Tag: Recent News

The Microsoft Partner Network is comprised of more than 400,000 global organizations and these partners are essential to how Microsoft delivers innovative products and services to customers around the world. This deep relationship between Microsoft and our partners spans more than 30 years, and in that time frame our partners have provided unique solutions across numerous industries, helping countless customers succeed in an ever-changing world. They especially have played a pivotal role in helping businesses adapt amidst the pandemic. As things continue to change and evolve, we are committed to investing in and delivering what partners need to innovate, grow their businesses and deliver on the promise of digital transformation for customers across organizations and industries.

To continue enabling partners — and by extension their customers — for success, we are focused on three major commitment areas:

• Strengthening our digital capability. We are providing well-defined guidelines and resources for partners across our digital experiences to navigate building solutions more effortlessly, going-to-market, and selling with Microsoft. By aligning partner experiences across the commercial marketplace, Partner Center, and the Microsoft Partner Network, we’re making it easier for everyone to engage and collaborate.
• Deepening partner technical capabilities. Equipping partners to better meet customer needs by investing in and accelerating our joint capability. We’re supporting partners on their readiness journeys by helping them gain advanced specializations and deep technical training across solution areas including business applications, Azure and security, compliance and identity. We’ve specifically committed to a 250% year-over-year (YOY) increase in spending in this area.
• Streamlining engagement between Microsoft and our partners. We are sharing more opportunities and enhancing the commercial marketplace as well as Partner Center, making it easier for partners to engage with us and drive profitability. In July 2021, for example, we lowered our marketplace transaction fee from 20% to 3% . Through these reductions, partners can invest even more deeply in their own growth plans.

The next step

Today, as a part of our investment in the cloud as a strategic lever for innovation and growth, and as a reflection of our continued commitment to partners, we are announcing that effective October 2022, we are changing the name of our partner program from “Microsoft Partner Network” to the “Microsoft Cloud Partner Program.”

This announcement is about more than a name; this change better reflects the enormous and ongoing transition of business operations to the cloud, and how Microsoft intends to support partners in the future. It aligns our partners’ go-to-market motions with the way customers buy today.

The Microsoft Cloud Partner Program is for all partners in our ecosystem, whether they build and sell services, software solutions or devices, and is focused on proficiency in six solution areas aligned with the Microsoft Cloud:

• Data & AI (Azure)
• Infrastructure (Azure)
• Digital & App Innovation (Azure)
• Business Applications
• Modern Work
• Security

We’re also evolving the way we categorize partner capability and measure success. To help customers better understand a partner’s capabilities, we’re offering two qualifying levels:

• The solutions partner level is a designation that is based on meeting specific requirements across what we call the partner capability score (see below) for each solution area.
• Specializations and expert programs will give solutions partners a way to differentiate their organizations and demonstrate deep technical expertise and experience in specific technical scenarios under each solution area.

These two designations clearly and immediately validate a partner’s capability to meet specific and evolving customer requirements and give customers an easier way to identify partners with technical capabilities, knowledge and a history of delivering innovative solutions in specific areas. They also provide a road map for helping build partner capability and guiding the way we invest in partners.

Investment in partner growth and success requires a robust, objective measurement of progress against a partner’s chosen solution areas. As noted above, to quantify that progress, we’ve developed the partner capability score, a holistic framework for measuring partner performance, skilling and customer success. The partner capability score evaluates a partner based on their certifications, added customers, successful deployments and overall growth.

To attain a solutions partner designation, partners will need to earn a partner capability score of at least 70 points (out of an available 100 points) across the four measurement areas. Starting today, all partners can access their dashboard in the Partner Center to see their progress toward a solutions partner designation.

Time to transition

We know change can take time, so we’re approaching the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program launch with considerable support for our partners, as well as ample time for them to adjust. The full timeline of changes can be found at this link.

Beyond gaining access to the previously mentioned dashboard, there are no immediate changes for partners. And prior to October 2022, there will be no impact to partners’ business or program status — including anniversary dates — and no reduction in benefits.

In fact, we are investing more in our benefits program to ensure that every partner has a chance to participate in the opportunity to grow and accelerate. We’re updating benefits to ensure that:

• Partners will be able to renew the benefits they’re currently using, while also taking advantage of new benefits packages customized to meet their unique needs based on their business focus.
• Partners will continue to receive internal use rights licenses (IURs), including on-premises licenses, cloud service subscriptions and Azure credits, although IURs will be now called “Product Benefits.”
• No partner’s incentive eligibility will change in the 2023 investments and incentives program year, which runs from October 2022 to September 2023.

During this time, we’ll also continue to recognize partner commitment and growth with programmatic incentives as part of our Microsoft Commercial Incentives program.

Accelerating partner growth

Customer needs are constantly evolving, which is why we are announcing this evolution now and preparing for the changes it will bring.

We’re excited to take this next step in the evolution of our ecosystem — putting customer value at the center of our continued partner investment. Visit the Microsoft partner website for more details about the announcement and what our partners and customers can expect.

Tags: Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, partners

When the final gavel came down on the 2022 Washington legislative session, lawmakers had made significant progress on issues vital to Washington’s future, taking the steps to satisfy our state’s immediate needs due to the pandemic while also dedicating efforts to long-term and foundational actions critical for Washington’s ongoing health and resilience. Lawmakers made significant investments in transportation, housing and education, but beyond the absolute size of those investments, they tackled these problems in new and innovative ways.

As the session began, Microsoft detailed its priorities for the 2022 legislative session. Two months later, we would like to highlight some of the significant actions taken on a number of these priorities, and how legislators’ actions represent an innovative, future-oriented perspective.

The commitment to make significant, additional investments in the state’s transportation infrastructure is a prime example. Included in the 16-year, nearly $17 billion transportation package was important funding to move forward with development of high-speed rail in the Cascadia region. There is $4 million to support continued planning for the system, including key issues like financing, governance and public engagement. There is also another $150 million to provide the state’s match to compete for federal funding intended to advance high-speed ground transportation projects such as Cascadia. This project will be a game-changer for generations to come, and Microsoft continues to be a strong proponent of the high-speed rail opportunity. We thank Senator Marko Liias for his leadership in championing the project in the legislature and Governor Inslee for his long-term support.

These investments will help move the high-speed rail concept forward from planning to a project development phase. The ability to reduce travel times between Vancouver, BC, Seattle and Portland will enable increased collaboration and innovation, expand job prospects, support access to more affordable housing, provide a climate-friendlier transportation alternative, and position the Pacific Northwest to assume a more prominent position in the global economy.

Transportation infrastructure has always been critical for economic growth and quality of life, and the rest of the package provides substantial funding to address safety, maintenance, and repair of our existing facilities, as well as important projects around the state. It reflects a lower-emissions vision of our transportation system, with significant new funding for transit services, ferries, busses, and bicycle and pedestrian trails. In 2021, Microsoft supported the Climate Commitment Act, which established a cap on carbon emissions and a revenue source for clean transportation. The resulting transportation plan utilizes those funds and, in so doing, realizes that vision for the first time and helps ensure that we can make progress with our sustainability and transportation goals through this meaningful approach.

Taken together, these crucial building blocks will pay many dividends: enabling workers to reach their jobs more easily; facilitating movement of materials and products around the region and across the state; and reducing congestion and the excess emissions it creates. Thank you to Transportation Committee Chairs Representative Jake Fey and Senator Marko Liias for their terrific leadership in assembling this groundbreaking package.

Just as transportation funding provided a major win for the people of Washington, we can also point to the legislature’s significant investments in addressing the state’s ongoing housing affordability and homelessness crises. Lawmakers took advantage of a healthy state budget and a strong revenue forecast to take bold action and set us on a course toward a future in which more people in our community have a stable place to call home.

The legislature committed more than $500 million in the capital budget to help reduce homelessness and provide affordable housing, including investments to rapidly acquire housing and shelter facilities, expand the state’s Housing Trust Fund, create crisis stabilization facilities and integrate housing and support services. Additionally, more than $200 million was appropriated in the supplemental operating budget for the remainder of this biennium to fund additional outreach and services to those experiencing chronic homelessness. This combination of facilities and services is critically important, as it enhances the prospects for successfully helping those experiencing chronic homelessness.

While the state is providing new resources, local initiatives are also underway to help solve the problem. Microsoft joined other business, government and community leaders in recognizing that a full return to a healthier economy and community can’t be achieved while so many of our neighbors are unhoused. As a part of the House Washington coalition, we urged lawmakers to prioritize affordable housing during the legislative session.

Microsoft also joined the Ballmer Group, Amazon, Starbucks and other local public, private and philanthropic partners to provide $10 million in seed funding for a new regional initiative called Partnership for Zero. This initiative will support the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in its efforts to dramatically reduce unsheltered homelessness in Seattle and King County. Innovative partnerships like this show our region’s ability to unite around shared goals. By continuing to work together, we can make housing more affordable and accessible for everyone, including those currently living in unsheltered or unsafe conditions.

These partnerships are all steps in the company’s ongoing commitment to finding workable affordable housing solutions, a commitment that includes Microsoft’s $750M Affordable Housing Initiative. The Initiative has already allocated $583 million towards the preservation and creation of approximately 9,200 housing units in the Puget Sound region.

The legislature also made investments in education to create greater opportunities for students and jobseekers. Thanks to the leadership of House College and Workforce Development Committee Chair Representative Vandana Slatter, the legislature made college more affordable and accessible by providing bridge grants to eligible Washington College Grant recipients to cover expenses beyond tuition and fees, such as transportation and books. They revised provisions of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship to make it an option for more students, and provided state matching funds for these scholarships and the program’s Rural Jobs Initiative. Finally, the legislature increased capacity for high-demand degrees in fields like cybersecurity and computer science for students throughout the state. Taken together, all these moves help more Washington students acquire the skills they need for rewarding careers with Washington employers.

The 2022 legislative session was pivotal in Washington state’s ongoing effort to create a more accessible, equitable and prosperous region for everyone who lives here. Microsoft will continue working with our elected leaders and other stakeholders on these and other pressing needs, like the creation of a workable data privacy statute that provides strong protections to consumers while not stifling innovation by local employers.

Washington is poised for a bright future, but we must continue working together to ensure that all Washingtonians benefit from the prosperity that our state achieves. We look forward to remaining an active contributor in that process.

Tags: affordable housing, Affordable Housing Initiative, Cascadia Corridor, education, Puget Sound region, sustainability, transportation, Washington state

Five years ago, today – March 14, 2017 – marked an exciting milestone for our customers, partners, and employees with the general availability of Microsoft Teams. We started with a unique point-of-view learning from Microsoft’s experience building communication and collaboration tools and from customer feedback on our products and those across the industry. Brian MacDonald and a small, passionate team started with an internal hackathon project and created a new application building on cloud services across Microsoft. As the project evolved to where groups could use it all day long for their work, the team iterated quickly based on feedback – first from inside Microsoft and then with customers and partners in 2016. Every hour around the world data and insights from customers of all sizes flowed into the product development team – all using channels, meetings, and documents in Teams of course – to help us drive to make the product better. And still does to this day. Teams transformed how we work to help you transform how you work.

Even in the first few months after release, it was clear the unique combination of async and sync collaboration in a single product was resonating. Over twenty million people used Microsoft Teams daily in the first two years, which was unprecedented for business software at the time. I was excited about Brian’s vision and partnered with him and the Teams leaders closely during this intense start-up phase. We worked to blend communications and content collaboration more seamlessly than ever before. We exposed an application model for partners to build workflows and solutions where users were spending time to simplify business processes. We embraced the community who had come with us to the cloud in Microsoft 365 as Teams became the hero application connecting the Microsoft Cloud. When Brian announced his retirement in January 2020, I was flattered to take on leadership for Microsoft Teams and evolve the communications and content management capabilities in Teams + SharePoint together into an even better platform for work. The Teams leadership has scaled well, and Brian continues to be a source of numerous great product ideas.

In March 2020, we all faced the crisis of a global pandemic. Across Microsoft, we were humbled by the challenges and uncertainty. We moved as fast – scaling to millions of cores from Azure to support the Teams services, adding dozens of features to improve our meetings experiences, and iterating with numerous stakeholders on our guidance for remote work. In the first three months after COVID-19, the Teams product team met with over 900 customers to hear their experiences and feedback. The team worked tirelessly on security, reliability, scalability, performance, and functionality. It has been a privilege in an unexpected time for the world to deliver a solution that would help schools, hospitals, governments, businesses, and more continue their mission at a vital time. The work customers did to support their colleagues and organizations and our product team did to support them inspires me to be curious, learn, and make the experience even better every day. During this time, Microsoft Teams grew 10X and we recently announced we have reached 270 million monthly active users. Consistent with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization on the planet, we recently introduced tailored versions of Microsoft Teams for personal use with Windows 11 and for very small businesses with Teams Essentials. Thank you for the bet you made on us during this critical period. We don’t take it for granted. I am incredibly excited about the pipeline we have for Microsoft Teams – from simplicity and performance improvements to new ways to work across organizations with Teams Connect to innovative new experience built on Teams like Microsoft Viva and Microsoft Mesh and much more. Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.

Together mode

I want to close with a special thank you and call-to-action to our community – spanning customers, partners, and MVPs. You have inspired us to do our best work. Your feedback shapes our priorities – from meeting layouts to platform features to admin controls and more – in every part and every level of the Microsoft Teams organization. So today, as we celebrate the 5th anniversary of the general availability of Microsoft Teams, we want to pause and say, “Thank you!”. You have bet your productivity, organizations, and careers on us – and we’re humbled by this. Together, as I’ve said many times before, you network and learn from each other as we strive to make Microsoft 365 the best community in technology. Thank you for betting on us and your continued feedback and support of each other.

Learn more about how Microsoft Teams transformed our employee experience via this Inside Track post from Keshav Puttaswamy and Claire Sisson from Microsoft Digital.

Twitter: @Microsoft365, @MicrosoftTeams, and @MSFTAdoption.

For children born blind, social interaction can be particularly challenging. A child may have difficulty aiming their voice at the person they’re talking to and put their head on their desk instead. Linguistically advanced young people may struggle with maintaining a topic of conversation, talking only about something of interest to them. Most noticeably, many children and young people who are blind struggle with engaging and befriending those in their age group despite a strong desire to do so. This is often deeply frustrating for the child or young person and can be equally so for their support network of family members and teachers who want to help them forge these important connections.

The PeopleLens is a new research technology that we’ve created to help young people who are blind (referred to as learners in our work) and their peers interact more easily. A head-worn device, the PeopleLens reads aloud in spatialized audio the names of known individuals when the learner looks at them. That means the sound comes from the direction of the person, assisting the learner in understanding both the relative position and distance of their peers. The PeopleLens helps learners build a People Map, a mental map of those around them needed to effectively signal communicative intent. The technology, in turn, indicates to the learner’s peers when the peers have been “seen” and can interact—a replacement for the eye contact that usually initiates interaction between people.

For children and young people who are blind, the PeopleLens is a way to find their friends; however, for teachers and parents, it’s a way for these children and young people to develop competence and confidence in social interaction. An accompanying scheme of work aims to guide the development of spatial attention skills believed to underpin social interaction through a series of games that learners using the PeopleLens can play with peers. It also sets up situations in which learners can experience agency in social interaction. A child’s realization that they can choose to initiate a conversation because they spot someone first or that they can stop a talkative brother from speaking by looking away is a powerful moment, motivating them to delve deeper into directing their own and others’ attention.

The PeopleLens is an advanced research prototype that works on Nreal Light augmented reality glasses tethered to a phone. While it’s not available for purchase, we are recruiting learners in the United Kingdom aged 5 to 11 who have the support of a teacher to explore the technology as part of a multistage research study. For the study, led by the University of Bristol, learners will be asked to use the PeopleLens for a three-month period beginning in September 2022. For more information, visit the research study information page. 

Research foundation 

The scheme of work, coauthored by collaborators Professor Linda Pring and Dr. Vasiliki Kladouchou, draws on research and practice from psychology and speech and language therapy in providing activities to do with the technology. The PeopleLens builds on the hypothesis that many social interaction difficulties for children who are blind stem from differences in the ways children with and without vision acquire fundamental attentional processes as babies and young children. For example, growing up, children with vision learn to internalize a joint visual dialogue of attention. A young child points at something in the sky, and the parent says, “Bird.” Through these dialogues, young children learn how to direct the attention of others. However, there isn’t enough research to understand how joint attention manifests in children who are blind. A review of the literature suggests that most research doesn’t account for a missing sense and that research specific to visual impairment doesn’t provide a framework for joint attention beyond the age of 3. We’re carrying out research to better understand how the development of joint attention can be improved in early education and augmented with technology.

How does the PeopleLens work? 

The PeopleLens is a sophisticated AI prototype system that is intended to provide people who are blind or have low vision with a better understanding of their immediate social environment. It uses a head-mounted augmented reality device in combination with four state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms to continuously locate, identify, track, and capture the gaze directions of people in the vicinity. It then presents this information to the wearer through spatialized audio—sound that comes from the direction of the person. The real-time nature of the system gives a sense of immersion in the People Map.

The PeopleLens is a ground-breaking technology that has also been designed to protect privacy. Among the algorithms underpinning the system is facial recognition of people who’ve been registered in the system. A person registers by taking several photographs of themselves with the phone attached to the PeopleLens. Photographs aren’t stored, instead converted into a vector of numbers that represent a face. These differ from any vectors used in other systems, so recognition by the PeopleLens doesn’t lead to recognition by any other system. No video or identifying information is captured by the system, ensuring that the images can’t be maliciously used.

The system employs a series of sounds to assist the wearer in placing people in the surrounding space: A percussive bump indicates when their gaze has crossed a person up to 10 meters away. The bump is followed by the person’s name if the person is registered in the system, is within 4 meters of the wearer, and both the person’s ears can be detected. The sound of woodblocks guides the wearer in finding and centering the face of a person the system has seen for 1 second but hasn’t identified, changing in pitch to help the wearer adjust their gaze accordingly. (Those people who are unregistered are acknowledged with a click sound.) Gaze notification can alert the wearer to when they’re being looked at. 

Community collaboration

The success of the PeopleLens, as well as systems like it, is dependent on a prototyping process that includes close collaboration with the people it is intended to serve. Our work with children who are blind and their support systems has put us on a path toward building a tool that can have practical value and empower those using it. We encourage those interested in the PeopleLens to reach out about participating in our study and help us further evolve the technology. 

To learn more about the PeopleLens and its development, check out the Innovation Stories blog about the technology.

Companies building cloud solutions (such as independent software vendors (ISVs), SaaS providers, app builders, and more)—have never been more important to the world today.

With the continued acceleration of digital transformation, every organization, small or large, in every industry across the globe, will require cloud infrastructure and services to power their business. As customers’ needs for cloud solutions exponentially increase, so do the opportunities for ISVs to connect with partners and customers across the Microsoft Cloud and the commercial marketplace. To help our ecosystem harness these opportunities, we are announcing:

• Private offers with margin sharing to motivate 90,000-plus cloud partners: Now generally available, ISVs can use the private offer capability in the commercial marketplace to create and share margins to partners in the Cloud Solution Provider program—creating new sales channels instantly.
• Increased agility with private offers for customers: With enhancements to private offers in the commercial marketplace, ISVs can now create a unique private offer per customer in less than 15 minutes. This helps ISVs unlock enterprise customers for seven-digit deals and sell directly to customers with a cloud consumption commitment (if the ISV solution is eligible for Azure IP co-sell).

For Microsoft, the commercial marketplace is the connector between ISVs and customers—it’s an engine dedicated to accelerating growth. By selling through the commercial marketplace, ISVs get instant access to global reach: 1 billion people that use Microsoft technology, 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies who use Microsoft Azure, and 270M monthly active users on Microsoft Teams. 

Shifts in business-to-business (B2B) buying

Before COVID-19, customers in both B2C and B2B environments already expressed a preference for digital commerce experiences, COVID-19 only accelerated digital adoption—digital-first selling is here to stay.

Harvard Business Review¹ recently surveyed 1,000 B2B buyers. 43 percent of those surveyed would prefer a purely digital experience for all sales. When the data was cut by generation, 29 percent of Baby Boomers preferred digital experiences in B2B buying and 54 percent of millennials had the same sentiment. Considering ten years from now, the channels we use for B2B buying today will be obsolete or a least forever transformed. Commercial marketplaces deliver on digital-first. Through B2B marketplaces, customers get a trusted buying experience that simplifies the purchase and deployment while helping customers optimize costs with pre-committed cloud spend.

Private offers to scale and motivate 90K-plus cloud partners

The ISV margin sharing to partners in the Cloud Solution Provider program (CSPs) became generally available on February 14, 2022. With margin-sharing, ISVs can directly incentivize CSPs to sell their solutions, this delivers on the promise of partner-to-partner marketing.  

Collaborating with CSPs, ISVs can lower customer acquisition costs and scale business to new customers globally. We are seeing pairings of ISV and CSP partners having tremendous success. Just two months into partnering with Pax8 (the CSP) and LawToolBox (the ISV) has seen a 105% increase in licenses transacted through marketplace.  

Another partner pairing, Sherweb (the CSP) and Nimble (the ISV), were able to work together and scale without adding any overhead. 

“The outcome of becoming a P2P co-seller with Microsoft has enabled Nimble to scale our simple serum for Microsoft 365 to over 22 countries around the world without hiring one person. That’s amazing.”

Jon Ferrara, CEO Nimble

ISVs can offer margin to 400 eligible partners at once to open new sales channels, mobilizing a global ecosystem of partners. This also helps ISVs lower acquisition costs and simplify the sales process while increasing customer retention. And finally, when CSPs sell an ISV solution, they can bundle it with Microsoft Cloud solutions and their own value-add services to drive scale and recurring revenue.

Guidance on how to create a private offer and extend a margin to partners in the Cloud Solution Provider program.

Increased agility with private offers—accelerating seven-digit sales

To meet the needs of customers with agility, ISVs often use private offers. Private offers are the key to enterprise deal-making in the marketplace delivering flexibility like negotiated pricing, private terms and conditions, and specialized configurations. Microsoft has recently made substantial improvements to this functionality—ISVs can now create unique private offers per customer in less than 15 minutes.

Additional improvements include:

• Create an unlimited number of private offers.
• Ability to time-bound the private offer.
• Offer custom terms and conditions.
• Bundle multiple products in the same private offer.

One of the main motivators for customers to buy through B2B marketplaces is to decrement pre-committed cloud spend. Microsoft offers 100 percent of sales through the Azure Marketplace for Azure IP co-sell eligible solutions to count towards a customer’s Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). These deals are often in the millions and commonly transacted via private offers—the large deal sizes often need customized terms and conditions, special pricing considerations, and so on.

The recent improvements in private offers help ISVs connect with MACC-eligible customers. According to tackle.io’s annual State of Cloud Marketplaces report², 82 percent of ISVs listed unlocking pre-committed cloud spend as their number one reason to sell through commercial marketplaces, and 43 percent of customers listed spending pre-committed cloud spend as their number one reason to buy through commercial marketplaces. Microsoft has a rich set of enterprise customers that require private offers, and we are seeing the acceleration. Year-over-year we have seen a 300 percent increase in customers buying Azure IP co-sell solutions through the commercial marketplace and we expect those numbers to continue to grow.

For agility and speed, ISVs can leverage APIs to create private offers and can view all private offers in a centralized dashboard with the flexibility to copy, withdraw, and upgrade offers as appropriate. As customers accept private offers, or when private offers are set to expire, the ISV will be notified in Partner Center. For the customer, they will see all the private offers associated with their account and when they purchase, they simply accept the offer with a click. No need to re-deploy their virtual machines—the solution deploys right from the Azure portal and is configured to work in the customer’s tenant.

Embracing the marketplace as a sales channel

With the proliferation of cloud solutions, commercial marketplaces simplify selling and offer customers convenience and a trusted environment to buy and deploy solutions to run their business. ISVs can accelerate their growth by embracing a third-party marketplace as a major sales channel. The improvements to private offers give ISVs the agility they need whether selling to customers with cloud consumption commitments or scaling through our 90,000-plus partners in the CSP program.

As the most trusted and comprehensive cloud—the commercial marketplace is how we are helping deliver tech intensity at scale—connecting over 30,000 solutions from partners to the 1 billion customers who use Microsoft products. Activate this channel by becoming a Microsoft partner and by publishing a transactable offer to the commercial marketplace.

Resources

¹ Harvard Business Review
² tackle.io State of Cloud Marketplaces report