Trying to make friends the Microsoft way

A year ago at the partner conference, Microsoft was pushing a similar specialisation plan for its partners. Have you seen a significant shift in your resellers in that direction?
Partner by partner, we're making an impact by creating business opportunity for our partners and, in turn, partners are betting their business with us. It's really encouraging to see partners betting big and succeeding. One example there is Interlink, which has more than doubled its revenue since they focused on partnering with us a few years ago.

Partners around the world are recognising the benefit of aligning by competency, and they're starting to see the competency-targeted readiness, sales and marketing tools work. Enrolment in the competencies is strong. Customers are finding the help they need by using the competencies in the Microsoft Partner Program to differentiate partners' areas of expertise. This differentiation also helps ensure that solutions partners receive the benefits, information, and business opportunities from Microsoft that are most valuable to them.

Microsoft has been dabbling in some new ventures that arguably have made the company somewhat less predictable for partners. For example, the company said in March that it was going to take over management of Energizer's internal IT functions, a job that Microsoft has not traditionally performed and its partners have. Why is Microsoft doing some of these things?
Let's be very clear here: Our core business is developing and delivering software. That said, our incubation project with Energizer should not surprise anyone. We have a responsibility to help drive cost and complexity out of our customers' environments and help them maximize the value of their IT investment. Energizer will not be the only one here in this pilot; there will be a few others, where we will mirror our own internal IT environment running the technology hand in hand as opposed to being a step removed. We're going to test this out and see where it takes us.

With the Internet serving increasingly as a means for businesses to learn about and purchase software, what is the long-term future for software resellers? How do you see their role evolving in the coming years?
Software resellers continue to provide value to customers across a broad range — some bring specific implementation or customisation skills; others bring a unique understanding of particular verticals or geographies, etc. The one commonality, though — and this is the crux of the matter — is that the partners who specialise are the ones who will thrive. I talked a lot about this at last year's partner conference, and I'll talk about it this year. As we go to market with our partners, we want to provide customers with the broadest ecosystem of products and services, and to do that, everyone involved needs to make choices about where to focus and add value.