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Microsoft President, Kevin Peesker, Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, the top partnership podcast, we uniquely feature the leaders, the best in the business from leading tech organizations and hyperscalers who are driving the greatest impact in our world of ecosystems. Today, we have a very special guest, Kevin Peesker, President, of Worldwide SMC & Digital Sales at Microsoft.
Kevin leads a massive business that drives go-to-market and sales across the world’s lower enterprise, mid-market, and small and mid-sized business markets. In this exclusive interview, Kevin shares his insights on how his 7000-person organization is leading the charge with a partner-led and partner-assisted mindset during this rapid change and digital transformation.
Join us as we delve into Kevin’s experiences and learn how partnering with Microsoft can help achieve business success. It’s an opportunity to gain valuable insights from this successful business leader.
Don’t miss this incredible high-energy discussion with Kevin Peesker on The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Tune in now and take your business to the next level.
In Microsoft’s Words
Kevin Peesker, the President of Microsoft’s Worldwide Small, Medium, Corporate & Digital Sales Organization, is a proven business transformation leader with an exceptional 30+ year record of driving collaboration between government/industry and technology and creating customer-obsessed organizations.
Kevin’s commitment to customers and partners drives his passion for providing technology solutions globally that make a local impact. Widely respected for delivering positive customer outcomes, he leads with a digital-first mindset enabling digital capabilities and the value of the Microsoft cloud for all.
Before his current role, Kevin served as the President of Microsoft Canada for five years, where he led a world-class team providing transformative outcomes for Canadians.
Before joining Microsoft, Kevin held multiple senior leadership roles with country and regional responsibilities spanning 70 countries across finance, marketing, operations, sales, and general management.
What You’ll Learn
- What is Microsoft’s go-to-market strategy for SMC & Digital? 6:28
- What are some of his learnings from this time of rapid transformation? 12:07
- How Microsoft stands out in the partner ecosystem? 27:56
- Doing more with less in response to economic headwinds? 32:46
- Kevin’s thoughts on the future of the cloud industry 36:51
On becoming “The Ultimate Partner”
With this exciting new episode, Ultimate Partnerships becomes The Ultimate Partner™ More than just a new look, The Ultimate Partner is doubling down on its commitment to helping YOU become the Ultimate Partner by getting it right. Do you want to be The Ultimate Partner? Learn more, by visiting our NEW website.
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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
partner, microsoft, organization, customers, vince, business, smc, aligned, industry, partner ecosystem, market, engage, outcomes, ecosystem, lead, kevin, partner organizations, world, success, perspective
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Kevin Peesker, Vince Menzione
Vince Menzione 00:00
At Ultimate Guide to partnering we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, the ones that are driving the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering leads a massive business at the largest software company on the planet. His organization is responsible end to end for driving go to market and selling across the lower enterprise, the mid market, and the small and mid sized business market across the globe. And today, you’ll learn how being a partner, the ultimate partner, working with his organization, can help you achieve your greatest business results.
Announcer 00:48
This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 01:08
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and today I will Kevin peacemaker is the president of SMC small midsize and corporate accounts and digital selling at Microsoft. And he joins us for an exclusive view his view on how this significant component of Microsoft’s business is leading the charge how his 7000 person organization globally is leading with a partner led and partner assisted mindset during this time of rapid change and digital transformation. I hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion with this incredible business leader. As much as I enjoyed getting to know Kevin P skirt. I’m so excited to welcome athletic greens as the latest sponsor to ultimate guide to partnering friends who know me well know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 20 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being. About five years ago I added athletic greens and now their product ag one has become my go to green drink supplement. I take this literally every single day. Ag one is packed with 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods source superfoods, probiotics and antigens. It literally is replaced every vitamin in my cabinet. I take it at the start of the day, and often have a second serving on days when I really need it. If you’d like to give ag one a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five travel packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athletic greens.com forward slash Vince M. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
Kevin Peesker 03:16
Thank you so much, Vince fantastic to be here.
Vince Menzione 03:19
I am so excited to welcome you to ultimate guide to partnering. You’re the president of SMC and digital at Microsoft. And I’m thrilled to have you join our listeners today.
Kevin Peesker 03:29
Thank you. Thank you appreciate it.
Vince Menzione 03:31
So for our listeners who may not understand your role and the mission of your organization, can you take us through that?
Kevin Peesker 03:38
Hey, sure, Vince. And is it okay, if we do this in with a little bit of energy? Is that alright? I love energy. Let’s do it. Oh man, thanks so much. It really is terrific to be able to engage with the events and with the rest of the partner ecosystem who I know and love. That’s maybe started on your question against the mission as well. Vince Microsoft is a very purpose focused organization and our mission based on empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. That’s where we come from. So within that vein of that’s the Microsoft big mission. My role is to lead Microsoft Small, Medium corporate and digital sales organization. We call it SMC very creative and acronym among many at Microsoft, by the way, SMC is a 7000 plus person organization. We do just under $60 Billion US of revenue, we are aligned to serve over 90% of the world’s customers. And we do that in a very digital first way. As you can imagine with the scale. We do that by leveraging talented people over 90,000 partner organizations engage with us in any given day and month and we bring the best together Some of our partner organizations are people and Microsoft technology to serve our customers at scale. And so maybe it’s from an SMC perspective, leveraging off the big vision is we are there truly to leverage the technology, leverage our global reach and deliver meaningful local impacts. So everyone in the economies we serve can benefit from digital transformation. That’s who we are.
Vince Menzione 05:28
It’s such a significant remit, right? It’s everything except the enterprise organizations if you break that down, right,
Kevin Peesker 05:34
right. And maybe for the partner team, the enterprise within Microsoft is sounds like a lot. But it’s actually very few. If you think as a global ecosystem, enterprise, our enterprise team represent 11,000 organizations globally, which out of the 10s, and 10s of millions is very, very small.
Vince Menzione 05:53
Yeah. And so when we think about this partner ecosystem, this is the organization that’s really touching it most significantly, right. 100%. And you and I were talking about this a little bit earlier, like I was a GM at Microsoft. Yes. And when I was in the business, we had different approaches to going after SMC fact, we had SMB, and then we had corporate accounts. And then we combine those together to create SMC. And it was a little fragmented, if you will, we didn’t have like a collective approach. Can you take us through how you’re driving greater impact and how you’ve organized for success?
Kevin Peesker 06:27
Yeah, thanks, Vince. You’re right. By the way, it doesn’t matter what organization a person is in whether it’s partner organization with 10 people or a large organization that has a couple 100,000 People like Microsoft, there is continuous iteration around what is the best way to organize for success. And from a Microsoft perspective, we’ve gone through multiple different views of how we should align ourselves best to serve markets, and to serve customers. Our current perspective, which we initiated just over a year ago, is that we have a tremendous business serving the enterprise within the enterprise is our large public sector customers, the largest corporate enterprise customers on the planet, we felt it valuable to look at our small, medium and corporate size customers with a global lens. So we did a fundamental shift, we aligned each of our country organizations, plus our digital sales organizations, and our global marketing, we aligned that together in one group this year, we are iterating to also bring the partner ecosystem into the end to end construct by which we think about our go to market. So the business of SMC has fundamentally gone from being divided into areas into a global organization with a clear alignment around our, our corporate customers, and our small, medium business customers end to end in every country or the world and having consistency through that process. That’s the shift that we’ve made. And that’s how we’re going to market now and into the next fiscal year and beyond.
Vince Menzione 08:19
And I think that’s what’s really significant. And for our listeners who don’t understand that is that Microsoft breaks out by by geographies GIS, and then with NGOs, vertical segments, right? That’s correct. And so what you’ve done is now combine that so it’s not so fragmented across the world. You’re creating a powerful organization, probably with a repeatable model for success a go to market model, is that what I’m hearing?
Kevin Peesker 08:43
Yeah, Vince, you are you are spot on. Vince straight out of business school coming to you live, is the statement that you just made. What it is, from our perspective is there is great consistency of the go to market motions. There’s great consistency as we think about Microsoft solution areas, Azure modern work business applications, about how we bring those product areas to market. And I think the big transformation for us is realisation which we were doing on a last mile basis and sputter in specific geographies, a realization that our enterprise customers are looking for certain outcomes and engagement. Our corporate managed large midsize corporates are looking for certain engagement. And then the SMB market is also looking for that. So a shift for us has been to look at each of our solution areas pick Azure determine what is it that are the best ways that we can go to market engage with corporate customers and Azur with small medium business customers in Azure, and then work at end to end from marketing through to Microsoft badge team members through to our partner ecosystem to really drive in To end success and ultimately enhance the way in which we go to market together with the partner ecosystem. So it’s a pretty fundamental shift really real time there. But it’s been in the works. And we’ve already put some of those aspects of that strategy in play.
Vince Menzione 10:15
So I’m excited to deep dive on the partner piece. But before we get there, we’ve been living through both exciting and interesting times. Right, some really great excitement coming out of Microsoft. We had the America’s lead for chat, GBT come on the podcast, not too long. But it’s really exciting there. But we’re also living through significant headwinds. In fact, the last few years, right, ever since COVID, the lockdown? Yeah. And now the financial headwinds, I’ll call them. What do you see? And how is your business evolving during this time of rapid transformation.
Kevin Peesker 10:47
This is one of these ones where I think perspective truly is everything. And let’s just step back COVID was hopefully a once in a generation event, actually, I think, with the way in which technology is evolving, we should be able to respond to future scenarios like COVID, in a much different way, and in a much faster way than we potentially did through COVID. And we saw that the impact of tech in that regard. But after 30 years in the tech industry, I’ve seen economic highs and lows many times before Vince COVID, altered the perspective, of course of how and where work is done from a Microsoft and the rest of the technology industry, we all saw a considerable increase in demand for our products and services, which drove rapid acceleration, frankly, and moving to the cloud, as is organizations maybe move their timelines and compress their timelines forward in that regard, I think the macro economic conditions that we have all faced and are facing with inflation, energy access in certain parts of the world, it’s affected many industries more dramatically than anyone could have anticipated coming out of the pandemic, people will say, Oh, I saw it coming. Well, nobody has that crystal ball. And so after this rapid period of expansion, our entire industry has had to adjust. And most companies, including Microsoft, we’ve had to make some really tough choices over the past three months, importantly, as a organization, and I hope our partner ecosystem feels this as well, our shared values of respect, integrity and accountability, they aligned us to the aspects of what is within our control within our business, to be able to execute with finer precision and greater operational rigor. So Vince, I think, in this sense, while it’s been challenging, I’m actually really personally very optimistic on the gift that change and challenge has for our businesses. I shared a quote recently with my team, from Marcel Proust, who was French philosopher, poet. And it translated it states happiness is good for the body. But it’s grief that develops the powers of the mind. And I’m sure you have events I’ve seen over and over that it is in the most challenging times that the greatest learning and progress is made. And as we reflect on what some of those learnings are, it’s clear companies that embrace the cloud partners who made strategic technology investments, and built up their capabilities and modernize their practices, they accelerated their leadership position in the market. And those who did the work are experiencing that their expertise, even in difficult times, remains in high demand. I seen this in multiple geographies around the world. And then now you layer on top of that the enhancements which you just mentioned, in AI, have aI itself artificial intelligence moving from hype to reality. If you think about the Gartner Hype, curve, hype to reality, we clearly are at a another significant inflection point for our entire industry. And in that regard, Vince, I think our partners stand to benefit immensely from the next wave of innovation, which will occur, which includes the current wave of innovation that was really accelerated during COVID COVID.
Vince Menzione 14:40
I am in so agreement with you about these times these times of headwinds, and we’ve seen this before some of the greatest entrepreneurial ventures have grown out of economically challenging times. Right. You bet. We’re starting to see this now. And I think this is we’re in a place right now where I think the invention is going to happen in an even bigger way. I always feel from the customer side, like what are they willing to do now that they weren’t before?
Kevin Peesker 15:04
Vince, this this is it is absolutely ominous to me. And I’ll give you an example. Recently, I was asked to do a keynote in Chicago, which I did with the YP organization, Young Presidents Organization, which is actually composed by the way, I didn’t realize this of a Young Presidents and then a graduated Young Presidents group. So in the room were 120, plus CEOs, owners of their firms, amazing businesses that crossed every industry. And I did a keynote with them, and then answered questions, Keynote for about 45 minutes and answer questions for 45 minutes about AI and the impact of AI on their business on their kind of lived reality, the response was phenomenal. And I think, Vince, you and I have probably grown up in this industry, where a lot of our time was spent engaging with Chief Information Officers with Digital Officers CISOs, what I’m finding foundational at the customer level is how Intune aware, and how desirable it is for CEOs to truly understand, what can technology do for me. And let’s go to the basic core in either assisting me in operational efficiencies, or in changing the way that I engage with my customers at the C suite level. It’s a foundational question. And what we’re seeing from the entire ecosystem of customers, whether they’re the very largest, or those, that our SMBs is a deep desire to engage, I think a little fear maybe of not being left behind, but more. So I think it’s a bit of a Darwinian moment of an understanding that, hey, I as a leader better innovate. Otherwise, I’m going to be passed by who’s someone by someone who does. It’s a really, really interesting environment that we’re in. And I’ve, I’ve never seen it as compressed and as active as it is right now.
Vince Menzione 17:20
Some great insights there. What about if I flip this over to the partner side? Sure. What are you seeing from partners working with you and your team? And what would you say to them now, to get them best engaged with working with your organization,
Kevin Peesker 17:33
there’s different scenarios of partner engagement. And maybe I’ll break it up into into a few partners on one side, global solution integrators, system integrators, they’ve been working deeply to build three specialization and capability to drive innovation, not large national partners who are building services to allow for both the movement to cloud but also application development, I am seeing a deep industry from that ecosystem interested in in truly determining what are the customer outcomes that they can deliver smaller partners who are specializing in aspects of the tech stack, whether it’s in cloud data, or it’s insecurity, or it’s in modern work, aligned to industry outcomes of modern work, those groups are doing phenomenally well being specific about industry outcomes, and customer outcomes in various sectors. And then if we think about the massive ecosystem of scale, which would be through the large global distributors, or large oil distributors, who are engaging with 1000s of partners, that are that either asserting the entire stack or being more specialized, I’m seeing that entire ecosystem shift in its development. And so from a Microsoft perspective, what’s been really, really critical for us is being adaptive to what’s required by each of those tranches of partners, ultimately, with the end goal in mind of being their best partner to drive and deliver customer outcomes. I think that ends up with providing longevity for the partner organization with their customers, but then also from an internal Microsoft perspective, how do we also ensure that we’re assisting in providing outcomes from some of our digital assets from our telemetry of what we’re seeing in the customer ecosystem? And that’s been I’d say, more of a newer development piece for us have that end to end communication that we have through our partner center to be able to provide leads get the feedback when there’s some Microsoft expertise involved for the partner to know who to go to where to get that from, and then to go align together to engage and win with the customer. And then for the partner to move on to the next and win in the next one from the shared learning that has occurred. So I think of the entire ecosystem, Vince in a few different sub segments, because that’s kind of how I see it operate.
Vince Menzione 20:27
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Kevin Peesker 21:49
You bet I went, when I think about, well, what’s the best engagement with our partner organization, I try and put myself in the position of, okay, if I’m a partner organization, working with Microsoft, knowing what I know about Microsoft, what is it that I would do to optimize success and in discussion with with principals and owners, and CEOs and presidents of partner organizations, we basically go down that discussion. And to your point, Vince, it is clear that Microsoft is got has a strong solution alignment, Azur Azure infra Azure data, Azure AI services, we think about Azure in that way. And therefore, when a customer contacts us, when we contact a customer, if you think about the go to market of how we how we view the segments that we serve, the deliberateness by of partnering with an organization that has built capabilities, expertise, certifications, that can respond to the customer’s requirements, and take them from an infrastructure perspective through to application development, because really, the application is where all the value is in terms of outcomes, that understanding from a partner perspective, and the alignment of us with them through marketplace, and through the certification systems that we have, that truly provides a massive amount of trust alignment, and makes for the connection to be very, very seamless between our organizations. So I’m seeing more and more partner organizations, be in alignment with that make appropriate investments with that, so that they are tightly intertwined with Microsoft. And then of course, our responsibility is to assist with that skilling to provide incentives that are in alignment with that so that the partner organizations can earn dollars for their activity and their investments. I think those two things go hand in hand.
Vince Menzione 24:11
You bring up some really good points here. In fact, we’ve had Dan Rippy on the podcast and leads the Microsoft cloud partner program, where it was a lot of rumbling in the partner world back when it was first announced. I think it’ll be a year ago this month, in fact. And then Dan brought clarity to the conversation. And really what you’re doing is you’re saying, Hey, show us that you’re invested. We’re jointly invested in our outcomes, show us how you’re doing that. And that will help us better engage with you.
Kevin Peesker 24:39
It’s logical, isn’t it? Yeah. I think that sometimes we do as organizations and as an ecosystem, we make things really, really complicated. At the at the end of the day, there’s a customer who is in name the industry and their desire or is to be able to earn enough funds to pay the salaries. So the people in their organization could put food on their table, and to have some money left to invest and some money left to pay the investors a reasonable return. That’s the essence. And so therefore, from a customer perspective and a partner perspective, the tighter we aligned to the outcomes that are required to make a difference to empower every organization means we make a difference we are purpose led about the success of others, not the success of as example the success of Microsoft, it’s through the success of others that Microsoft will earn the right to continue to invest, continue to operate. I think the easier we make that the more streamlined our engagements are in driving success in the market.
Vince Menzione 25:55
And a lot of organizations are looking towards Microsoft, right? You go back 40 years ago to Boca Raton, when the PC came out and Microsoft license, Bill Gates license, the software and ecosystem was built at that point. Amazing, right. And you and I talked about 30 years, I think I’ve got 30 or 35 years of experience here. But Kevin, what have you been around these partnerships for so long? What do you see from the best ones like the best in the business to bet to better?
Kevin Peesker 26:19
Oh, without a doubt, and yeah, it’s been a it’s been a privilege, I started my my first partner job was in 1992 1993. In Sydney, Australia, at that time it was you drive over to the partner, you cajole them to get a cup of coffee with you, you talk about your offerings in a speeds and feeds of your offerings. And you sort of begged them to please please, please consider selling whatever it is that we have in front of you. And I’ll be back soon. So things have moved on from that, but in a way they haven’t in and I say that, I think obviously the entire ecosystems offerings have changed, we’ve gotten much more aligned to not pushing speeds and feeds down into the customer ecosystem, we are all about driving, what’s the end outcome, which is fantastic. What I’m finding though, is again, and again, over the decades, the great partners, the truly ones that are special, they have amazing clarity, a great partner knows who they are and what they want to be. And I also see that they invest to succeed each day, and to succeed for tomorrow. So they succeed to win in the near term, clearly, because they’ve got to pay bills with the margin they make. But they also find a way to carve out dollars to be able to position them for the next wave. And there was a recent stat that I saw a comment was from JP Morgan. But anyway, over the last 30 years, there’s only one technology company that has been in the top 10 largest organizations in the world that’s been Microsoft over 10 years, organizations come and go think about the partner ecosystem, there have been partner organizations that come and go, our industry is aligned to agility, rapid change, rapid transformation. And so that concept of Well, I’m just going to worry about today, that’s not success for tomorrow. And I think the third element if there’s a third element would be, I find that partners who truly truly desire long term relationships with their customers, they act differently from others who are just trying to optimize margin optimize profit, they act as though Well, we’re gonna be here for decades, and therefore we’re going to do what’s required to bring you the best of technology to your organization. And do that consistently. We’re going to change with you push you challenge you as a customer around what’s required so that you can be your best because when you’re successful will be successful. So I see those three elements repeat time and time again, Vince, lat last last one might be as I think, from a Microsoft perspective, we we hold our values very, very strongly internally and Microsoft respect respect for our customers respect for each other integrity, doing the right thing, regardless of if anybody is watching and accountability, which is fundamentally do what you say you’re gonna do. I recently was in Redmond, and we had the 14th largest partner organizations in Japan, the CEOs of all of those partner organizations with So in Redmond, and we literally we discussed respect, integrity and accountability, how we act as Microsoft, and the partner ecosystem, those very senior folks talked about what the values are from their perspective, and how we therefore aligned, which effectively builds trust. So if there’s a fourth pillar, it’s trust, built between the vendor don’t between Microsoft, and between our partner organization. So those would be the big four that I’ve seen. So the respect,
Vince Menzione 30:31
the integrity, the accountability, and trust, and I talked about trust, like, if you don’t have trust in the room, you don’t have oxygen in the room, you don’t have a partnership in the room.
Kevin Peesker 30:41
Beautiful, beautiful. And that other one, though, the first one I mentioned, which is just, I’ll stress it, because I sometimes see confusion, a great partner, knowing who they are and what they want to be, I think sometimes there’s a view that, well, hey, I’ve got AI as a partner, I’m serving this customer set, I need to be great at everything, modern work, infrastructure in the cloud, data, AI, cybersecurity, I need to be awesome at all of these elements of business applications, I think it’s really, really hard for most organizations to be awesome at everything. But it is much more achievable to be phenomenal at certain elements and build a great business off of that, which has a reputation that’s second to none, I think many customers will have multi partner relationships, because they look for some degree of specialization and expertise.
Vince Menzione 31:45
I love what you have to say there, I refer to it as sort of showing up as a shiny quarter and a bucket full of shiny quarters all the 1000s of Microsoft partners, right? What makes you stand out, right? From a business value perspective? And then you also touched on, I want to I don’t want to forget this. You talked about agility. And I also I talk about a set of fundamental principles around well, what makes successful partnering and agility is the part the component Microsoft will shift right? Few years ago, we weren’t talking about teams, we certainly weren’t talking about changing. And so how do organizations pivot? or invest in a way without betting the farm, I guess, is what I would say. So think about areas of growth, where you can invest in your business to grow the business within through your relationship with Microsoft,
Kevin Peesker 32:33
you bet things think about, you’re so right, I mean, aspects of the stack, which weren’t there, five, seven years ago, that’s an awful long period of time, and they weren’t there. And now they are becoming predominant discussion points and execution points with customers. As a small example, we launched this concept of do more with less to respond to the economic challenges that are occurring in many industries. And one of the discussions that I’ve had with end user customers is, tell me what is it that you are fundamentally objective, what your fundamental objectives are as outcomes during this period? And sort of layering down and getting into will? Is it changing an operational aspect? Is it getting efficiency? Is it enhancing the way in which they’re engaging with a customer in a certain part of the channel, whatever it is, what we’ve seen is this concept of I just can’t have a project that takes me 18 months, or 24 or 36 months to deliver a return on investment, I need a faster turnaround. Otherwise, I’m frankly not going to invest. Well, several partners to figure that out. And they have built very quickly, a low code, no code type application development section of their business, we do it off of Microsoft Power platform, to be able to go in and take an analog process, digitize it, not in six months, but in a week, and then layer that in to the company’s operations so that they can handle things more efficiently. Or if they have a staff crunch, they can’t get the talent to be able to handle more business with less. And that to me is just a great example of how partner organizations looking at their own talent doing a little bit of rescaling to then align on a market opportunity. To your point, Vince, that is agility. And I think we’ll see even more of that emerge as AI begins to be infused as a co pilot against so many aspects of how we’re going to waystations think about their operations.
Vince Menzione 35:03
So many great learnings today, Kevin, for the listeners from from the hundreds of 1000s of Microsoft partners that are out there. How can they best engage with you and your organization?
Kevin Peesker 35:15
That’s fantastic question. Thank you for asking it, please. We have an amazing partner organization led by Nicole Denson, that we run globally, it operates in each of our countries, which is fantastic. So I mentioned the structure upfront, we have a global SMC Small, Medium corporate structure. But underneath that we have individuals in each of our core markets, effectively serving over 180 countries around the world. So we are deeply aligned in core markets to the partner ecosystem in the market. The first part is reach out to Microsoft itself. If you are managed partner, you should know who your person is, if you’re not a managed partner, we have amazing distributor relationships, tutor relationships that have complete Microsoft services, literally Microsoft employees working within the distributors that are there to serve. So those would be the first two areas that I would say, hey, just reach out and make sure that we’re engaging with you in the right way for you.
Vince Menzione 36:26
Great, great answer, Kevin. So I’d like to pivot here, right? You have had an amazing career journey. You were president of Canada, just before this role, and did some amazing things. And if you’re Canadian market, very fortunate, but such a great career. How did like it? Was there a spark? Was there a pivot? Like, was there something that set you off? 30 plus years ago, Kevin, on this path to success in this stellar career?
Kevin Peesker 36:51
I? I would love to say it was all planned, Vince. But that would be a load of Yes. What are your thoughts? You made a comment recently, which is one that was told to me when I was I was about 27 years old. And I was asked to go and have dinner with a small group of people with the CEO of a company called Lexmark, which was a spin off of IBM back in, in the 90s. And I naively said to the CEO is one of those kinds of questions you ask when you’re young, I stated, I have aspirations to lead a company one day, what do I What should I do to become the CEO of, of Lexmark, and he just looked at me and he’s like, I can just imagine, he was maybe 60 years old senior in the industry, and a kind of chuckled a little bit. And he said, Kevin, there’s a long path ahead of you. It’s not determined yet for you, where where you will be your happiest, where you’ll be your most passionate where your skills will align. So first, figure that out, determine what you are most interested in, and where you will apply your greatest level of energy. And alongside that, regardless of what the role is, do the best job you can in each job, and good things will happen. That’s what he said to me later I heard Satya respond to a similar question and, and such as CEO of Microsoft. And Satya said another thing is such a never imagined that he would be the CEO of Microsoft. But what he did want to do was do the very best job and become the deepest of expert he could in the job that he was in. And so from my perspective, I always did have a desire to lead a company, I had that leadership, the view of being someone who would serve others, while also taking responsibility and, and having the the pressure of that plus, I think the opportunity to impact were the things that I was aligned to within my own DNA. Along the way, though, it is been a journey of just such iteration. And when you talk about agility, number one are at our industry requires agility. It requires a desire and a mindset that is adaptive to change. But it also requires, I would say pretty significant resilience. Because what you learn to do and what become you become great at suddenly, in certain circumstances becomes obsolete. And so you have to do it again and again and again. And so if there’s any kind of message to someone who’s maybe in the earlier stages of their career or mid stages of their career is pleased. It’s going to happen. AI is probably Leigha bigger disrupter than we’ve ever had in technology, we’ll see if that those words come true, bigger than the PC bigger than the internet bigger than having a handheld device that has amazing compute power and information at your fingertips. It’ll be fascinating to see how people adjust, adapt, demonstrate resilience, and really think of not what was but what could be, and what potentially will be in the future. Kind of cool. It’s such a great time to be in this industry.
Vince Menzione 40:37
What strikes me as you can’t prepare for 30 years out,
Kevin Peesker 40:40
you can’t prepare in our industry, you It’s you can’t prepare for five years. So I mean, yeah, one of the one of the things that I would say I’m most proud of in my last role in Microsoft, with my Canadian leadership team is, we picked a couple of things pretty early, we picked how rapidly cloud would move from, oh, I can’t trust it, oh, it’s not secure. Oh, I really like hugging my servers and my storage devices to the most the highest required compliance industry is going, well, we just studied this for three years. And, yeah, we need to move to the cloud, we’ve gone through it with our board, and therefore we are moving to the cloud at pace, we need to move our core data to the cloud at pace that has shifted what we saw alongside that was the requirement to rapidly skill and invest in skilling both within our customers within the channel ecosystem, and within ourselves. And so the opening of Microsoft’s entire portfolio of IP, all of the internal skilling that we have opening that up to the entire ecosystem, that was the right thing to do. And, and it’s one of those of you can lead a horse to water will they drink, it’s their choice. In this case, it really was critical that we provide the platform for individuals to be able to advance their skills for the next wave. I I’m so excited that multiple partner organizations, many, many have done that. And it’s paying off for them.
Vince Menzione 42:24
Yeah, I love seeing the transformation of our partners, we tend to focus on quite a few of them here. So so great to see. Yes, you
Kevin Peesker 42:32
bet. You bet. It’s inspiring. Yeah,
Vince Menzione 42:34
it is very inspiring. So I have a favorite question, Kevin, and you are hosting a dinner party. And you can host this amazing dinner party in any part of the world. It might be Singapore, it might be Australia, and it might be in Toronto might be in Seattle, who knows. And you can invite any three guests, Kevin to this party from the present, or the past. One guest even said in the future, they had three guests from the future, they want to invite. Whom would you invite Kevin? And why?
Kevin Peesker 43:06
Oh my gosh, that that’s I’ve never thought of that before. So let me I’m not gonna I’m not gonna be clever enough to give a really astounding answer. But I’m going to start out with one, which is when when I was 18 years old, I was at university in the US. I had an athletic scholarship, and I was down there. And it was the first day of classes and I got a call that my father, who was 42 years old was unfortunately killed in an automobile accident, sorry. And so he never saw me as a pure relationship. Because I was 18. And he was my dad, I would love to have a discussion with him adult to adult. So that would be number one. And number two is I just thought watch the masters. I have been doing that since I was a kid used to do with my dad. I’ve always admired Jack Nicklaus. And what he stood for, he’s up there in years, but boy, he would be an intriguing, intriguing dinner guest. And number three would be cautious, hard to do three. I would love to go in the future and see how either my daughter or my son have a turned out at my age, which is in mid late 50s. What the world’s like for them, and maybe as a precursor to, well, what could we have done differently today? To make their world a better world? What shouldn’t we have done to make their world a better world? So that would be a fascinating dinner party
Vince Menzione 44:46
and be absolutely fascinating. I would love to come along and meet your dad. Jack lives down here in Jupiter, Florida. You run across them I have run across him if you happen to know his favorite Italian restaurant. Let me and cellos they have a beautiful portrait of he and the owner when you walk in. That’s amazing. And yeah, so we’re gonna have to maybe we can host it down here and Jupiter, how do you what do you think?
Kevin Peesker 45:09
I love it. I love it. I’m there.
Vince Menzione 45:11
I’m going around a golf in there, maybe
Kevin Peesker 45:12
I’m absolutely.
Vince Menzione 45:16
So you have been an amazing guest. Kevin, I’m so thrilled to have you today, I feel honored and privileged to have you as again,
Kevin Peesker 45:23
thank you, Vince, for I know that you’ve been a voice of connection across the incredible ecosystem, which is the partner ecosystem. In my career, there’s no way that the businesses that I’ve worked within would have had success without the partner ecosystem. One of them was a direct company. And one of my jobs was to initiate the partner ecosystem in Canada, for that organization that was fully and slowly direct. And it was incredible to see the impact that occurred for that company, once we did that, and how we engaged and built that ecosystem. So thank you so much to you for everything you do to connect multiple aspects of what this incredible industry does each and every day to have impact on others deeply. Appreciate it.
Vince Menzione 46:16
Thank you very much from from the heart. And I would love to have you back again, Kevin. So I’m fact I’d love to deep dive we take probably take another episode, just a deep dive on your learnings. Taking a direct organization to make it partner assistant partner lead a lot of organizations struggle with that today. Yeah, they’re not as far along or advanced as Microsoft is in their ecosystem thinking. So we’d love to have you share some of your learnings as well. And then our next slide, I’ll be
Kevin Peesker 46:45
happy to chat about that. It was a fascinating period. And as that organization, it now has a robust global channel. At one stage, it was never so it’s pretty cool to see that type of transformation occur. And I know a number of vendor organizations have have had to consider that or really had to make the assessment of how far do they go? Or in what way do they interact with the partner ecosystem. So it’s a really, really cool area of focus.
Vince Menzione 47:18
So Kevin, you’ve been an amazing guest. I want to thank you.
Kevin Peesker 47:22
All the best. Cheers,
Vince Menzione 47:24
cheers. 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 at 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.