161 - Decoding Microsoft's New Cloud Partner Program at the Launch

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Microsoft’s Partner Program Lead Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

October 3rd was the day of the New Microsoft Cloud Partner Program launch; this episode of Ultimate Guide of Partnering® features Dan Rippey, one of the most influential people shaping the future of Microsoft’s partner programs. Dan is the director of the new Microsoft Cloud Partner Program and joins to help you best align for success by understanding what just rolled out and what plans Microsoft has in store. In this important episode, I was excited to have Dan decoding Microsoft’s new cloud partner program at the launch.

In Dan’s Words

I lead partner programs, strategy, and digital experiences for Microsoft’s Global Partner Solutions organization. Agile trainer and coach. Weekend warrior for a Battalion of service members who defend freedom and democracy on behalf of the United States Army Reserve. Awesome jobs on all sides of life.

Where I’ve been: MIT, EMC² / Dell, Microsoft, Afghanistan, and about a dozen other US & foreign military bases worldwide. I speak a lot of SQL, a little C#, a bit of Arabic, and even less Spanish.

What I’ve done: Contributed a billion USD to Microsoft’s top-line revenue. Returned $20M to Microsoft by removing complexity in the systems/tools that service their customers & partners. Saved EMC² from software bugs that would have otherwise knocked their storage management systems offline. Built custom server hardware (pre-Cloud) for missile defense researchers at MIT. Led teams in combat on foreign soil.

What You’ll Learn

+ What the New Microsoft Cloud Partner Program IS & ISN’T (2:15)
+ What Partners Ask? (8:06)
+ What is in store next for ISVs? (13:57)
+ Should being a managed partner be your objective? (18:15)
+ Why Do Partners Need a Marketplace Strategy? (26:16)
+ His career path – Military + Microsoft (38:28)
+ How partners can best align for success with the new program (46:37)

Why Listen?

Released the day of the NEW Microsoft Cloud Partner Program launch, this episode should clarify how partners can benefit from optimizing their businesses for success to achieve their greatest results this new fiscal year.

WARNING – This episode is exclusively for leaders who care about the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem, the evolution of Microsoft’s Cloud Partner Program, Industry Solutions, and other business priorities from Microsoft. This is a MUST LISTEN for any of the 450,000+ Microsoft Partners.

I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Dan as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

Quote From This Episode

“Okay, so what happens to me in October, I lose everything that I had? Do I need to scramble my team to go after a bunch of things that are different? I’m just kind of confused, right? I don’t really understand what my transition process is going to be like from MPN into the cloud partner program, a lot of anxiety on the transition process.”

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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partner, microsoft, isvs, isv, cosell, customer, built, services, program, business, market, industry, capability, solutions, marketplace, areas, big, storefront, year, solution

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Dan Rippey, Vince Menzione

Dan Rippey 00:00

Okay, so what happens to me in October, I lose everything that I had? Do I need to scramble my team to go after a bunch of things that are different? I’m just kind of confused, right? I don’t really understand what my transition process is going to be like from MPN into the cloud partner program, a lot of anxiety on the transition process.

Announcer 00:16

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven sales and partner executive brings together leaders to discuss transformational trends and deconstruct successful strategies to help technology leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione 00:39

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right. Optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. Coding Microsoft’s new cloud partner program, why it’s shaping the future direction of the channel, and how you can optimize for success as a partner. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering is one of the most influential people shaping the future of Microsoft’s partner programs. Dan Rippy, is the director of the new Microsoft cloud partner program, and joins us to help you best align for success by understanding what just rolled out and what plans Microsoft has in store. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed welcoming Dan Rippy. Dan, I am so excited to have you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You’re the director for the Microsoft cloud partner program, a topic clearly on the minds of most Microsoft partners these days. So I’m really excited for this conversation.

Dan Rippey 01:55

Oh, it’s my pleasure. I’ve been following the work that you and your team drive. And I’m just so thankful for everything that you do for the channel, the advice that you give is always rock solid. And I see our partners benefit from modalities like this. Thank you for driving us.

Vince Menzione 02:07

So July was a really big month for you. But October promises to be even bigger

Dan Rippey 02:15

is a perfect starting point. On October 3 This year, we begin to say goodbye to the NPM program, and its legacy, silver and gold endorsements, and we welcome in the new Microsoft cloud partner program. This aligns our program structure to Microsoft’s six core solution areas. And so one of the major initiatives behind the change is to create clarity for our mutual customers. And really to simplify things for you as our partners, we do that by dropping our 18 Silver and 18 gold and market competencies. And we simplify the program. So the way that we go to market and sell as a business is now aligned with the way we go to market and sell programmatically with you with our partners.

Vince Menzione 02:53

Such a big announcement. And I want to highlight a few things from this conversation right Microsoft has been doing partnerships better and longer than just about anybody. First off. And I’ve always talked to partners about aligning with Microsoft’s priorities and scorecard, what I believe you’ve done here this simplification process is you’re helping the partners better align to what’s important to Microsoft.

Dan Rippey 03:16

Yeah, if you look at the way we build capacity, we Microsoft has a big and diverse business. But it’s actually much simpler than most people think our business groups and our product teams are aligned by solucionario. And so we have three that now are core to the Azure business with digital app innovation, data and AI and infrastructure, one with modern work that you actually used to be combined with security, but we’ve recently pulled out and elevated security as its own solution area. And then the last one with business applications, which covers dynamics and the entirety of the power platform, you had to be on the inside with Microsoft to understand how we were structured and understand how to plug your sales motion into that business model. But now it’s front and center. Everybody sees it we’ve exposed ourselves and the way we’re structured and the way we go to market so that our partners feel like they can plug into that without this need for a translation dictionary, and trying to map their business model to ours.

Vince Menzione 04:08

Many of our listeners may want to better understand from your perspective, what changed about the programs at Microsoft, and what has stayed the same. Our starting

Dan Rippey 04:17

point is always customer trust. If we have any potential for erosion of customer trust in the channels capability. It’s hugely detrimental to our business, and even more detrimental for our partners. And so when we looked at where we had come from, there was a lot of strength in the competency ecosystem when it was first built. When you flash back to the early 2000s. Right? The cloud didn’t even exist yet or soft, hadn’t birthed or killed a Windows phone. We didn’t have a search engine, none of that stuff existed. We had a Productivity Suite with Office, and we had an operating system but we were also in the early stages of building our business applications, our Dynamics business out and the multitude of acquisitions that created that. So when we started with a competency structure, we needed a way to classify partner capability And we decided that competence was a strong market word and competencies would be the way we represent that. And they serve us the business really well for a long time because it led us segment partner capabilities that lead partners pick up multiple capabilities and areas representative for their business. And we could tie things to it we could tie incentive programs to it marketplace presence to it cosell motions to add all of that. But in the end, as the business got bigger, and the portfolio got more diverse, what we realized we had was this house for everybody. We had one home for our services partners for ISVs, our OEM device partners, our IoT, and mixed reality business, all these things emerged along the way, and we just shove everybody in this house, and we had genericized, the look and feel of the home to accommodate the needs of everybody. And in the end, what we realized is that our customers really had a hard time stepping through that house and understanding based on these endorsements that we had given on silver and gold competencies, what our partner’s core capabilities were, because the truth is, most of our partners just went to market buy the precious metal designation they had, they said, I’m a gold Microsoft partner, I’m a silver Microsoft partner. But what really mattered was a differentiator tied to that say I’m a I’m a cloud vis apps partner at the gold tier with Microsoft. But we started to lose our way in the market with that. And so we said, You know what, we don’t need one house for everybody, we needed a neighborhood of homes, we need a house for services partners house for IoT mixed reality, a house for OEM devices, a house for ISVs. And even each one of those houses might have a couple of doorways might have a door for startup businesses might have a door for breath businesses who are just trying to get established in market, maybe only working in one or two GEOS might have a doorway for big multinational, well established technology firms. So that’s what we’re building now is that neighborhood, the first house on the street is our house primarily designed for services partners with the solution partner designations. And I’ll say the paints kind of drawing on the walls of that one, but we unlock that house on October 3, and we start welcoming partners into it. It’s not to say that a house is exclusive for services partners, we would welcome a partner of any type into that home. But the business model that was used to create that house and kind of the furniture, the fit and finish, the design and structure, the house is really built for that services model is assessing our partners based on three things, a portfolio of skilled professionals, a track record of driving successful customer outcomes, and a history of performance, we know that we also need to build houses for all of these other partner types that I’ve mentioned, and ISV is certainly front and center at the at the entryway to the neighborhood to say, hey, this house has long since passed to do, let’s get to together and let’s start constructing this as quickly as we can. But I think the same is can be said for all the other homes. When you look at mcpp. When you look at the cloud partner program a year or two from now, what you’re gonna see is that full neighborhood built out.

Vince Menzione 07:40

So what I heard you say is that the Microsoft cloud partner program is going to be a neighborhood, and there’s going to be separate homes or there’s going to be differentiation between and I think there was a level of ambiguity, I would say when the announcements were made back earlier this year. So I appreciate the clarity. Is there anything else from frequently asked questions that you get today from partners that you believe needs clarity,

Dan Rippey 08:06

good, one lot of anxiety on the transition process? Right? Change is hard. And we get feedback from partners constantly that says, keeping up with the pace of change at Microsoft can be burdensome. And I think we’ve really tried to take that common in stride. And we tried to learn from areas where changes landed Well, we’ve enabled our market makers to really slingshot ahead of our business and set the pace with the market and where we’re going together. And also looked at some of the changes where we’ve had negative reaction to and say, Could we have landed this a different way? Could we have given partners more notice? Could we have opened up opportunities for engagement and feedback. And so on the backside of those learnings, I think there’s two things that really stand out for me. First one is, the way we deployed, the new cloud partner program changes was really the first time we’ve tried to write this playbook on saying, let’s announce this at least six months before it goes live. And then let’s just go into listening mode. Let’s do world tours, let’s talk to partners, let’s set up advisory councils, let’s do co design sessions with our ecosystem. And let’s figure out in these changes, what’s working and what’s not. And that six months has been an incredible runway for our team to learn from partners on some of the things that we’ve had to adjust along the way. And we’ve actually made those adjustments we’ve recently we’ve made adjustments to the business applications designation, we’ve rolled back some of the requirements out of the Azure data and AI solution partner designation for some exams, that didn’t really make sense there. Because our partners came with that feedback. And the market validated it right when we bring that to customers and say, Hey, how do you perceive this? What do you think? What what do you think of a partner who has this capability? It helps us fine tune these programs before we ever turn them on. The second piece is partners are saying okay, so what happens to me in October, I lose everything that I had, do I need to scramble my team to go after a bunch of things that are different. And in this, we’ve actually tried to make FY 23 A year of transition and telling partners benefits that you had most partners really lean heavily on software licenses, Azure credits, partner technical consultation pre sales advisory services, we’re not going to change anything. So if you’re a silver or gold partner today, you’re going to go into this year, and the benefit package is going to be completely unchanged this October, we’re also going to extend that. So when you hit your normal annual renewal phase that happens to every year, we’re going to let you renew those silver or gold benefits next year. And we currently have no plans sunset date for those legacy benefit kits. The other big piece partners asked about is lots of things have used gold competency status as a precursor requirement, right? You look at our incentive programs, you look at our commercial marketplace and the ability to publish services into our app source storefront, you look at our cosell ecosystem and the requirements to get cosell ready. All those things have always hinged on gold status. We’re not going to change that this year. And so everything that you’ve qualified for historically, you’re going to continue to qualify for in FY 23. And we’ll make adjustments along the way as we approach fy 24. We’ll start rethinking our incentive program qualifications are cosell programs. But we want this year to be about a soft landing for partners that says, hey, take some time, understand how you want to invest and structure your business with Microsoft move when you’re ready, and give us feedback. If there’s something that’s working for you let us know. But more importantly, if there’s something that’s not working for you, you’re probably not the only partner that it’s not working for. And we need to hear from you. Because if it’s an area, we can help rethink some of the structure of the program or rethink our transition timelines, we’re going to do that

Vince Menzione 11:22

what are the key watering holes or listening mechanisms that you’re using today, Dan,

Dan Rippey 11:27

there’s three. The first one is upstream. We’ve now started a process of doing co design sessions with partners. And we talked about this quite a bit it inspired. But for our ISV programs, we’re actually bringing in ISVs of all different types, sizes, geographies, maturity models, and saying, Hey, come on up to the dry erase board. And we’ll hand you a pen uncap the pen and help us design the program that works for you, and the program that works for your customers. And those have been so valuable for us, because in the end, you end up with a lot of different drawings from a lot of different partner types. But you can create commonality and start to build program structure that works for most partners. And then you can think about those outliers and say, how do we embrace their business models as well. The second one is we have partner advisory councils, where we do a lot of pre testing with partners and said, Hey, this is the direction Microsoft thinks we’re gonna go, what’s your feedback to this, and they really help us get deep in program requirements. For example, this partner capability score that’s now core to the cloud partner program, they helped us right size, the weighted metrics, we put on each score, how many points you should get for a person who passes in the intermediate skilling exam versus an advanced skill exam, all those things where you really need to get in the minutiae of the program. And you need feedback from a representative sample of partners that said, hey, if we were to turn this on, would it be met with resistance? Or would it be met with celebration? And then the last one is as our support team, honestly, I mean, we obsess over the data that comes in every ticket, every phone call to our support staff, whether the partner saying something as tactical as hey, I understand my capability score. And I think the numbers that I’m seeing in the skilling metric are wrong, too, as broad as saying AI, I’m just kind of confused, right? I don’t really understand what my transition process is going to be like, from MPN, into the cloud partner program, we aggregate all that data up. And we go back to the drawing board and say, how could we have fed answers to this so that partners don’t have to be on the phone for hours with our support team. And we can give them quick answers in the experience to give them clarity on where we’re going and how they’re going to get there and what their footprint looks like today, and what it’s going to look like tomorrow, we strive to build those digital experiences to be self service as much as we can. Our support teams really are the litmus test, when the things that we are attempting aren’t working really well of what we can go back and fix.

Vince Menzione 13:34

I love what you’re doing here. And as you might know, I work quite a bit with ISPs. And you mentioned ISPs here in terms of working through and whiteboarding, what needs to happen. I was hoping you could share more about the emphasis on improved engagement with ISPs. I know you and Julie talked about Industry Solutions is a big topic area. How can ISV partners best the line and engage to drive deeper here,

Dan Rippey 13:57

this topic probably gets the most attention from almost anything my team’s talking about these days. Number one, because there’s just a massive army of people at Microsoft that are embraced and working to build for this ISV model success. And number two, because I think we’re a little bit late into market with ISV offers. And I’m open to say that because it true Microsoft fashion, we try to get things right on day one. And we’ve watched our competitors kind of work around this area. And we’ve seen some things in the market that work really well. And we’ve seen the market attempts and things that aren’t working really well. And we’ve taken those learnings in stride and said how can we when we deploy things for ISVs we really got to hit the nail on this one. And so that when I talk about the neighborhood of homes, this is the next house that’s going to under construction. If you imagine if you’re on a walk into the halls of Microsoft and you walk down the hallway for the partner team, you’d see this house being built right now in conversations that are happening in conference rooms with our executive leadership team with leaders across our global demand Center, our global partner solutions organization or commercial marketplace team, our partner center engineering team, everybody’s really rallying around this ISV persona. on making sure that we get this right. And there’s a couple of things, I think it’s good for the ecosystem to know. And so this house, if you can envision the house for ISVs, in the front of the neighborhood is going to have a couple of doorways, we know that we need a door for startup ISVs. And we’ve actually delivered that it’s in market right now under the founders hub, you can go to your favorite search engine and search Microsoft founders hub, you’ll see those offerings that are in market for early stage startups. And there’s actually a whole maturity model that for startups that the founders hub team has, and they try to right size, the level of benefits based on where you are in the startup process. For our breadth ISVs. Really the big kind of core base of technology partners, many of these partners are trying to get their first or second solution in market, they may be trying to Geo expand a solution they’ve had some success with and they want to start evolving that into be available for other markets. When you look at our ISV Success program, you can go to your favorite search engine and search Microsoft ISV success, or you can just shortcut it go to microsoft.com forward slash ISV. What you’re going to see is a program that really embraces that and they’ve actually accumulated a set of benefits, I think the total value of those is worth almost $130,000 that are designed for ISVs software, licenses, Cloud Credits, technical consultation, pre sales, advisory services, all the things that an ISV needs not only to get into our marketplace, but also to be very successful once they’re in market. And that becomes really a bridge to selling and CO selling with Microsoft. The last door we’ve got to create and this is the one where we started co design sessions around the time of inspires that third doorway for well established technology providers that probably have a number of solutions in the market. They’re probably representing the saleability of those solutions in multiple geographies. These partners are telling us, hey, we want to be badged and branded differently. We can do business at a level of scale, that is globally we can we can close multimillion dollar transactions with Microsoft’s field sellers very quickly. I know that this ecosystem wants to be endorsed that way. And they also want to be endorsed by industry, they want to say these are the solutions we built. There are certain key industries, we target these four that we have a depth of expertise on. And so that’s my team’s job right now is building those programs for those ISVs. Once that’s ready, I think we’ve got to package this house a little bit better, I think we can go to market and say, Hey, ISVs, here’s your home, you’ve got a couple of different doorways to enter the home, you get to pick based on where your business is, at this moment in time, what’s the right door for you. And we’ll show you the pros of each one. And we’ll help you we’ll help lead you through that doorway when the moment is appropriate. But we’re trying to get this right, as much partner feedback as we can get on this one. I would love for that to come back in from the channel.

Vince Menzione 17:29

Yeah, I would love to provide feedback back through this podcast to you, Dan, I think they’re doing some really great things. I think about this when the program was first launched. And I think about don’t forget ISVs stand for independent software vendors, which have their own standalone businesses that don’t necessarily just rely on Microsoft, and you need the program needs to support that which I believe you’re doing here. And these well established organizations as well. Like how are you thinking about the alignment there is there’s a maturity model, I gather from here, right? Founder founders have taken care of startups ISV success dealing with what we call breath ISVs. That means certainly earlier stage, not necessarily managed by Microsoft Partner Manager. And then the well established where there’s, I call it more white glove support for their relationship. Yep.

Dan Rippey 18:15

Yep, you got it. And I think one of the key pieces is everybody makes this assumption like that there’s this pyramid, and you’ve got to climb to the top of the pyramid as fast as you can. And actually, I don’t think that’s true from looking at a lot of different partner models. And looking at the ways partners have found success for us. A lot of times I get asked, Hey, how do I get a partner development manager and account manager PDM, from Microsoft? And I’ll counter that question, say, Why do you think you need a PDM? And what do you think that person is going to do for you? I think the answer is when you look, programmatically these different doors, understand a set targets for where you want your business to be with Microsoft. And an easy example I use is imagine if you are getting a new cosell engagement from Microsoft’s field every couple of days, every two or three days, right? Everybody thinks man, that would be great. My sales teams phone rings every two or three days from another Microsoft seller trying to bring the business. But what happens if they’re bringing you business in markets, you’re not ready to scale into yet? What happens if they’re looking for capabilities in the solutions you haven’t matured to yet, you now have aced engagement with Microsoft’s field sellers that’s bringing you into sales engagements that you your business might just not be prepared for it this time. And that’s okay. You may find, hey, the solutions aren’t as customizable as we want them to be. We’re still building towards that. So you get in front of these customers, but with Microsoft’s field and you realize we’re not really set up for this yet. We need to we need to grow a little bit more. We need to invest in our solutions a bit more. We need to invest what Microsoft a bit more so that we can be invited into these sales engagements. Take the time that you need to do that, whether that’s weeks, months or years, think about how and where you want to scale with Microsoft and adjust yourself programmatically to that. Let that be the guide that starts to show Microsoft hey, here’s what how we want to engage with you Microsoft. Here’s the level of here’s the geographies we want to work with you And here’s the solutions that we’ve really invested deeply in our business. Here’s how customizable these are, here’s the customer scenarios, we can really tie these into, or the sales plays using Microsoft vernacular, where these solutions that can be directly correlated with, here’s the industries we sell into. But more importantly, here’s what we don’t, here’s the industries we’re not ready for. Here’s the sales plays or solution areas that were not fully capable. And it’s okay to tell Microsoft that it’s okay to ask Microsoft for that level investment to get ready. But just find the place that works for you and let the program cater to those needs.

Vince Menzione 20:31

I’m happy to announce that partner tap has become a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering partner tap is the only partner ecosystem platform designed for the enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align channel teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share, while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have them on board, be on the lookout for events, content and more. And I’m so excited to continue working together and our exciting year ahead. So I want to come back to something you said you mentioned this, I hear this all the time, right? We want to be a managed partner, we want the attention of Microsoft, if you’re not a managed partner, how do you get the attention? We grow? We’re going to talk about marketplaces here in a moment. But like how do you think through this? Like, what does it mean? Why do I need to go put all my deals in partner center if I’m not managed by Microsoft, I guess is what I would say. Yeah, this

Dan Rippey 21:32

question comes up all the time. I think the key is two things. One, when we structure the program, we set targets for every every step of the program, right? So the solution partner designations, these new six designations that are landing in October. And then if you look at each designation, there’s generally five, six or seven specializations that nest into those they used to be called advanced specializations. Now they’re they’re just called specializations. These are effectively our our sales workloads, right? So we call them sales plays in years past, we call them solution plays now, but what we’re doing in all of this is we’re looking at incoming customer demand globally global customer demand and saying, how many partners do we think we need in every solution area and every subordinate specialty, or specialization of those solution areas? What do we think the right number of partners is in our ecosystem to be able to service that global customer demand. And it’s hard to get that right, because if you have too many partners, instead of managing expectations, you all you do is manage disappointment, where the partner says, Look, I did all this work, I got this endorsement, I build capabilities. And I waited, my sales team waited for the phone to ring and it never rang. We didn’t get any leads from your commercial storefront, we didn’t get any leads from your qualified referrals program. We didn’t get any leads from the partner directory, we didn’t get any leads from Microsoft’s field sellers. And that’s the worst outcome for me, because I looked at I’m like you, you’ve already executed the investment. And you can’t, there’s no refund on that. And it didn’t yield any net new business with Microsoft, we also look at the opposite of the deficit of capacity, where we have so much customer demand coming out in the workload, and we’re trying to connect that demand with partners who can service it, and we don’t have enough partners, because then we start that’s where we’re Microsoft really falls down because customers are coming saying I want this thing. We’re saying, Okay, our partner channel drives most of the business for that thing that you’re asking for. But our partners are busy, they’re fully saturated with business against that workload. And that’s where we leave money on the table, right? So it’s a loss for our partners, because I wasn’t able to make that connection is a loss. For Microsoft, it’s a loss for the customer. It’s everybody loses. What we strive to do is we strive to right size, that model between incoming customer demand and the number of partners that we need globally to service it. We slice that by region, and we say we need this many partners in Western Europe has many partners in Southeast Asia, this many partners in North America. And we try to make those connections and recruit partners into those programs to make sure that we’ve got the right number within that threshold of service capacity without either an abundance or a deficit. So for our partners, what this means is look at where Microsoft is going. And I think this like influencers like you events do a very good job at this, at creating a roadmap for the channel is saying, this is something Microsoft is investing in. If you look at something as simple as what we did two years ago, when we split, modern work and security used to be together as a combined solution area. When Microsoft split that out. What you can see between the lines is happening is Microsoft’s making a big investment in its security solution area by bringing that up as a standalone, and then creating specializations that nest within that, because security is an area of focus and investment for our business and for years. And so as a partner, the key piece is figure out how to plug into that look at the areas where Microsoft has deficiencies and partner capacity. And your organization has the capability to build solutions, services, intellectual property offerings against those that you can bring to market because as we start to saturate our field and our commercial marketplace with incentive programs to prioritize those things, that’s when we can start bringing you new business faster. I’d say that if you have an account manager, they’re probably helping doing some of this mapping with you right there. be creating a multi year investment strategy for your business. They’re investigating areas where your business can make new growth investments in areas where Microsoft is going to start to incentivize down the line. And so it might speed up the conversation a little bit. But honestly, if you just follow Microsoft closely and you follow the influence for communities that track our programs, you can get the same level of information. What you

Vince Menzione 25:21

said is so profound, I talk about agility is one of the seven key characteristics of successful partner, and what you said regarding that listening mechanism. Listen to where your partner is going, where is Microsoft headed, and intuitively knowing and investing in areas, maybe micro investing in areas where you might fail fast. But ultimately, you’ll find the areas where your greatest source of success or future success lies. I want to dive into one of these actually, so marketplaces, people are still questioning like, why should I invest in marketplaces, these ISVs are saying like what is important to me, I already have a channel, I already have a go to market. But marketplaces were front and center at the Inspire conference, and you had featured previous guests, Jake Swenson and tackle with regards to an announcement. Why do ISV partners need a clear marketplace strategy?

Dan Rippey 26:16

Yeah, this one comes up constantly. And I think the buying patterns in our industry have evolved, what used to be centralized in big central IT shops, and then that kind of CIO to CTO transition that It’s decentralized. Now, you look at if you look at some of the work Gartner has done on the new chasm of buying in a typical SMB or enterprise organization, there are so many decision makers involved in the buying process, not necessarily in these big central IT firms anymore, that you’ve got to create this credible place where customers can go and say, okay, when I think about any Microsoft workload, where do I start? Where do I at least see a catalog of solutions that have been designed to solve as a customer our needs at this moment in time, so we can deploy something quickly celebrate a rapid win. And if we need to customize, we can work with a partner who has the capability and competence to be able to do that to customize the solution for our business. Our commercial storefronts app source in the Azure marketplace are really designed to do that. And so when you think about this, where the storefront started in their infancy, it was effectively a directory of solutions, right? As they were, we call them contact me listings, where the partner could showcase the things that they had built. They could align those by industry by solucionario, by workload, by technical capability by region and GEO. But at the end of the day, you are clicking a big blue button that said, I’m a customer, this thing looks interesting. I want a salesperson to call me and give me a demo or a test drive or maybe talk about what my challenges are, we’ve evolved from that. And so now it’s really the center stage is transactional offers in our marketplace. And it’s always a couple of things. One that our many of our partners actually need, they want to host billing and invoicing on Microsoft, they want the solutions to sit on subscriptions that are hosted centrally, so they can get accountability and record of all the transaction and Azure consumer revenue they’re driving, but they want their customers to have a trusted way to transact those offers through multiple gos multiple currencies, to be able to deploy things quickly. If you think about a smaller mid sized partner who’s trying to build all those capabilities, it’s incredibly burdensome to have to create all that from scratch, or to have to go to another independent provider and put all those marketplace logistics in place. You can walk onto our storefront today, and you can have these things deployed in a matter of days. Now, the other piece is customers want a sense of security, right? They want to know, every solution that’s in Microsoft storefront. Has it been vetted by Microsoft? Does it contain malware, is it well architected on whatever Azure services it’s going to use? Are there principles and practices of security that were implemented in the way the solution is deployed, and was initially architected, we do all of that. And so for a partner who’s never been through this, this process of deploying a transactable offer on our storefronts, I can tell you, it’s pretty rigorous. When you go and click the Submit button to get your offer deployed. We have a certification team that’s going to look at everything, they’re gonna look at your technical architectural diagrams, they’re gonna look at the Azure services you’re using, they’re gonna look at the way you’ve deployed, they’re gonna look at the bench of your sales team, and where that sales team sits, to be able to answer the call, they’re gonna look at whether or not you have a demo, or test drive available for partners to download and start interacting with this thing, before they ever enter the process of a sales engagement. The marketplace is enabled all that. And so for many of our partners, it’s been a game changer to be able to just walk onto that infrastructure that’s already built for them. And I think for some of our bigger partners, there’s a maturation process of getting them ready for that for those partners that say, look, I already have all this I don’t why do I need to do this? I think there’s a reality of you look at our even our partner reported ACR programs and our CO sell business transactable offers and market actually solve for a lot of that it lets us reliably know how’s a partner transacting their business with Microsoft? How much consumption are they driving because we want to give partners credit for all that hard work. And we don’t really want to burden you with having to report all that manually. We just want it to flow through the marketplace. And that’s where we’re going with cosell.

Vince Menzione 30:01

He said some very interesting things here, I just want to amplify a few points, right? The customer buying decisions are happening differently today are happening in the lines of business. It’s not the CIO shop that’s making all the decisions, right. And the seats at the table that are helping influence that I think about this ecosystem strategy and how marketplaces become the aggregator of your ecosystem strategy. And allowing you to point customers or point a partner, in fact, might be an influencer partner might be a transactional partner might be a support partner, back to the marketplace solution. It’s fun, it’s a fungible offer, then also just the simplicity of driving the solution. And let’s not forget leveraging, right, the what is it 50,000, Microsoft sellers, the 17 million partner feet on the street. And, in fact, the millions of customers that can access and buy off in the marketplace.

Dan Rippey 30:54

Yeah, this is what a lot of the a lot of our partners actually never see this. There’s another side of our storefront that’s not exposed publicly. And we’ve called the cosell catalog, but it’s really a it’s a different entry point into app source in the Azure Marketplace. That’s designed just for Microsoft employees. And imagine if you could walk into favorite store, right? You go into Costco, and it has a little placard on a product, it says the price, couple features of the product, maybe the manufacturer’s name, the SKU, whatever the item number that the store has on it. But if you could flip that over, and you can see, how many times is that product been transacted this month? What’s the rate of return? What’s the level of customer satisfaction with the product? How many people who look at the product actually execute a purchase on it? We effectively have that for our field. Because when we are going to cosell with a partner, we want to know all those things, right? We want to know what is the time that transaction between Microsoft requesting cosell engaging with the partner and the partner actually accepting or rejecting that opportunity to engage with us? What’s the win rate? What’s the average deal size? What’s the deal? Velocity? What’s the partners track record of cosell with us historically? How many markets? Is that product co sold in? Where does that partner have their Salesforce positioned and oriented globally so that we can call salespeople in that partners organization and whatever market we’re trying to close the deal in all those things, right, we make a multitude of data we make available to our field sellers, because it helps them be better informed in the buying process. And there’s this stigma that like to get into this cosell world, you got to be the best partner, you got to be Microsoft’s top 1% or top 10% of partners. And that’s actually not true. Every marketplace solution that we have, we expose and make available to our field sellers. There may be areas where sellers on the phone with a customer customer defines their needs, sellers immediately translating those needs to workloads to products to industry to line of business. And they’re narrowing down their search results in the catalog saying how many partners do we have that built this thing that can solve this customer’s problem as quickly as possible? That’s so powerful. Yeah. Oh, power. Yeah. And they might find, I mean, that may be a top to your partner, the sellers are certainly looking for certain endorsements to know that we have, we can reliably co sell with a partner. But a lot of times when we look at like niche solutions and things that some really interesting breadth partners have built, the sellers are discovering these in their catalog and saying, You know what, I think that’s a perfect match to what this customer needs. And it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re not if you don’t, if you’re not an Azure expert, MSP or you don’t have an advanced specialization, if that seller can quickly discover that solution and find it’s going to be a great match for their customer, they’ll take a bet on you. And I think for partners, keep that in mind. And like, let them roll the dice and give them the ability to find you and connect with

Vince Menzione 33:34

you some really interesting food for thought for me, and for the partners that are listening today. So I want to make sure we amplify that. But this is the ultimate guide to partnering. And from your perspective, what do you see from the best of the best partner? Stan,

Dan Rippey 33:49

I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. One is clarity of understanding. And we touched on this earlier, but clarity of understanding on where Microsoft is going with its product roadmap with industry prioritization, new solution areas we’re investing in, and really staying with that. I think the second thing is, as a partner, especially if you have a big business, really understand what’s working for you, and leverage that and more importantly, understand what’s not, and either fix it or deprioritize. It there’s, you’d be surprised when I look at partners that how many solutions they have in our marketplace, or in our cosell catalog. And I’d say hey, you got 100 solutions here, nine of these are driving big business for you. And the 91 of these are doing almost nothing for you. Why are you carrying around this baggage of the solutions that have like either the market doesn’t want or they’re Miss position in the market doesn’t understand what they do fix them or get rid of them. And so I think that like ruthless prioritization of how can you find success with Microsoft, and as soon as you see that inkling of success, accelerate those factors as much as you can, and deprioritize the stuff that’s not working anymore. And then the last one is connections with each other like this p2p concept, and Microsoft’s tried to get involved in this before we’re always awkward and how we facilitate these collaborations but I look at the relationship between a services partner and an ISV. And what a good services partner can do for an ISV that’s built really interesting intellectual property. Microsoft can’t broker those relationships for you. But industry events, a lot of these big service partners and CSPs are doing these kinds of Shark Tank style opportunities for partners to come in and showcase what they do. Think about that. Think about the durability of your business, not just between your business relationship with Microsoft, but your business relationship with the entire community. That is the cloud partner program.

Vince Menzione 35:28

So Dan, you’re joining us for a very special event, or partners are going to be in the room and you talk about partner to partner I think there’s a key that’s a key aspect of what this event will be about this ultimate partnerships mastermind, what should partners attending the event expect or look for from your keynote session?

Dan Rippey 35:45

Now I’m going to talk about one of your peers Vince and another big industry influencer recently published an article where he, he calls Microsoft’s partner ecosystem, a bellwether for the industry, as humbled as I was by that the reality is the big four big five in the in my ecosystem, my big competitors in the partner space, we all kind of chase each other every everybody thinks that man, what we’re doing is messed up. And let’s go look at our competitors and see what they’re doing. And let’s figure out how to respond to what they’re doing. As I recruit industry leaders and have worked with a team that’s been moved throughout the ecosystem, I always realize that we all have the same perspective of each other, everybody thinks that their competitor is doing it better than they are. And what I realize now is that there are a lot of eyes on Microsoft’s on where we’re going, not only from our partner ecosystem, but the competitive landscape as well. And that puts a level of pressure on the team to keep us competitive and keep opportunities in the market that are very much relevant for our ecosystem, I think what differentiates Microsoft is, we’ve got almost half a million organizations that work with us. That is, when you look at the number of employees of those half a million companies, it is millions and millions of people that come in inside Microsoft’s ecosystem, every week, every month every year to work with us and transact. And where we work really hard is to take care of numbers that large, right, and we’ve got one of our starter kit programs, we have over 100,000 partners in that one alone. And so anytime you make adjustments to these programs, you’re not impacting a couple of partners, you’re impacting 1000s of partners, and you want to make sure that you’re getting it right. But you also want to be a bellwether for the industry, you want to go bold, you want to make big kind of industry market making decisions, and you want to signal to the channel and your competitors channels, this is where we’re going. This is how we are going to go to market and sell with our partners for the next probably one to two decades. And so when I meet with your event that’s coming up, really, I want it to be a bi directional exchange between me and the industry leaders that you invite into that session, to just let’s get real about that. Let’s get real about what we think the next decade in tech looks like. Let’s get real about the value of these channels and the way we will go to market and sell together. Let’s talk about what’s working, and celebrate it. And more importantly, let’s talk about what’s not working and come up with a plan to fix

Vince Menzione 37:54

it. So excited to have you, Dan, come to our event. So as you might know, from previous interviews, I’m fascinated with the career journey. And I’ve also had the opportunity to work in public sector with some amazing leaders in the military. In fact, my 911 post, I talked about my really profound respect for those who are been in service for our nation, your are major in the Army Reserves, you’ve been active service. I’d love to hear more about how you got here at Microsoft into this role. How your career and your journey led you here.

Dan Rippey 38:28

Yeah, that’s a great question. And what First off, I want to thank you, I read your 911 posts, and it was very much relevant and moving. Thank you for it was incredibly well compiled. So thank you for putting the time I think you really paid an honor and a tribute to the sacrifices that that day and the fact that even though a lot of years have passed between now and 2001. But I think for the generation that was there was alive and very much present when that moment unfolded, that stays with us, right? I mean, we’re never going to forget that. And I appreciate you keeping that memory alive. On the army side, I’ve got kind of a cool story I was. So I’ll at the end of this, you’ll be able to guess my age. But I was in university at the early stages of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars happening simultaneously. And I come from a long line of service members in my family and I had made the decision as a very young man that I was going to join the military. I just didn’t really know how to do it. And I when I figured out college was going to be for me and I wanted to commission as an officer because I was I always kind of envisioned life beyond the military and what would be next. And so I did an ROTC program at my school in Boston, and I was ready to go. The mantra then for ROTC cadets is when you graduated, you were going to go to your basically an infantry school, all of us would go to Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and you go to a short specialty school beyond that, and then you would deploy to the Middle East. That was the plan for all of us from like day one of those commissioning programs. That’s what they told you. And so you had that mindset. And I got really lucky that school I was in was a co op school. And so we would do these six month inter extended internships in the industry while we were going through school, and I was I was in a computer engineering program. My last Co Op I did with Microsoft. I was like This is the 21 year old version of me. And I got accepted by Microsoft. I moved from Boston to Seattle for six months, I had an amazing internship, I actually worked for the team that was building the partner membership Center. This is the thing we now call partner center. I was an engineer on that team. Last day, my internship, I walked out of the building for the last time after saying goodbye to my colleagues, and I could feel somebody behind me. And so I turned it looked over my shoulder as I walked out the door, and it was my manager, and she had an envelope in her hand, and she handed it to me, and she said, hey, when you get home, open the envelope and call me when you’re ready. And so I didn’t, I think I made it three steps out of the building before I just tore the envelope open and ejected the contents. And it was an offer letter from Microsoft. So I like any college kid who just got their first full time job offer, I don’t know, probably sprinted back to the car, called my parents first, and then went back to school a week later, and I sat down with my ROTC Battalion Commander, I showed him the letter, and he said, Dan, you’d be crazy not to take this for a company with goals as audacious as Microsoft, he said, let’s set you up, take this job offer, because you’re still gonna go to the Middle East, you’re still going to do your army stuff. But let’s get you set up in Redmond first, then we’ll get you back down to Fort Benning, Georgia, we’ll get you through your training. And we’ll figure out next steps beyond that. So they switched me over to an Army Reserve commission. And I’ve been with Microsoft. And the Army actually the same length of time, both started the same year, and now of almost 16 years in the Army, and in almost 16 years at Microsoft, a couple of trips to Afghanistan between then and now. But the company has been incredible. I just the amount of resources they make available for reservists and veterans and National Guard’s men and women has been really, really phenomenal. And it’s been a good pairing, because what I do in the military is totally different than what I do at Microsoft. But the fundamentals of leadership and building direction and motivating people, those things are evergreen, right? It doesn’t matter where you go, the fundamentals of leading human beings is always the same. And so it’s been a lot of fun to have those two parts of my life working in tandem. Not always easy, but always, always a lot of fun. And I’m proud to say that I’m going to stick up for Lieutenant Colonel in the next couple of years, I’m going to stick with the Army Reserve for a bit longer until I meet everything that I feel like I came to do there and just incredibly proud of the men and women that still put the uniform on. And despite a world of uncertainty and global conflict, the fact that we still have men and women step up willing to serve, it always just reminds me of how inspired I am to be in the position that I am and how lucky I am to have the honor to serve these men and women that are coming through in their young careers as well.

Vince Menzione 42:20

So well said, Ben, thank you for your commitment. And thank you for your service. That was such a amazing story. Such a profound story. I love the fact that Mike Microsoft’s respect for an inclusiveness for those who serve. Thank you for your service.

Dan Rippey 42:36

Appreciate that, Vince, thank you.

Vince Menzione 42:37

So let’s have a little bit of fun. So one of my favorite questions, Dan, you’re hosting a dinner party, and an amazing dinner party. And you can pick any place in the world to host this dinner party. We could talk about that also. But you can invite any three guests to this party from the present? Or the past? Whom would you invite? And why? And this

Dan Rippey 42:58

is a tough one, I think I’m gonna give a kind of different answer on this one. The first one I would do is Gordon Moore, because I won’t restate Moore’s Law on this call. I think there’s probably enough familiarity with it. But to have the foresight of how fast technology would move when you look at the adoption curve of anything else in the history of humanity, the way technology has accelerated in a way it’s changed adoption curves, since then, on everything that we produce and technology to have had the foresight that Mr. Moore had when he founded that principle at Intel, I think was just like, I mean, he just have that lens to see in the future. And there’s not like a there’s always a few leaders who have that. And you don’t know how they have it or how they built it or if they’re just brilliant or just lucky. But Gordon Moore had it. And he’s certainly Moore’s law. Certainly what define that for us. The second one, I’d say George Washington, I think just the founding father of the nation that I’ve had a chance to serve for 16 years would love to pick his brain on kind of where his priorities were in that era of our nation’s history. And it’d be able to fight for what was the vision of at the time of freedom and independence, I think is a pretty special thing. And it required a lot of gusto and an amazing leadership capability to get people on board with that vision. And what it’s created. Now, hundreds of years later has been shaped my life and probably many of your lives as well. And then the last way, one is it’d be it’d be a dinner for for Thomas Watson, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Like, imagine me imagine a dinner for for with those with those brilliant minds and knowing what we know now being able to hash out what was happening in our industry at the time, and where things came from IBM were things and then what, what happened on the backside of that, with what two of the major players in the tech industry did it really the formation of the personal computer and the way Tech really took its foothold in the world, I think would just be such a, like a profound discussion to have, as it informs where we’re going and what the next 50 years of tech looks like. And I would love to inform my perspective on that. A journey where we’re headed. Based on a deeper understanding of the past, it’s more

Vince Menzione 45:03

or less, I think more than a dinner party might be a summit. I’m looking at this guest list. And it’s amazing, right, Gordon Moore, first of all, Intel, so much good and amazing, profound knowledge came out of Intel, right? Moore’s law being one of them. Okay, are some of the other things that Intel? Did they led the way in so many ways? George Washington, what else can we say about this amazing experiment? And hopefully, we’ll continue our democracy moving forward. I think the experiment is just in its early days. But then the leaders in tech, right, you got Watson and Kate’s, and jobs, what a conversation that’ll be,

Dan Rippey 45:39

yeah. And to hear, I think, to be able to revive Watson and jobs to see where we’re at and be able to pick their brain and say, where you think we go from here? What does the next half century a century look like? And I bet they would place and if you could bring Gordon Moore into that conversation to I bet between the four of them, they could place a couple of bets that are that are probably end up paying off, and just how insightful it would be to look at the future through the eyes of the past,

Vince Menzione 46:03

I think I’m gonna have to come by and bring a bottle of something or a beverage, because then I want to be a fly on the wall. This conversation

Dan Rippey 46:10

is join us more than one. I

Vince Menzione 46:11

love it. I love it. Well, you, Dan, have been a truly amazing guests, such a great leader at Microsoft, all the work you do, I’ve gotten to see a little bit behind the scenes, as you’ve built out some of these programs. And I just want to thank you for all that you do for our partner listeners. Any final words, for partners, we’ve covered a lot of ground here today, but how they can align for success for Microsoft 2023?

Dan Rippey 46:37

Yeah, I think I’ll respond to the feedback I get from a lot of partners that talks about the pace of change that we move at. And change costs, time change costs, money change, change puts a lot of burden on our partner organization. So number one is just a sense of deep respect and appreciation for every single organization that calls on Microsoft Partner both now and in the future of how much we appreciate the business. Like I’ll tell you, my entire team and the entire division, I represented the company, we wouldn’t exist without you. So number one, my message to you is thank you. And just a sense of deep committed gratitude, and your capabilities and your teams and your sweat equity and everything you drive and bring to the table. And my call to action is give us feedback. If we’re moving too fast. Tell us tell us where we’re moving too fast. Tell us where he needs to slow down. If we’re not moving fast enough. Tell us tell us where you want us to see us accelerate where you want incentive programs and cosell motions and programmatic endorsements and benefits to align to. And if you feel like we’re getting it right, tell us that too. We actually we get pretty special to have that affirmation to say. And I’ve seen a lot of this and these changes that we’re making on the backside of the Microsoft Partner Network and the birth of the cloud partner program of partners saying, you know, at this was past due, we’re glad that Microsoft’s taken the steps. We’re nervous for the future. But we’re glad to see these steps finally being enacted. And my goal in the future is let’s not ever let this get past due. Let’s move at the right pace with our partners to respond to your needs and help you build clarity, sense of purpose and direction to be able to plug into the engines at Microsoft that are going to help drive success for your business. Just keep that conduit for conversation open. And my ears are always open and my team’s ears are always open as much as we can connect with you. That’s the best outcome I can foresee. Thank you so much for the business. And thank you Vince today for the time

Vince Menzione 48:14

on behalf of the over 450,000 Microsoft partners. Dan, thank you for this great discussion today. So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it. We all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail, and that ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. I am so excited to announce the ultimate partnerships mastermind. For more details, follow the link in the show notes. I hope you join us my friend at the beautiful Gaylord hotel, October 9 and 10th.

Announcer 49:30

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering