Microsoft reports success, but an analyst says the company needs
to train more partners to handle the sheer volume of upgrade projects
over the next few years.As Microsoft gears up for the Feb. 27 launch of Windows Server 2008,
Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008—the biggest enterprise launch in the
company's history—it is aggressively readying its partners to handle the wave
of demand it hopes will be generated for these new products.
So important is partner readiness that Allison Watson, corporate vice
president of Microsoft's worldwide partner group, headed off on a 45-day worldwide
tour to review all partner businesses, returning to the United
States on Feb. 12.
And she is upbeat about what she found. "We feel more on top of this
launch than for any other launch in our history. This is the biggest launch for
the IT professional and the core IT community and it has the potential to
reinvigorate and offer new options for both partners and customers,"
Watson told eWEEK Feb. 13.
This launch has the potential to really change the current
momentum around infrastructure across everything infrastructure delivers as
value for customers, she said, noting that the launch moniker of "Heroes happen {here}"
is meant to reflect the role of partners and customers and how this launch
helps make them "heroes" within their organizations or communities.
In order to achieve this lofty goal, the company has a very aggressive
training program, with more than 150,000 people already having been trained
since the beginning of Microsoft's fiscal year and another 150,000 to be
trained over the next few months, Watson said.
But, while Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at the NPD
Group, said he thinks this number is a good start, given the massive installed
base of Windows Server, Visual Studio and SQL Server, Microsoft
"clearly needs to train more partners to handle the sheer volume of
upgrade projects over the next one to three years as customers migrate to the
new versions."
While Watson acknowledged that achieving launch readiness was complicated by
the fact that there were three products that all required ISVs and service
partner readiness, she said she is confident of Microsoft's preparedness.
"We will have more than 1,200 shipping ISV
applications for Visual Studio at launch, more than 1,000 applications for SQL
Server and 1,200 shipping applications for the core Windows Server. In
addition, our partner training has explicitly touched all of our core
infrastructure, networking infrastructure, partner infrastructure, security and
systems management," Watson said.
Figures from research groups IDC and
Gartner showed there is a $120 billion partner revenue opportunity in the United
States alone over the next 18 months,
targeting some 3.5 million new server installations, Watson said.
That research also indicated that for every dollar of Microsoft software
sold, there was an attach rate of $18 for partners, which is far higher than for
previous launches, and that this is due to the value and gains these products
unlock for partners and customers, she said.
In the large and growing business intelligence market, the outlook is also
good, she said. Between Performance Point Server, which Microsoft launched in
2007, SQL Server and Windows Server, "You are unlocking something
significant and which may not have been as evident before," Watson said. "I
am very confident that we have a large number of partners who are ready to go
and understand the opportunities this launch brings. If a customer needs a
qualified partner to help them with these products, they will be able to find
them."
However, Watson did caution that not every one of Microsoft's partners were
ready and Microsoft's call to action to them was to not underestimate the need
to be ready for the opportunities this launch brings.
Swenson said he believes that Microsoft is doing a better job of achieving
partner readiness than it has done in the past. "Although I think
Microsoft's partner programs have always been good, over the past couple of
years they've really focused like a laser beam on how to make their partners
more successful, how to improve their training and how to get them up to
speed," he said.
An example of this is the "Empower for ISVs" program, essentially a
licensing program that enables small ISVs to try out Microsoft software like
Windows Server and Visual Studio for two years, easing them into a regular
Microsoft licensing program on completion, he said.
"The program has been enormously successful. Clearly, Microsoft
is listening to the concerns of its partners and working with them to create
more effective programs," Swenson said.
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