Houston was a productive trip for the Scottish Partners at the World Partner Conference, and might even be considered a pivotal moment as Microsoft Partners were finally presented with a workable business model for Microsoft Business Productivity Online (BPOS).
For me, and certainly for any Partner involved in implementing collaboration tools, the biggest news was that there is 12% compensation for partners referring their customers to BPOS.
This isn't just money for old rope, Partners will earn this through their skills in planning and migration of users onto the service.
Thereafter, there is a 6% annual fee for customers remaining on the service after 12 months. With the BPOS suite (Exchange, Sharepoint, Live Meeting and OCS) at around $15 per user per month, this will form the basis of a recurring revenue stream for partners to manage and provision the service on behalf of customers. This might earn a partner $22K over a 3 year period for 500 users, which compares reasonably with the margins involved in delivering the hardware, software and services involved in a on premise solution.
The 30+ attendees from Scotland had the opportunity to ponder on striking keynotes from Steve Ballmer (president and CEO), Stephen Elop (head of Microsoft Business division) and Kevin Turner. Together with the host Alison Watson, leader of Microsoft Partner Program, all focused on opportunities in the move to Software + Services: a software marketplace comprising of both traditional on-premise IT, and cloud -delivered software services. You can catch all of these on the Silverlight based Digital WPC site.
Scotland's special envoys created a few hits in the press - in Scotland on Sunday, Hi-tech Scotland and the Scotsman, and attendees may be interested to see some incriminating pictures from Houston below.
Now back in Edinburgh and reflecting on what I heard, the Highlights of the conference for me were as follows:
Microsoft Online - BPOS
As mentioned above, Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft Business Division, talked about Partners opportunity in the Online cloud-delivered form of Microsoft's collaboration tools Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting and Office Communications Server. He knows a bit about online services, having previously worked in Macromedia and Adobe.
BPOS will be attractive to many customers - it reduces the time and hassle of deployment and at a stroke addresses issues of availability, business continuity, anywhere access, etc. One surprise for me was its keen price - For the minimal, limited "deskless worker suite" , its as cheap as $3 per user per month.
You can get an idea of what this might look like from the demo, and to prepare for the 2009 UK availability of the service sign up for the Microsoft Online Services Quickstart
Clearly there will be a lot of small print to understand on BPOS including the technical detail and implementation models - a directory synch tool will be available for customers with AD (i.e. most), and they can mix and match "on premise" and "hosted" users. For partners delivering Hosted messaging and Collaboration, SPLA license costs will be reduced to match BPOS.
Cloud Computing
Steve Ballmer clearly articulated his views of how Microsoft will build a cloud computing platform - with software deployed run and managed to highly scaled and highly available Internet services - and how this will work together with desktop, mobile devices, and traditional on-premise servers through an evolution of todays software development models. Even Prof. Clayton, Geek in Disguise is getting a bit cloudy about the cloud.
Unified Communications
Chris Capossela spoke of the transformation of the $45 billion Communications marketplace with unified comms expanding to take a much bigger proportion of overall spend from siloed voice and web conferencing solutions.
For Microsoft partners there is a sizeable opportunity around the integration of voice into customer Unified Comms deployments - in recognition of this the Unified Comms Solutions Competency was announced with a Voice specialisation for partners investing in skills around VOIP integration and conferencing.
Essentials Business Server
Finally, our very own Robert Adie of Glasgow City park based Digital IP shared his experiences of delivering Secure/Reliable computing for medium sized businesses with a packed auditorium in Houston.
The launch of Essential Business Server in November 2008 will present a profitable opportunity for partners, like Digital IP, who wish to server medium sized businesses with a standard platform giving them the basic ICT infrastructure of the modern business - which is security, management, email, collaboration and remote/mobile access - in a economic and compact 3 server format which offers simplified deployment and migration.
More on Digital IP and their experience of the Essentials Business Server Technology Adoption Program at a later date.
