My 5 main takeaways from Microsoft Inspire 2017

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the biggest partner event of the year – Microsoft Inspire 2017. As the name states this is an event that shapes Microsoft‘s strategy for the upcoming year and defines the roadmap for partners as well. I have a few takeaways I would like to share with you today:

One Commercial Partner

This is probably the biggest news of the conference. Basically, Microsoft is consolidating all the manpower that supports partners into one unit. One Commercial Partner will help partners build relevant apps, market and actively sell them, Microsoft is even starting a dedicated position called ?Channel Manager“ that will ?have responsibility for connecting the right partner solutions to the right customer at the right time“. This means that partners will have more support than ever before since Microsoft will take some workload of partners and support them throughout.

AI is a business area Microsoft is betting on

Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Applications and Infrastructure, Data and Artificial Intelligence are the new focus areas in Microsoft‘s journey to becoming more solution-centric. I‘ve written my piece on AI‘s possible leap into the business world and it looks like Microsoft is treating this very seriously and setting the ground early.

Azure is a strategic product

This isn‘t really news in any way since Microsoft has been making big acquisitions with Azure in mind for years, not to mention the tremendous push for Azure recently. This year the trend will continue as Microsoft will have specifically dedicated Channel Managers to help sell Azure-based solutions as well as co-sell Microsoft‘s flagship service with partners.

Cloud embed

Business applications will definitely benefit from this introduction. ISV Cloud Embed will help partners build cloud apps based on Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Flow and Power BI faster and easier than before, all the builds will be based on Microsoft‘s ?Building blocks“ system.

Microsoft 365 makes its debut

Satya Nadella introduced Microsoft 365 as an offering package that consists of Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility and Security. This is an offering that complies beautifully with Microsoft‘s embeddable block strategy as well as its push for cloud services. Because of its simplicity, Microsoft 365 is a great package for almost any business around the world and it could very well become an industry standard sooner rather than later.