Exclusive Interaction - Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Microsoft India

In the lockdown times, digital presence and online skills of traditional partners are very important. Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Commercial Partners, Microsoft India, discusses how his organisation is dealing with this aspect in this interaction. 

Traditional partners are facing a challenge from the digital platforms. How can the partners be integrated into the digital initiatives?

We have been carefully considering how we can serve our partners best through our programmes, as we adjust to this new way of working. We understand that some partners may want to accelerate their pace, while others may want to slow things down. Regardless, we are regularly gathering feedback from our partner ecosystem and doing what we can to help.

At our Partner Leadership Conclave in April this year, we provided an opportunity for our partners to hear the latest innovations, updates and strategy from Microsoft leaders. This year, the conclave had over 6000 attendees for enhanced learning and networking opportunities.

We’re giving partners increased access to training, support and go-to-market services. Partners have more options to differentiate their skills and expertise to approach customers with new competencies, advanced specialisations and  through  the  Azure  Expert  MSP  Programme. We’re working on new ways to give partners quicker and easier access to Microsoft support to help them better solve challenges and meet customer needs. To further support Microsoft’s commitment to shared growth and profitability  within the ecosystem, partners  can access co-selling programmes so they can accept and give referrals from Microsoft (first-party solutions) and other partners (third-party solutions).

Fuelled by the market opportunities we see through tech intensity, digital transformation, and the cloud, we need to continue evolving in order to meet emerging customer needs and expectations. We’re 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.

How do you think partners should be trained to adapt to digital platforms quickly and efficiently?

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem is at the center of delivering technologies and driving business transformation for its customers. Today, more than ever, it is critical to collaborate and co-innovate to meet the customers’ needs. For Microsoft, it means ensuring the right support for the partners to help them tackle and adapt quickly with the current situation. For this, Microsoft has a range of training resources available for the partners and their customers at no additional cost.

• Microsoft Learn is a free, online training platform that provides interactive learning for Microsoft products. The goal is to help the partners become proficient with Microsoft’s technologies through fun, guided, hands-on, interactive content that’s specific to their role and goals
• Regionally delivered webinars for partners and customers that are designed to boost the teams’ knowledge of deep technical scenarios across all Microsoft cloud solutions
• Role-specific learning paths for partners to build their skills on Microsoft products and solutions
• Partner Technical Services  are available to help partners who are trying to close deals with pre-sales technical and deployment guidance, as well as application development assistance. This resource is available to partners who have advisory hours included with their competency or Action Pack

Digital tech is changing very fast. How can the partners keep pace with it?

As we look  ahead,  some of the  areas  for  partner  opportunities that we  see are –

• Teams for modern business – Now more than ever, the ability to  connect remotely  is vital, whether that be with the coworkers, friends or family. Partners have an opportunity to  support  activation and usage for their customers.  We’re seeing  adoption and  change management partners  focus  on extensions to further customise to their customers’ business needs
• Tech intensity – Partners have an increasing number of ways they can help meet emerging customer needs and expectations. One is supporting their movement toward tech intensity, as  organisations move past adopting the latest technologies and develop their own digital capabilities
• Azure migration –  The latest versions of Windows Server,  SQL Server and Windows Virtual Desktop  offer tremendous opportunity for businesses to secure and modernise their workloads. Our partners are in a unique position to help customers migrate to the cloud and unlock the benefits of Azure to transform workloads with the latest data and AI capabilities
• Security – While the cloud has opened the door for  a myriad of possibilities, it has also made security a top priority for customers.  Security  is  engineered into our products,  but  we are  counting on  our partners to help secure the  customer’s environment from endpoint to datacentre.

Additionally, below  are  two  offerings we’ve  recently launched –

• New  advanced  specialisation – Competencies remain important for all partners, but advanced specializations provide the opportunity to further highlight technical scenarios where partners are delivering high quality services to  differentiate themselves from the competition.  The recently  added  Adoption and Change Management  Advanced  Specialisation  allows  partners to showcase proven expertise in adoption and change management to drive usage of Microsoft Teams.
• New Teams Practice Development  Playbook –This is designed to help partners understand the growth opportunity that Microsoft Teams provides to them  as well as to  their  customers.