Microsoft Boosts Sales Support

While Microsoft increased its budget overall, the company also tried to balance out large individual investments, such as those in channel spending, with more modest or flat allocations in other areas, Watson says. "This is a big year of what we are trading off vs. what we are investing in," she says.

The results add up to good news for partners that underscore Microsoft's renewed commitment to the channel, Watson contends. New initiatives include a major boost to inbound/outbound presales support now available to all 30,000 certified partners, with the ultimate goal of creating a set of best practices at Microsoft that can be made available to partners, Watson says.

Bill Carn, president of Austin Software Products, a Microsoft partner in Pacifica, Calif., says the vendor has provided more than ample support to his company, both on the presales and technical fronts. "The information and support Microsoft has made available is first-class, and I don't see how they can improve it," says Carn, who specializes in Microsoft Small Business Server. "You have access to their sales and marketing library, technical library, MSDN, etc. Just keeping up with it all is a Herculean job."

Beyond presales support, Microsoft is doubling the resources devoted to its systems-builder program (see "Microsoft's Channel Push," page 70) and pressing ahead with its $10 billion drive to bring developers into the .Net fold, including signing up 5,000 new ISVs to the Microsoft ISV Empower Program. Watson says the company also now employs 2,400 technical specialists on staff to assist partners, up from 700 one year ago.

All this activity is leading up to Microsoft's Partner Momentum Event, to take place Oct. 9 to 11 in New Orleans. Other moves include Microsoft's revamping its employee-compensation incentive plans, tying 60 percent of bonuses in most cases to partner and customer satisfaction, and simplifying accessibility to the company. In addition, Microsoft is working to synchronize its 67 different partner Web sites across the globe, and has embraced a plan to measure the satisfaction of its partners' customers using the Customer Engagement Manager (CEM) tool. Through CEM, customers can actually report what some of their experiences have been with specific partners. The company keeps scorecards and analyzes them with business analytics tools to determine how well the company's partners are doing.

"We'll be using [the CEM tool] more richly in the U.S. this coming year than we have in this past fiscal year," says Margo Day, vice president of U.S. partners at Microsoft. "[With it], we'll be able to report back to the partner what the customer's perspective and perception has been of that particular partner."

And, yes, Day concedes, the tool could be used to tell Microsoft when the time has come to bring in another partner to cater to a customer that is not satisfied with an existing solution provider.

Austin Software Products' Carn says that's not such a bad thing. "Checks and balances mean that customers get the best of what is offered," he says. "I think it's a very good idea. Now, how it's done will control the results."