Microsoft Outlines Strategy To Pump Up .Net Channel Business

At Fusion 2002, which kicked off here Friday morning, Microsoft's outgoing channel chief, Rosa Garcia, and her successor, Allison Watson, said the company will rely on its solution providers and enterprise systems integrators for sewing together .Net solutions and selling new organizational productivity and knowledge workers solutions to a field of one million customers.

Microsoft's next two fiscal years will show a clear commitment to partners--including a $500 million investment--and an effort to guide solution providers out of a tough economic climate. As part of that, Microsoft's product groups, marketing and sales groups, and services groups will coordinate efforts and be held accountable for pushing sales through the channel.

"We're launching go-to-market [campaigns for the next fiscal year," said Garcia, who emphasized that Microsoft's services arm will not compete head to head with partners like it did last year. "You guys have had a hard, a really hard time, and Microsoft made the [economic crisis worse. We were competing with you. . . . But we changed the policies around consulting. Please accept our sincere apology."

As part of that change, Microsoft identified key new go-to-market opportunities for fiscal 2003, including selling enterprise application integration, Internet business and .Net and Web services.

Watson estimated the IT infrastructure opportunity at more than $3 billion and pointed solution providers to engage on server consolidation, communications infrastructure, .Net servers, Small Business Server, management and Secure Connected Infrastructure opportunities.

Watson, who will take over as channel chief on Aug. 1, estimated the emerging business-productivity and knowledge worker opportunities--selling business intelligence, intranets and portals, work management, and connecting Office XP-based knowledge workers with line-of-business applications--as a $3.2 billion opportunity.

Watson also estimated Microsoft has more than one million opportunities selling to its 5,500 major accounts, 16,000 corporate accounts and 347, 000 midsize businesses. Microsoft plans to push solution providers to sell to the growing SMB segment and midsize segments.

Microsoft plans to launch a bevy of new MSOs this year for vertical markets and will enlist partners to integrate the client and server components together, she said. Microsoft also plans to ship partner toolkits to help solution providers sell MSOs.

While Microsoft launched its solutions-selling approach code-named Sable at last year's Fusion and back-to-back Microsoft Global Summit for the company's sales staff, the distinction this year is a clear understanding about the partner life cycle and a reliance on the channel to "glue together" the Microsoft solution offerings, she said. "We have a partner network that does it for us, and they will glue the MSOs together," said Watson.

For example, Microsoft Vice President of Worldwide Services Mike Sinneck, who will make his first public appearance before partners on Sunday, plans to announce that Microsoft Consulting Services will provide premier solutions services to Gold Certified partners and other services for Certified Partners.

In her public goodbye on Friday morning, a tearful Garcia told more than 4,500 attendees of the show that she has left Microsoft's channel in good hands with Watson. "She's a fighter," said Garcia of Watson. Garcia becomes general manager of Microsoft's subsidiary in Spain on Aug. 1.