At the WPC this week, we’re thrilled to be able to share the latest news with partners. It’s great to see that partners continue to build their businesses with Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and Dynamics GP 2010 – and are experiencing phenomenal results, on-premise and in the cloud.

In fact, every week, more than 100 partners join us in the cloud, adding to the 16,000 already selling our Microsoft Online Services. It’s the world’s largest partner ecosystem for the cloud - and the number of partners backing our Online Services has more than tripled since this time last year!

Partners are participating in rigorous training (Over 800 events this year!), gaining customers in droves, and making money. The cloud has been good to our partners.

To give you a feel for this rapid growth in our cloud partner ecosystem, here are a few snapshots of activity:

• Today, we’re announcing the addition of five new communication service providers – Bell Canada, BT, Telenor, TDC and PGi. These partners find strong synergies with our Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). Since last year, BPOS has also launched with Vodafone, Orange, Telecom New Zealand, and Telstra. These communications services partners have seen steady growth in a short time frame. For example, since launching in Germany in April, Vodafone, the largest communications service provider in the world, added more than 1,000 BPOS customers.
• To extend our reach with BPOS even further, we have signed global agreements with Ingram Micro and Tech Data, the two largest technology distributors in the world. Our partner ecosystem has now expanded to over 50 distributors worldwide!
• Slalom, a national business and technology consulting firm, grew its revenue with BPOS, citing $5 million in new revenue last year alone. Going into the next year, Slalom already has more than 50 prospects in the pipeline, approaching $10 million in revenue. http://www.slalom.com/
• Wortell, our Online Services Partner of the Year, launched a new division focused on online strategies and profit margins close to 60%, with diverse customers including a national bank and a national postal service. Wortell also found new market opportunities in the law enforcement industry; one recent Wortell project helps international police agencies collaborate using Microsoft Online Services. http://www.bposrocks.com/
• To help partners join the cloud successfully, Pinpoint, our technology marketplace for partner applications and services, is going global. It’s now live in 16 countries and 9 languages. Pinpoint has also been updated to make it easier to discover partner applications online and in other Microsoft applications, with the help of in-application discovery - giving partners wider global reach for their solutions and services. http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/getlisted

These are just a few examples of the new opportunities in store for partners over the next few months. Partners can learn more, enroll as a Microsoft Online Services Advisor, and browse training resources at www.quickstartonlineservices.com. If you’re attending WPC, check out our booth and upcoming keynote sessions from Jon Roskill on Tuesday and Kevin Turner on Wednesday. See you there!