20 Scenes From The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011

Microsoft WPC 2011: Sign Of The Times

Microsoft WPC 2011 attendees entering the show expo (officially the Solution Innovation Center) in the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC) were greeted with this sign, a promise Microsoft executives sought to make good on in keynote speeches and briefings covering everything from new products to new incentives and resources for partners.

Getting The Message Across

Keynote speeches during the week were held in the cavernous Staples Center, home to the Los Angeles Lakers, in downtown L.A. Here Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Group, delivered his welcoming speech on Monday.

Roskill dropped a number of statistics about the Microsoft universe. Channel partners made $8.70 in revenue from services and related sales for every $1 of Microsoft sales, he said, for a total ecosystem of $580 billion. If that ecosystem were a country, Roskill said, it would rank #19 according to country GDP.

Roskill noted that 95 percent of Microsoft's sales are generated through the channel. He also cited a survey of partners that found that 58 percent were working with cloud technologies, although he said many of them were opportunistic rather than making cloud computing a core of their business.

Pep Talk

In his WPC keynote speeches in 2009 and 2010 CEO Steve Ballmer worked hard to convince partners that the king of desktop software was serious about the cloud. This year, with such products as Windows Azure, Windows Intune and Office 365 on the market, the CEO's goal was to fire up the channel troops to join the cloud revolution. Ballmer said 41,000 Microsoft partners today identify themselves primarily as cloud solution providers. Some 50,000 customers signed up for a free trial of Office 365 in the two weeks after it went live, he said, and "Azure is really climbing at a very, very rapid rate."

The CEO also offered updates on a number of other key Microsoft products, touting gains for the Bing search engine, Office 2010 and Dynamics CRM. And he poked fun at Microsoft's struggles to gain traction in the smartphone market saying: "We've gone from very small to very small, but it's been a heck of a year." But he promised "a lot of progress in that market competitively" in the future.

{C}

The Windows XP-To-Windows 7 Migration Opportunity

"Two-thirds of business PCs, two-thirds, are still on Windows XP," said Tami Reller, corporate vice president of Windows and Windows Live, addressing WPC attendees in a keynote Monday. "Together, we must help our customers migrate more than 300 million desktops to a modern experience."

More than 400 million copies of Windows 7 have been sold to businesses and consumers in the 20 months since the operating system began shipping, Reller said. That's a pace three-times the sales growth of Windows XP after it debuted, and Reller cited such customers as General Motors, Dow and the San Diego Unified School District as customers that have upgraded to Windows 7 -- most with help from partners.

Microsoft calculates that over the next few years customers will purchase upwards of $40 billion in services from solution providers as part of the Windows XP-to-Windows 7 migration, Reller said.

Just a Reminder...

Marketing promotions for Office 365 were everywhere, including on the steps leading up to the exhibition hall. CEO Ballmer touted customer wins for the cloud application set, including the American Red Cross, which will have licenses for 66,000 users by the end of 2011.

In an interview, Kelly Waldher, Microsoft director of online services, cited a Forrester Research study that concluded that businesses can realize a return of 300 percent within three years on their Office 365 investment and that the payback for the product is two months.

While Microsoft hosts Office 365 and handles the billing, Waldher said Microsoft has launched an "order on behalf of" system that solution providers use to place Office 365 subscription orders for their customers, making them the partner of record and making them eligible for the 12-percent margin for the contract's first year and 6 percent for subsequent years. Waldher said Microsoft also is taking steps to pay partners more quickly.

Small Car, Big Promotion

This Mini Cooper parked outside the LACC also promoted Office 365. The car was awarded to a partner in a drawing.

His Honor...

Ballmer, (left), and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, (right), in a press conference on the show floor Monday. Attracting a big conference with big spending companies is always a coup for a city. Before the show the mayor's office estimated that WPC would fill 50,000 hotel rooms and generate $45 million in attendee spending.

Ballmer said he was unaware of which cities were in the running for WPC 2011, when he received an e-mail from Villaraigosa making a final pitch to host the conference. That apparently tipped the scales in LA's favor.

The 2012 edition of the Worldwide Partner Conference will be in Toronto.

Cloud Competency

Speaking about the move to cloud computing, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, said in his keynote Tuesday: "Our mission, simply put, is to lead this transition by cloud-optimizing every business."

Nadella promoted Microsoft's cloud service products, including Windows Azure (which he said has "tens of thousands of customers" with "hundreds more being added every day") and SQL Azure. The division president said 30,000 partners have been trained on Azure competencies.

He also touted Windows Server, the SQL Sever database, and the System Center 2012 systems management software (due later this year) for building private clouds.

Nadella also announced that an early version of the next release of Microsoft's SQL Server, code-named "Denali," is now available as a Technical Community Preview.

ERP And CRM Momentum

Microsoft has released to manufacturing its Dynamics AX 2012 ERP applications and the product is set for a formal launch in early September, said Kirill Tatarinov, president of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division. "Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is the game changer," he said in his keynote speech Tuesday. "This is the product that starts the new era for what ERP business applications ought to be."

Tatarinov said Microsoft's Dynamics CRM software now has 30,000 customers worldwide with 2 million users. The on-demand version, Dynamics CRM Online, will be available as an add-on option to Office 365 starting this fall. And an update of Dynamics CRM Online will be available in the fourth quarter

Tatarinov also took the opportunity to urge partners to try to replace competing CRM applications, referring particularly to Oracle's Siebel CRM apps. "It's a dead product and those [customers] need to move," he said.

Welcoming Sight

Partners cruising around the Expo show floor were greeted with inspirational, wall-sized graphics like this.

Trying Kinect On For Size

Want to see how you look in a wedding dress or some other outfit? This virtual dressing room, called "Swivel" from developer Facecake, uses Microsoft's ground-breaking Kinect technology. WPC attendees got a chance to try it out on the show floor.

Attendees Under Glass

A number of regions (Latin America, Asia Pacific Rim and others) and nearly a dozen individual countries (including the U.S., India, Germany and France) had "regional lounges" on the show floor. The 15,000 attendees came from total of 138 countries, according to Microsoft.

Press Encounters Of The Third Kind

Members of the press used work space and meeting rooms in this structure set up in dead-center of the Expo floor. One public relations agency worker referred to it as "The Death Star."

Show Swag

YouSendIt, a developer of cloud services for storing, sending, receiving and tracking large files, was handing out these cute squishy toys.

Event Competition

ESPN was holding its ESPY Awards event in Los Angeles the same week as WPC and for much of the week ESPN corralled much of the "LA Live" area around the Staples Center for its own festivities. That meant WPC attendees were treated to the occasional celebrity sighting, including Justin Bieber on Wednesday who was among the award presenters.

Detour Ahead

The ESPN festivities also closed off West Olympic Blvd., which created a barrier for WPC attendees moving between the LACC/Staples Center complex and the J.W. Marriott hotel -- the headquarters hotel for the conference and the location of many attendee meetings. At one point workers put up this sign directing confused Microsoft execs and partners around the ESPN event, causing some grumbling among WPC attendees.

Advice From The Channel Chief

Microsoft will spend $5.8 billion on its partner ecosystem in the fiscal year that began July 1, including new incentives for partners to sell cloud solutions, Roskill said in his keynote Wednesday. "A significant portion" of the $5.8 billion would be devoted to partner incentives, Roskill said. Those include rewards for Windows Azure Circle program members for increasing sales of that cloud platform, for Gold certified partners in the Management and Virtualization Solution Program for boosting private cloud systems, and for Gold certified partners in the SQL Server Solution Incentive Program for driving application platform and business intelligence sales.

The new incentives reflect the changing way IT is sold today. "We're moving from a world of transaction to life-cycle solutions. We're moving from a world of one-time revenue opportunities to revenue annuity streams. This brings real benefits in terms of revenue stability and business resilience," Roskill said. The Microsoft Partner Network program "is a great resource. But some of you are not taking full advantage of it today," Roskill said.

Taking A Competitive Stance

Microsoft Chief Operating Office Kevin Turner devoted his keynote speech Wednesday to outlining what he saw as the market opportunities for Microsoft channel partners. And he engaged in a little competitive trash-talking along the way. Microsoft, for example, sees Oracle's customer base as fertile ground for new customers as Oracle's next-generation Fusion applications come to market. "How many happy Oracle customers are you talking to?" Turner asked rhetorically. "It's a huge opportunity for us. We can rescue Oracle customers in a big way." Turner also took aim at Salesforce.com and VMware, arguing that Microsoft has a big price advantage.

Upgrading customers to Windows 7, Office 2010 and IE 9 was a major theme of his pitch. "It is just a tremendous partner opportunity to help customers make that transition," he said, noting there are an estimated 300 million business PCs still running on the decade-old desktop OS. Turner also promoted Microsoft's System Center, Hyper-V and SQL Server products for building private cloud solutions.

To Boldly Go...

As part of the Wednesday keynotes Roskill interviewed Sir Richard Branson, the noted explorer and entrepreneur who started Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Galactic, among other companies.

On his management philosophies: "A lot of us need to be a lot more flexible in how we treat our staffs," he said. And this: "Rules were meant to be broken and I've broken my own rules many times."

In answer to a question from an attendee about what three people, past or present, he would like to have lunch with, Branson named Sir Francis Drake (a fellow explorer), Cleopatra, and Jesus Christ and other religious leaders of the past. On the latter, Branson explained that he'd like to "try to get [Jesus and the religious leaders] to explain to some people in governments today that they didn't mean certain things that governments claim they meant."

Carmageddon?

This banner hung over S. Figueroa Street outside of the LACC, spanning the seemingly-always gridlocked traffic in downtown Los Angeles.

During the WPC, a major topic of conversation was the scheduled closing of Interstate 405, the busiest highway in the LA area, during the upcoming weekend. Word among attendees was that if you didn't leave by Friday, getting to LAX would be impossible. But the expected "carmageddon" never happened.