At the Microsoft Inspire conference, Microsoft this week made it clear its primary focus going forward in the channel is going to be on independent software vendors (ISVs) and managed service providers (MSPs).
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told conference attendees there will be more applications created within the next five years than the previous four decades.
Making sure as many of those applications as possible are deployed on the Azure cloud is now job one for Microsoft and its partners.
“There will be 500 million applications created in the next five years,” says Nadella.
To facilitate achieving that goal, Microsoft has added several programs to attract ISVs to its cloud platform. A Business Applications ISV Connect program, for example, promises to help ISVs get to market faster by making it simpler to publish and promote applications on both the Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace that Microsoft will co-sell with ISVs and partners.
Microsoft also revealed that via that co-sell program more than $9.5 billion in annual contracted partner revenue has been generated in the last 24 months. Via that co-selling motion, Microsoft claims deals are nearly six times bigger and closing nearly three times faster, and Azure consumption is now eight times higher.
To accelerate that growth further, Microsoft is also making available pre-packaged functions such as application programming interfaces (APIs), business logic, entities, and workflows for Dynamics 365 and PowerApps, which should serve to make it simple for ISVs to treat Microsoft cloud applications as a platform for developing application extensions.
At the same time, Microsoft is now previewing ISV Studio, which provides a consolidated view into how ISV apps are performing across multiple customer tenants, including metrics such as the number of tenants and install successes/failures.
To attract more MSPs to the Azure platform, Microsoft also announced a Cloud Adoption Framework that defines a set of best practices for partners and the general availability of Azure Lighthouse, a single control plane for service providers to view and manage Azure across all their customers. Azure Lighthouse introduces a new delegated resource concept that simplifies cross-tenant governance and operations that makes it easier for organizations to delegate control over Azure permissions such as subscriptions and resources.
Microsoft has also announced the general availability of Azure Migrate, a suite of Microsoft and third-party tools designed to make it simpler to lift and shift existing applications on the Microsoft cloud and launched the Azure AI Accelerate Program to help partners bring AI solutions to market.
Nadella today made it apparent Azure is now largely a means to a larger artificial intelligence (AI) that will be driven by massive amounts of data residing on the Azure cloud. Those AI services require massive amounts of data to drive the machine learning algorithms that enable those AI applications. Microsoft is also making clear to channel partners large and small the primary mission is to attract as many applications to the Azure cloud as possible to ensure the critical mass of data required to drive next-generation AI services from Microsoft is achieved.
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