MBAS ISV Connect Session Summary

Thanks to all of you who attended our first virtual, Microsoft Business Applications Summit today. For those who couldn’t make it, I’ve recapped the event here – or you can visit ISV Connect at MBAS for all the content.   

Momentum & Partner Success 

We talked about ISV Connect momentum so far, which we feel really good about.  We’ve had more than 1,000 ISVs sign up for ISV Connect and they’ve published more than 1,000 certified apps in Microsoft AppSource. This number of high-quality apps is growing 28% every quarter.   

We’re happy to see long-standing partners like Seismic, Annata, and Flintfox enrolled as well as new partners like Solgari who has tripled their deal pipeline and is expecting 150% monthly run rate growth – this is great to see.  We shared other partner success stories like MazikCare who, in just 3 days, deployed six Covid-19 related solutions for State Governments using Power Apps, Dynamics 365, and Azure.  

ISV Patterns 

We designed the program to drive value for all types of ISVs in our ecosystem and we continue to see partners joining from all three of the core patterns - Build, Extend, and Connect.   Build is all about creating new apps on Power Apps and the CDS and reducing time to market by leveraging existing Business Logic, Power Automate, and UI. We see great success by partners who Extend an existing Dynamics 365 app by customizing to meet specific business or industry needs, and we see partners improving their apps’ accessibility by Connecting to Microsoft products, leveraging connectors to speed integration.  

Improvements are Accelerating Momentum 

While enrollment and app marketplace have been areas of strength, we’re continuing to address partner feedback in areas we need to do more, including: the experience in Partner Center and in AppSource; our ability to generate co-selling activity with our field; and our need to simplify the operations requirements for partners. Casey McGee and Toby Bowers helped outline what we are doing in these areas.   

Casey shared more details on the feedback we hear from our ISV partners, including the need for:  good technical support for app development, endorsement and marketing support, and of course on the co-selling side, strong account planning and coordination to share leads.   

To address the difficulty in setup caused by the merger of our offers databases, we’ve simplified to a unified listing across AppSource and OCP Catalog/GTM.  As part of this effort we are wrapping up work to fix the duplicate and misconfigured offers for a better partner experience. We’ve also been working hard to address challenges with referrals and lack of co-sell engagement, and we’ve fixed most of the Partner Center referral pain points, so it operates more like PSC.    

We’ve taken steps to address your concerns about the low volume of AppSource leads with UX design improvements as well as improvements in Test Drive, Contact Me, and Search relevance.  As an example, we’ve improved Search relevance in AppSource, including exact phrase search and improved performance of the search box to deliver faster results. These are just some of the improvements - and we’ll have even more to share around the July time frame.   

In terms of the co-sell motion with our field we’re created more incentive for our Sellers to drive outbound lead sharing by making changes to compensation plans for the Field and we’ve better aligned our internal resources to drive account planning.   

We’ve listened to your feedback and have made improvements to our certification tooling, including improved pre-certification testing support with ISV Studio, PowerShell support, and DevOps improvements.  Other improvements include: a streamlined functional review process; making TestDrive an optional component, and improving the Partner Center error handling.  All these improvements together set a high bar for quality, while further reducing friction and time to market.  Lastly we're changing the re-certification timing, so it aligns with the anniversary of your initial certification, instead of with our release cadence, adding more time and flexibility around the re-certification requirement.

We know when all our efforts are aligned it provides a great experience for partners.  Toby shared some great success stories where we’ve seen this in action.  ISVs like Solgari have opened massive channel opportunities and expansion into new markets through the Partner to Partner (P2P) connection.  ITRAK 365 is an example of another partner who leveraged the program to expand their global footprint without hiring more staff or opening new locations.  Access to our technology platform is driving success with Partners like simple.io who is leveraging the full breadth of the Microsoft cloud, with D365 + Power Platform, Azure, and Teams to reduce their development time by 3x. 

Our goal with the work underway is to deliver an awesome experience to all of our amazing ISV Connect partners.  

Additional Improvements for FY21 

Going forward, we want to take the work going on listed above and align that with a few additional pieces of work underway for FY21.  At the core we’re mostly looking to act on partner feedback per above, make a few additional changes, but not change the core elements of the program. So, in FY21, the business model remains the same and the benefits are similar - with some improvements to drive additional consistency with Azure’s, and the operations and tools get better/simpler but do not fundamentally change.    

We are going to make a few licensing changes based on feedback from partners. To start with: 

• We are adding a three-year SKU which will provide pricing predictability for ISV Cloud Embed 
• We are announcing a 1 year, 50% discount on database capacity for FY21 

These changes will be available August 1, 2020 and more detail will follow as we get closer to that time.   For additional changes, including simplified deal registration; aggregate revenue billing; and a ‘multi-cloud discount’ on rev share for large Azure partners, take a look at the new ISV Connect Addendum.   

Thanks for joining us today. For access to today’s materials, including the partner vides and additional resources, visit us on Linked In at: ISV Connect at MBAS. And thanks for joining us on this journey.   

On behalf of Greg Nelson, Casey, Toby and the entire Microsoft ISV Team, thank you for joining us today and on this journey. 

Guggs