Pacific Life CIO Exemplifies Microsoft Partner Mantra

Cosgrove is vice president and CIO of Pacific Life Insurance, Newport Beach, Calif. and a big proponent of using partners to build solutions atop the Microsoft stack. Watson vice is Microsoft's vice president, Worldwide Partner Sales and Marketing Group, at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash. Her mantra going into this week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis is "platform plus partners equals Microsoft's strength."

Cosgrove, who by his own estimate regularly uses three partners for infrastructure needs, two for information worker-related matters, a custom application developer, several ISVs for vertical expertise and a licensing partner for Enterprise Agreements, could be the poster boy for that slogan. Among the partners on his roster, Aviva Consulting, Interknowlogy, Meridio, K2.net, Avanade, Hewlett Packard Services, SoftChoice as well as Microsoft Consulting Services.

While Pacific Life, which services not only its own several thousand users, but has to compete for the affections of independent insurance agents nationwide, is not fully a Microsoft shop, Cosgrove says by far most of the innovation especially in customer- or user-facing work is done atop Microsoft's software.

"Cameron loves the partner model—the partners compete for his business and in the end he gets the best possible pricing. He also uses MCS in the role of strategic enterprise strategy consultant although almost all of that business is delivered through partners as well," said Don Nelson, general manager of Microsoft's worldwide partner group told CRN going into this week's show.

Cosgrove's advice to partners is to know what they know and also recognize what they don't know. When he hears a partner say he or she can do it all, he gets suspicious. "No one can do it all."

He also wishes more partners would proactively ally themselves with other partners to forge deep solutions. Many of the partners he has used are now doing that. Rob Speck, president and CEO of Phoenix-based Aviva Consulting, would agree.

Aviva has done Sarbanes Oxley compliance work for Pacific Life and specializes in collaborative and workflow solutions.

"In the Microsoft world, that's Sharepoint, SQL and Biztalk and we look at third party tools—we work very closely with K2.net [a workflow specialist]," Speck says. Of late Aviva has also been working a lot with Meridio, the Waltham, Mass. ISV specializing in Microsoft-based records management and expects a lot more joint work there.

In a world where other vendors pitch accounts as a monolithic force—going in as the prime contractor and bringing in outside partners only as necessary, Cosgrove is enlightened, his partners say.

What does he want to see in a partner? He would tell prospective solution providers to be passionate about their expertise, be able to show ROI in similar deals and not be afraid to say what they're good at and what they're not.

"First and foremost, you have to make your strength relevant to the platform, be passionate about it and how you've worked with it. Show ROI on previous engagements," he notes.

He also said it's important to show flexibility and the willing to evolve with customer needs and the technology. "Partners cannot be stuck in what they did five years ago."

"If someone tells me they can do it all, I start to doubt them. No one can do it all," he noted.

Microsoft partners in the large corporation space say they increasingly face direct competition in accounts from SAP, Oracle, and IBM who tell CIOs that they'll take responsibility for implementation so there will be only "one throat to choke."

Cosgrove says that's a "scare tactic." Even though he promotes this partner model because it gives him deep "domain expertise" in what he needs done, he still says he has one throat to choke: "Microsoft's."