Microsoft To Tweak Sales Org In Search Of Better Partner 'Alignment'

Starting in its next fiscal year beginning July 1, the Redmond, Wash.-based company plans to boost investment about 10 percent to tighten ties between its sales professionals and partners in business accounts, said Bill Veghte, the Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of North American sales and marketing. Plans include the addition of industry and technical specialists in major markets nationwide.

It will concentrate its efforts in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, professional services areas. And, there will be related efforts in the public sector and communications sector, the company said.

Microsoft wants to go after business opportunities more consistently across geographies and customer types, Veghte told CRN late Tuesday. The goal is to knit together internal and partner resources in horizontal technology areas, such as infrastructure or databases, with expertise in more vertically oriented business processes relevant to specific customer types, he said.

The impetus is that Microsoft's product portfolio has gained a bigger footprint in enterprises, and the company aims to help customers get the most out of their investment, according to Veghte. "We need a good way to go into accounts and talk about how Office, SharePoint and .Net can foster collaboration for a health-care provider, for example," he said.

"We want a consistent way for our team to focus on a set of customers not only across geographies but also across accounts," he added.

The changes won't affect the "partner-lead" nature of these engagements, Veghte said. The goal is to build stronger strategic links between internal salespeople, partner account managers (PAMs) and partner staff dealing with the customers, he said.

Partners also want to be better aligned with Microsoft's marketing and sales efforts, Veghte added. For example, Microsoft may have good field staff in Atlanta with great horizontal expertise in SQL Server database technology but also have a big retail opportunity in Home Depot that requires deep retail expertise. The idea is to bring both sets of knowledge to bear on the opportunity.

Of course, any vendor moves that boost the number of internal sales and services staff can spook solution providers that competed with such forces in the past, since partners are always wary of vendors trying to assert account control at their expense. However, Veghte said Microsoft isn't attempting to do that. "Our partner focus will not change," he said.

The fight for partner loyalty has heated up recently. IBM and Oracle, for instance, have bulked up recruitment and retention efforts for solution providers and ISVs. A lot of those efforts, though, focused on small and midsize businesses rather than large enterprises, industry observers said. IBM and Oracle field large consulting businesses, whereas Microsoft's internal services arm is trying to position itself as an ally--not a rival--to solution providers.

For its part, Microsoft is under pressure to boost corporate migrations to the latest Office 2003 desktop suite and other products. Some large companies have used the threat of defections to Linux or open-source alternatives to wring price concessions from Microsoft.

Microsoft is trying to showcase Office 2003 perks and features to persuade businesses to upgrade from older versions. Company executives have long said that Office's biggest competitor is not StarOffice or OpenOffice but older versions of Office that dominate the market. An array of new Office-labeled products, including a range of upcoming servers, are another attempt to woo upgraders.

This story was updated Wednesday night with more detail about target markets.