are making - from viewing productivity, security and device management as individual workloads to seeking a comprehensive approach to secure productivity.

We are launching two offerings today: Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business. Microsoft 365 Enterprise is the evolution of our highly successful Secure Productive Enterprise offering and is designed for larger organisations whereas Microsoft 365 Business is designed for small and medium sized businesses, up to 300 users. This is a fantastic step to allow our SMBs to have access to the same tools as a larger organisation and to ensure they aren't subject to limitations of their business apps.

Find out more about Microsoft 365.

We've also integrated Microsoft 365, LinkedIn and Dynamics 365 so that you can transform the way you work with customers - from sales to relationship selling.

An example of how this integration can transform the way that both you and your customers work, is Dynamics 365 for talent which creates a consistent experience across the employee lifeline.

In Dynamics 365 you can set the parameters of a job role and the integration of LinkedIn automatically pulls together a view of potential candidates, which you can then pull into the interview process with the integration of Office 365 allowing you to schedule the interviews.

Hiring managers can then see all the feedback and recommend a candidate for hiring. Once hired, you can then pull together a great onboarding experience using Dynamics 365 for talent.

This is a great example of how technology can really optimise business operations.

"Collaboration is the secret sauce of individual success." - Melissa Arnot Reid, Guide/Athlete/Adventurer

At the centre of today's keynote was collaboration and the importance of working closely together to drive success. For those of you at Microsoft Inspire, this is an incredible opportunity to connect with other partners that can help you expand your offerings to better serve your customers and expand into new markets.

If you're back in the UK, remember to tune in on tomorrow and Wednesday for the other keynotes and stay connected with our UK Partner Twitter channel to ensure you don't miss any key updates.