Continuing our series that spotlights fellow Exchange partners who are spotlighting the range of great opportunities Exchange can bring to your businesses, this edition focuses on Voicemail.

Voicemail (a/k/a Voicemail with Exchange Unified Messaging) can truly save your customers both money and time, and perhaps more importantly, save them from that aging, legacy hardware solution they have today for voicemail.  You know the one; the one that may be from a vendor that no longer even exists!

To further support this point, we know from some fairly recent research from folks like the "Voice Report”, over 50% of customers will need to replace their primary PBX before the year 2014. What does this means for your business? Easy. There’s not only an opportunity to position a solution like Lync, but also swoop in and win the voicemail socket with Exchange!

But, PBX replacement time doesn’t need to be the only compelling event that can drive a good conversation about Voicemail with Exchange. We’ve found in a number of cases that partners are just making the deployment of Exchange-powered Voicemail a default aspect of any SOW they pitch to customers.  Basically, they are saying that every customer should think of a well planned, designed and deployed Exchange 2010 solution includes Voicemail, and this has not only been a very successful upsell opportunity, they have also witness cases where a Lync deployment was a natural pull through.

Voicemail: the gift that can keep on giving!

As with other “Spotlight” posts, you don’t just have to take my word for it! 

Here’s what partners like The VIA Group have to say about tapping into these additional services opportunities:

"Microsoft's unified messaging capability inherent in Exchange 2010 is such a natural fit for The VIA Group and the services we deliver to our clients. VIA was one of the very first system integrators worldwide to embrace third party unified messaging technologies for Exchange 5.5 in the mid 1990's and over the past 14 years, we have delivered millions of unified messaging mailboxes to our clients. When Microsoft first introduced its own unified messaging functionality with the release of Exchange 2007, we were very excited! Since then, VIA has become experts with Exchange UM on-premises as well as Exchange UM online with Office 365. Exchange 2010 has become a big part of our services delivery for our clients and specifically with our deep knowledge around these technologies, we are able to seamlessly integrate Lync and other telephony manufactures systems with the robust capabilities that both the on-premises and Office3 65 versions of Exchange 2010 UM deliver for our customers."

- Kevin Carswell, CEO The VIA Group

So what’s next?

• Use Exchange Voicemail to run your business.  Nothing is cooler to demo to a customer than a real-time text preview of a message you just left yourself.  This is always a staple of my customer pitches and should be in your sellers’ arsenal as well!
• Deploy what your customers might already have the rights to.  No kidding!  There are many customers that have the software and license rights via the Exchange ECAL, but need you to go and deploy it.  This is why the “Voicemail included by default” technique for SOWs is a winner.  And, just ask partners like Dimension Data’s Brian Walshe who has one of my most favorite quotes of all time, saying with Exchange voicemail “your ROI on [Unified Messaging] is probably six weeks. It’s ridiculously good.”
• Earn the new Gold Messaging competency, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers.

Are you seeing great opportunities to with Exchange Voicemail?

Post a comment and share!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Earlier in October, we kicked off a new series to spotlight the range of great opportunities Exchange can bring to your business. One of the objectives of these “Spotlight on" Partner Opportunity” posts, is to demonstrate how the advanced capabilities--or what I like to call the “Hero Workloads”--we’ve delivered in Exchange 2010 offer you the opportunity to develop specialized, high-value practices to your customers, which in turn, should translate to higher services revenue.

We kicked off the series by sharing how Dimension Data continues to see new opportunities with archiving in their Exchange engagements. This blog post brings you the next installment of our series and focuses on the opportunities email security can bring your business.

So, without further ado:

Taking a macro-level view, email anti-virus/anti-spam (AV/AS) is projected to be a $4B market by 2012 per IDC.

To pile on, in a study this year, Forrester Research surveyed ITDMs (IT Decision Makers) and BDMs (Business Decision Makers) at 400 North American companies and found that integration with email security is a top evaluation criteria for purchasing email.

No surprise, right?

And, if you take into account the momentous demand we are seeing from customers to get to the latest release, the fact customers love the release, and bear in mind that anti-virus/anti-spam is one of the most compelling features customers are looking for, this creates a great opportunity for you to position, consult and deploy email security capabilities in Exchange 2010.

Partners like Avtex recognize this customer demand and are taking advantage of these additional services opportunities:

"Companies are faced with many challenges of how to provide consistent and quality real-time and non-real-time communications to their employees, partners, and customers.  More and more, the standard for communications has been expanded to a multitude of devices.  With this explosion of multiple interfaces, it is critically important to protect sensitive corporate information.  Exchange 2010's advanced email security features provide integrated, controlled, and manageable ways to deliver world-class messaging.  Avtex continues to see growth in our business as it relates to securing the foundation for UC deployments, specifically Exchange 2010 projects."

- Khai Tran, Vice President of UC Solutions at Avtex

It’s a win-win when you upsell your customers on the email security capabilities in Exchange 2010. Delivering email security requires specialization that leads to higher-touch customer engagements with the opportunity for more services dollars for your organization. Customers in turn can reduce costs or complexity while benefiting from the Forefront functionality that earned Microsoft a Leader position in the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways.

So what’s next?

• Use the technology to protect your own businesses (like Forefront Online Protection for Exchange)
• Upsell your customers on the email security capabilities in Exchange 2010. You can use things like the recent Gartner MQ I referenced just above to help start that conversation.
• Earn the new Gold Messaging competency, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers.

Are you seeing great opportunities to with email security?

Post a comment and share!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Earlier this morning, I had the opportunity to swing by Building 40 to welcome a number of Exchange SMEs (the subject matter expert variety) who will spend the next five days developing the questions that will ended up in our new Messaging competency technical assessments.

You’d be very impressed with the team we’ve assembled, who’s industry credentials include Exchange MCMs (Microsoft Certified Masters), MVPs (Most Value Professionals), owners of consulting businesses, holders of MPN competencies, and even a Blue Badger (the Microsoft FTE variety).  We also have a some nice representation from around the globe, even with a few folks joining from parts like Italy via Lync.

One of favorite takeaways of my short chat with the question crew: while all of them have taken a range of certification exams, tests, assessments, etc., many of them are writing questions for the first time.

I think this is great news, because it is always good to have a fresh perspective--especially one that is backed with a ton of experience and product expertise. 

These guys will be working this week with some of the big guns of psychometric consultation and test development from another partner of ours to make sure we translate these expertise into quality assessments for you to demonstrate your Exchange skillz (that’s right, skillz!).

Just a quick reminder: this work is contributing to part of the new requirements for attaining the Gold Messaging competency.  More specifically, we’ll be adding new assessments to test your abilities to deliver the advanced workloads (like security and archiving) of Exchange as well as implementing Exchange Online.  These new assessments are a key part of our goal to differentiate partners who’ve achieved the Gold level of our new competency.

I can’t wait to check in throughout the week to see how the question writing is going and watch these new assessments come to life right before my eyes.  And, don’t worry, I’ll keep you all updated along the way!

Happy Monday!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Yes, I know.

It’s been a while since I focused a post on some news for our Exchange ISV partners.

Well, you can consider those days over, as I have some Friday Fun Facts on what we’ve been up to on the Microsoft Platform Ready front!

If you’re not already familiar with MPR--and you haven’t already click on the link above—Microsoft Platform Ready “is designed to give you what you need to plan, build, test and take your solution to market.”

While we’ve had good stuff up there on microsoftplatformready.com for Exchange 2010 for some time now, we just recently refreshed the bits around the “Test” stage of the MPR process.  More specifically, we have updated our Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool which enables you to assess your applications for compliance with Microsoft-recommended requirements and test cases. 

More specifically, specifically, we’ve updated the Exchange Server 2010 MPR test to:

• Align with our brand spanking new Messaging competency to enable our ISVs to obtain either the Silver or Gold to show off your skills making Exchange even better
• Assess applications written for either Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Online with Office 365

Neat, right?

“So, why is this important?”

At it’s essence, the MPR test will help you identify possible compatibility and readiness issues when building your apps for Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Online with Office 365.  However, while you may wish to test non-complete versions of your software as it’s being developed, only released version tests can be submitted and/or used for earning the Messaging competency as an ISV.

Nonetheless, you’ll want to visit our MPR site a bunch because we will continue to refine the Exchange MPR test tool as we learn best practices for ISV partner applications working with Exchange or Exchange Online.  In fact, Jim Lucey (my ISV partner lead on the Exchange partner team) thinks non-stop about how partners like you can best utilize our modern extensibility interfaces (like Exchange Web Services) to build your solutions to add value to both the on-prem and online flavors of Exchange.  We’ll certainly keep you updated as new guidance is made available and tweaks to the MPR test tool go live.

“Sounds great! How do I get started?” you ask.

It’s super (and not just a normal Microspeak “super”) easy to get going:

1. Sign in to Microsoft Platform Ready and register your application to access the Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool.
2. To begin using the Test Tool, click on the Test My Apps navigation tab.  Details about the criteria requirements and individual product test cases are available in the test tool

Go ahead and give the MPR test tool a whirl and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and feedback.  In fact, Jim is so passionate about this opportunity he wanted me to share some recent examples of fellow great partners of yours who have already engineer their offerings to (in this case) run with EWS for (again, in this case) Exchange Online.  For example, I already spoke about the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services support for Office 365, but there’s also Quest OnDemand Migration for Email, LiveOffice Discovery Archive, and Binary Tree Solutions for migrating to Office 365 just to name a few.

Happy testing!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing