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I was delighted to have Eduardo Kassner, the leader of the WW One Commercial Partner (OCP) Strategy and Innovation Team, join the podcast for a lively discussion. In this episode, we discuss the fundamentals of innovation for partners to transform and how he and his team address the key areas where partners need the most support, guidance, and enablement.
Eduardo brings a rich set of business, technical and leadership experiences to this role. His deep background as a cloud business leader lends itself to a deep discussion on the fundamentals for success.
It’s a rich business and technical discussion and points to the work he and Microsoft are doing to enable the partner ecosystem to accelerate and push through the change. Eduardo brings a wealth of resources, highlighting links available to help partners innovate and transform.
In this interview, we address four fundamental focus areas:
- The Skills Gap – helping partners understand and address the skills gap, including how to locate, identify, attract, hire, onboard and retain talent. Change is happening so fast, how do you stay current? Check out Eduardo’s Blog Post on the topic HERE.
- Practice Development – how partners can develop the right practices to grow and optimize their businesses. We share a link HERE to the Practice Development Playbooks with more details.
- Marketing / Selling – how partners can build a reputation and differentiate themselves in the market, find the next area of opportunity, build on it, and co-sell with Microsoft. Read more HERE.
- Profitability – how partners can achieve and maintain profitable in this new digital age. Read more HERE.
In addition, Eduardo and I discuss how his team is working to evolve Microsoft Competencies to make them more relevant, measurable and deliverable to joint customer satisfaction. Its a continuation of a discussion from Episode #33 with Toby Richards. In addition, we discuss his book “Enterprise Cloud Strategy” with former Microsoft CTO Barry Briggs, which explores the why what and how of an “enterprise-class” IT environment. Eduardo also shares his career journey and how it prepared him for this unique role.
Listeners and readers will find the following links from Eduardo valuable:
- Ebook blog https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategy-2nd-edition/
- Ebook link https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/enterprise-cloud-strategy/
- Webinar for the ebook https://info.microsoft.com/roadmap-to-build-your-enterprise-cloud.html
- My MPN blog with a lot of articles: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/news#/?author=Eduardo%20Kassner
- Build a Practice: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/business-opportunities/build-a-practice
- Practice development playbooks: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-US/campaigns/cloud-practice-playbooks
You can listen to the podcast here or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.
As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach me on Linked In or on email at vincem@cloudwavepartners.net. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the ratings link. This helps others find the podcast.
I hope you enjoy this episode!
Vince Menzione