Microsoft Inspire 2019: Network, Knowledge and Celebration

Last week the IT world gathered at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas to network, exchange knowledge and celebrate the achievements of the past year. Of course, our experts joined the industry event and summarized their most important takeaways. Here is what you need to know about this year’s Microsoft Inspire.

Microsoft Inspire is the opportunity for all Microsoft partners to connect and communicate. Microsoft partners from over 130 countries seized the opportunity to network. Beside the core notes Microsoft offered networking sessions and social hours to facilitate it for other partners to gain insights from other partners, generate leads to new business, and create and strengthen relationships with Microsoft field team members.

Moreover, Microsoft officials honored the achievements of all partners and expressed their gratitude. Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, stated: “Our partnership is built on commitment, integrity and trust”. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, acknowledged all Microsoft partner’s hard work, commitment and persistence.

Furthermore, Microsoft Inspire showcases the opportunities ahead and indicates what trends and strategies Microsoft is going to follow. Here are our main takeaways:

Cyber-Security Training

 The Microsoft Security Competency is now generally available. For more information click here.

Azure Cloud Migrations

 Microsoft is promoting competencies and tools to drive customer workloads to Azure. 

The effort includes:

• Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure
• Linux and Open Source Databases Migration to Microsoft Azure
• Data Warehouse Migration to Microsoft Azure
• Modernization of Web Applications in Microsoft Azure
• Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure

Azure Migration Program

Moreover, the new Azure Migration Program (AMP) offers proactive advice and tools to help any customer to engage with a partner to move workloads to the cloud. There are more novelties regarding Azure Cloud Management. A new tool called Azure Lighthouse was presented, that is supposed to automate and scale cloud management. By using cross-customer management features manual operational tasks can be reduced and customer management can be scaled.

The Azure Migration Program is initially exclusive to Azure Expert MSP providers such as SoftwareONE, who has a highly skilled team specialized in Cloud migrations to support any customer in their Cloud Journey.

Partner Marketplace Tools

More pricing models will surface in Microsoft’s marketplace starting in July 2019.

Key efforts include:

• monthly and annual SaaS billing
• custom-metered billing options; standard contracts
• free SaaS trials that convert to paid engagements.
  

Data and SQL Server

 90% of all the data we have today has been created in the last two years. To cope with this new set of conditions Microsoft is building a limitless data estate. Amazing capacity is needed to move petabytes of data.  As a result, Microsoft is completely rethinking what a database looks like and it has led to SQL Hyperscale.

Dynamics 365 ISV and Vertical Market Milestones

 The business application and automation platform now features a Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator and two new integrations for Dynamics 365 that address the automotive and financial services industries. In addition, the Business Applications ISV Connect program is generally available.

Microsoft Teams

There are over 2 billion front line workers and 70% feel they don’t have the tools to do their jobs effectively. Microsoft Teams allows for chat, meetings, and collaboration using the richness of Office tools and process workflow. New integrations include support for contact centers, compliance recording and cloud solution providers.

Hololens 2

Hololens 2 is bridging the boundaries between the physical and virtual world.  It now has twice the field of view, improved comfort, and allows you to build applications out of the box that take advantage of Mixed Reality. For more information click here.

Enabling Partner Services

Gavriella Schuster announced the Azure Marketplace has expanded to over 12,000 applications and services while generating over 350,000 leads per month.  The rapidly expanding Marketplace has generated new streams of direct revenue for many partners and it is activating new opportunities through Microsoft directly and CSP licensing.

Schuster also announced that Microsoft sellers will be incentivized to drive partner services. Microsoft is also seeing accelerated growth through CSP generating over $4B in sales to over 3.5M customers.  They plan to move CSP onto the modern commerce platform in an effort to accelerate and mobilize the delivery of Azure services to their customers.

Apart from networking and taking an outlook at the latest trends and opportunities Microsoft focuses on, the Partner of the Year awards acknowledged the achievements of outstanding partners on a global and a country level. We at SoftwareONE had a good reason to celebrate. We won the following awards:

• Bolivia Partner of the Year Award
• LATAM Datacenter Migration Partner Award
• LATAM FY19 Remarkable Partner Award
• Ireland Licensing Solution Partner Award

We are thrilled about these awards. Find out what motivates our teams daily and how they manage to provide excellence.

The next big event hosted by Microsoft will be the Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida from November 4-8, 2019. Of course, our experts will be on site and keep you updated.