#58 – Focus on Launching Successful Partner Business Models

For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation.

My guest for this episode is Brent Combest, the general manager of the US One Commercial Partner organization responsible for Microsoft Value-added Service Partners to build profitable practices with and through Microsoft.

Brent and I discuss the work his team does to help partners transform their businesses and build profitable and sustainable business models, his journey from the channel to Microsoft, and what’s in store for partners July 15 through the 19th in Las Vegas, Nevada. And if you’re coming to Inspire, please join me in the commons theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I’ll share what they don’t teach working with Microsoft.

You can listen to the podcast or view the transcript here or on iTunes, SoundCloudStitcher, Google PlayPlayer FM, other Android podcast players.

As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach out to me on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or on email at vincem@cloudwavepartners.com. 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 rating link. This helps others find the podcast.

Links discussed on the interview:

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW

Brent, welcome to the podcast.

Brent:                 Thanks for having me.

Vince:                 It is great to have you here. Thank you for taking time from your compressed schedule. You are the general manager in the One Commercial Partner team focused on helping value added service providers scale their business with and through Microsoft. I’m excited to hear from you about your organization’s role and focus, how partners can maximize the results of their practice with Microsoft, your view on this amazing transformation, and what’s in store for partners in Microsoft Inspire. So welcome.

Brent:                 Thank you very much. I’m happy to have this conversation. Some great topics there.

Vince:                 So first off, can you explain to our listeners, in simple terms, the role of your organization at Microsoft?

Brent:                 Sure. We reside inside of the One Commercial Partner organization here in the US and my team has 26 partner development managers inside of it and collectively, we look after about 650 partners from around the United States, some of the top partners that are driving our transformational cloud business. And our mission as a team is to help these partners develop modern practices that develop strong, sustainable growth in a very profitable way so that these partners are able to reinvest and create additional growth for the future.

Vince:                 So why is Microsoft investing in this team and at this time?

Brent:                 Well for us it all starts with our business model. Microsoft, for as long as I can remember has been a partner obsessed company. To the degree that we invest heavily in understanding our channel, what’s driving success and wanting to share those best practices across the ecosystem. We invest as a company about a million dollars a year, just in research to understand what makes the best partners as great as they are. And then, from that, we take that knowledge and want to help others from across the ecosystem to flourish. And this is really the core of PDM does, a partner development manager does.

They are, in my mind, an adjunct board member or an adjunct executive of a partner’s leadership team. Their role is to come in and to help them paint that long-term vision for where they’re going to go strategically down the road and to help demystify some of the things that are in the market today from an opportunity standpoint, translate how technology solves those challenges, and then coach them down that journey, all the while, bringing in those best practices that we’re gathering and learning through our research and this spans everything from sales and marketing to offering to a go to market strategy. They really, in my mind, are the Sherpa that help the partners to build for the future and then are with them every step of the journey as they go forward.

Vince:                 So I think I’m hearing practice development here, coming across loud and clear, in terms of this conversation and I’ve seen you speak in great detail to partners on how to maximize their practice with Microsoft and in the cloud, and so I’d love for you to spend some time here sharing some of those great nuggets that you’ve shared with others. I think it would be very compelling for our listeners.

Brent:                 Sure. Well, this are’s my passion. I’ve spent virtually the entirety of my career working in the channel and with the channel. Before I came to Microsoft, I worked for three different partners and the dynamic side and saw what I like to always call the good, the bad, and the ugly of the channel. You know. I worked for one partner that was right in the middle of the dot com boom, became a victim of it and the story I always tell is I was employee number 73, we went to 103 but I was one of the 15 that turned the lights off.

I worked for one of the biggest dynamics partners so I got to see how a well-oiled machine worked and how they continued to create growth and then I eventually left that one to help some old colleagues to start one of the very first Microsoft CRM partners back in the day. And so I got to feel the challenges and the opportunities of being in that start-up environment and building something from scratch. So collectively we could go out and see if we could create a new market around this new offering that Microsoft was bringing up and I learned so much along that journey, from a profitability standpoint around what the levers are that determine success or failure and I brought that passion with me inside of Microsoft and continued over my 12 and a half year journey to focus on partners and coach them and really understand what makes them tick and where maybe some of the biggest challenges lie and what partners can to do to kind of get around that.

And I’ve loved every minute of that journey. Every role that I’ve had has been centered around partners and to be honest with you as we go forward, I have no interest in any role that doesn’t lead with partners and working with them.

Vince:                 And so, how did you get to Microsoft? How did you get to this particular spot in your life and career?

Brent:                 Well, it’s a funny journey, right> I was in that channel for an extended period of time but for the most part, I was raised in Seattle and when Microsoft calls you, it’s kind of like the Yankees calling, you go play for the Yankees, right?

Vince:                 Yeah.

Brent:                 So I had a great opportunity come my way to come into Microsoft and at the time, I was going to work on the existing customer marketing team for dynamics, which was the sweet spot for me. I knew the dynamics business really well and I could come in and work with other partners on how to build their strategy around maximizing revenue and potential to their existing customer base.

And so I started there and spent a couple of years in that role. Then I was stretched by Dave Willis and the leadership team to take on a broader perspective and think about ERP all up and lead our ERP business in the US for a couple of years. And then, at the time, one of the big things Microsoft is focused on is grooming their employees to continue their journey and part of that is mentors and at the time, I had Doug Kennedy, who was the vice president of worldwide partners for dynamics as my mentor and he said to me in a meeting, he said, “Brent, we’re about to come out with this new product, Microsoft dynamics CRM online, we have no idea how partners are going to make money with it.”

And so, I took about a week following that conversation and he had offered me the role to kind of help kid of figure that out and during that week, I just sat there and thought about, what’s actually going to work? How is a partner going to adapt and make this transition over? And we came to the end of that week period and I said, “Doug, I have no idea how they’re going to make it, so I’ll take the job.” And we spent about six months working with partners who would deeply engage with us to pull apart their PNLs and understand the different variables, the different factors that would determine success or failure.

For example, how much could they spend on sellers in the cloud, because now that we move away from the bulge payment up front to the elongated revenue stream built around an annuity, how much could we invest up front from the sales and marketing capacity standpoint in order to be profitable? That was one of the many areas that we looked at and we stress tested those things with partners like Power Objects and Zero to Ten and others that had been around for a long time and we learned so much from that, that we went out and we wrote our very first guide to being profitable in the cloud and it was all focused around dynamics.

And I spent the better part of about 15 months traveling all over the world and meeting with great partners, sharing those learnings and insights and best practices that we had gathered with them and then, a former manager from my early days at Microsoft and said, “Hey, we’ve been watching what you’re doing with dynamics, what do you think about repeating that for Office 365 and kind of taking the helm of driving sales and strategy at a world wide basis for our Office 365 ambitions in the small and mid sized business base, SMB.”

And so, I couldn’t refuse the offer. It was a great challenge. And so I took that one and came over into the world-wide SNB team and worked for Thomas Hansen and David Smith. I did that about three and a half years and together, with our channel, there’s no way we could have done this without partners, but we took what was [inaudible 00:09:39] at the time, which was a bout a $50 million business and in three years, turned it into a $1.4 billion business. That’s just SMB.

Vince:                 Yeah, that’s amazing.

Brent:                 Yeah, if you put that in perspective, that would have been the … If SMB cloud would have been its own company, right, its own entity outside of Microsoft, it would have been the third fastest company in the history of the world to reach a billion dollars. That’s how powerful our channel is.

And so, I did that for about three and a half years and then, at the time, Til [inaudible 00:10:09] was a mentor of mine and he brought me over to his leadership team and the world-wide partner group, where my team led partner profitability, all the research that we do around that. We developed all the modern partner ebooks, those series. We led competitive recruitment and we got pretty good at convincing Google and Amazon and salesforce.com’s best partners to join our ecosystem. We had the original Azure PDMs that were around the world. And really had a lot of fun doing that job and learned a ton there and then wanted to get back out into the field and so two years ago, I moved back into the US business to where I am today.

Vince:                 And what was the best piece of advice you received when you came back in … or came into the field?

Brent:                 You know` it was more of a reminder than it was a piece of advice and it was to stay partner obsessed and to keep things simple. My biggest challenge that I have in my role today is really understanding the volume of stuff that comes out, whether it’s products or programs or initiatives or investments, and making it very clear for the PDMs on my team as well as the partners that we support to be successful and whittling it down to a consumable form factor so that they know what are the top two or three investments that tie to the practice that I’m building right now, because there’s many different practices that you could be building, to go out and be successful. And it’s that ability to not get so myopically focused on a single grain of sand on the beach, but to look at it in its entirety that has been something that I’ve brought back into my mindset and really tried to make sure that we stayed focused on. And demystification is kind of that core mantra that I have with my team so often.

Vince:                 So what are the things you share with partners to help them to be more profitable? What is the great nuggets of advice that you would share with them?

Brent:                 How much time do we have? That’s a good topic-

Vince:                 We could always do this as multiple podcast interviews.

Brent:                 Well, to me, there’s really four or five things that just stand out in every single conversation around this topic of profitability, and the biggest thing to me, and it starts here every single time. In conversation I have, this is the genesis of almost every one I have with partners is, you’ve got to figure out, in a ecosystem with more than 300 000 partners in it, you’ve gotta think about what makes you different, what makes you special, what’s your core DNA that you can build around? ‘Cause the biggest mistake that a partner can make is being too generalized or trying to become too opportunistic and chasing too many things because most partners that reside in the ecosystem today, they have anywhere from 10 to 100 employees. They can’t afford to chase 20 or more kind of things or try to build all these different practices for all these different verticals.

No, the best and most profitable partners, the ones with the healthiest PNLs, have a very strong differentiated value proposition and they’re better at it than anybody else, whether that’s Restaurant 365, you can guess where they go after based on their name. Whether that’s Keynote Cozy and their law firm focus, Elis Retail and their retail focus. Those high-end, highly profitable partners really understand that concept of differentiation.

The next piece that is really core and I would give this advice to any equity stakeholder in a partner, primarily in the C suite group is that we’ve got to make sure that we focus on working on the business and not just in it. So often, we get stuck in the day-to-day grind of running one of these companies, we forget to raise our head up and start to think about what metrics should we be focusing on? How are we performing against those metrics? What strategies do we need to tweak or change to make sure that we’ll preserve our success over the long-term and that we don’t run either into a plateau or a downward cycle in our business.

The third piece is all about having what I call a heavy paranoia for what’s next. And this is more important now than it’s ever been, because of the pace of change that’s being driven by the market, not necessarily Microsoft, but the market being the customer as well as the competitors that are out there today. Every day, there’s new entrants that are coming in. Every day there’s a new disruptor that’s happening somewhere and customers as well as partners are having to adapt to it so we’ve got to constantly be thinking about what piece do we need to add, not only to stay relevant, but to stay ahead of our competition.

And then that fourth piece, that fourth element of success, and that the greatest partners are really in tune with, is that they don’t rely on anyone else. They make sure that their success or failure is self-controlled. And what I mean by that is it’s great that vendors like Microsoft have programs and things like MDF to support you and other investments that we make but they consider that to be gravy or icing on the cake. They’re really, really good about controlling their own destiny, both in terms of the revenue line or the revenue composition that they have. One of the biggest thing that I coach partners through right now is if their overly pivoted on revenue coming form a vendor or the resell of a vendor’s product, that’s a problem because you’re going to be swayed by the margin or the incentives that that vendor is willing to provide. And that’s not just Microsoft, that’s anybody.

Vince:                 Right.

Brent:                 So at the end of the day, you want to make sure you have your own revenue, project services, managed services, your own IP, as the leading force and we use the vendor’s revenue stream as kind of that Trojan horse and that conduit to create that opportunity for you.

And then, the last one, that fifth element, that’s something that we focus on so often is don’t let yourself get stuck in the past. Business models just like we see with Netflix or you name whatever disruptor out there, they’re constantly changing their business models and some of the most aggressive and highly growing companies in our channel today challenge the status quo. I’ve seen all kinds of things, from New Age sellers to very interesting social tactics for marketing through to innovative ways that they deliver the services and technology. They’re not falling into the cycle of, well this has worked for me for five years or longer and that’s just the way that is. No, it’s never just the way that it is. You’ve constantly gotta be looking for ways to invent new opportunities for yourself and to question and challenge the way that things have been done for a long time.

Vince:                 Yeah, you bring up several key points here, in terms of how partners can stand out, that I love and I’ve shared some of these myself in some of the talks that I’ve given. But the one you just brought about … What I see partners doing, a lot of the partners I see, setting up and incubating new businesses, right, that they’ll try a few different things. They’ll test the market out for new and disruptive technologies and ideas and if they fly, they fly and they’ll grow the business form there. Have you seen that as well?

Brent:                 I have, but the most successful way of doing that is you’ve gotta take a first step, in my mind, which is having a conversation with your customers and os often people skip that step. They go and they see a flashy new technology or they hear a pressure point from a vendor and then they go out and they try to build something around it before they talk to their customers about, is this something that’s going to make sense for you? Does this land with you? And then the net result, the downside is, they either chase something that’s not going to be profitable for them or they position it and try to drive it in a way that’s just ultimately not going to resonate with the customer and they miss an opportunity.

Vince:                 You know, you’ve been talking about this disruption. We’ve all been talking about this disruption. It’s been happening, in fact, faster. I mean, you’ve been at Microsoft and in the channel for many years. I’ve seen it really accelerate. The pace has accelerated rapidly in the last 18 months or so. Would you agree?

Brent:                 I would. And it’s that pace of innovation that’s taking place today and it’s that desire from customers that need new types of solutions to remain competitive against the entities that are putting pressure on them and so they’re pushing the envelop faster and faster for us to keep up and then there’s these bit solutions that come in from competitors and we’re having to react to that and I think that’s here to stay. One of the greatest quotes I’ve heard from one of our leadership teams most recently is we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. We’ve gotta constantly be thinking through, okay, what we have right now’s not good enough. We need to make sure that we’re adapting and molding over time.

Vince:                 So you mentioned speaking to customers, getting that feedback from customers about new opportunities for growth. What else can partners do to sustain the growth? Where do they need to invest in the next 18 months or so?

Brent:                 Well, one of the biggest areas is you’ve gotta understand and translate what those customers asks are and the needs are into the technology that’s coming about. You know, there’s so much desire right now for new areas related to machine learning, to analytics. Analytics is a huge one right now. There’s a lot of hunger for that out there but there’s a great shortage of ability and resources in the channel today to be able to deliver that, so that’s a big area. As we go forward, as well, we’ve got to think about turning on the engines that can attract and drive customer acquisition at a faster rate and this has a lot to do with the profitability and health of our partners business. That more and more we move away from those big upfront payments towards an elongated revenue stream, the more necessary it is for us to turn those engines on.

And the other thing that’s driving that is who the buyers are today. It used to be that the decision makers, they lied on the technical side. CIO, CTO controlled so much of the budget but in today’s world, roughly 80% of the budget is either owned or influenced by line of business executive and their needs are more immediate, there’s less patience there. They look for solutions that will solve maybe 80% of their problem, 90% of their problem. They can adapt around it as opposed to custom bespoke work that will be just right for what they need. And then they also want to solve smaller problems quickly because they’re, a lot of times, tied to revenue performance, right, as their driving factor in, so they need to get something more immediately done that way and then they go from there.

And so that creates a new challenge for our partners and for Microsoft. We’ve been going through this transformation as well, of being able to go out and have a conversation at the right level with a line of business executive and speak their vernacular and understand their drivers and how financially, this decision is either going to create upside in revenue or it’s going to control the downside of potential risk and productivity loss.

And those are big changes and challenges that we’re facing and going through right now, not only at Microsoft, but within our channel.

Vince:                 So what can partners do to better align to the line of business decision makers?

Brent:                 Well, it starts with that differentiation piece that we talked about earlier, right? When you create differentiation and you specialize around an area, you tend to be able to go deep and really understand, not just the vernacular that’s happening there, but you understand the challenges that are current and the ones that potentially are going to come in the future for that subsegment of the market. If you don’t have that knowledge and you’re having to learn on the fly, you can easily be outpaced by somebody that does or you’re going to fall victim to elongated sales cycles and more cost to go out and actually acquire that customer because you’re having to spend too much time learning.

So partners really need to be able to understand that. The more that they can do research and learn about the driving forces that are controlling that subsegment of the market is going to be huge as well. There’s all kinds of new requirements from a technology standpoint. It’s not just about GDPR and what’s going on but there’s ones that are very relevant to a particular vertical and area that they need to stay in touch with and can help the customer to understand how they as a provider and how the technology itself can get them through that change that’s happening in the industry.

So there’s a lot of little things around that topic that partners can do.

Vince:                 So I hear you speaking towards specialization, maybe even focus in on specific industry sectors and I know Microsoft is investing quite a bit now in industry. What do you see happening there and are there any use case examples you can point to?

Brent:                 Yeah, we have a very big focus there and we started that journey for us about 12 months ago in a way that we haven’t done before. We’ve always had some light traction in that regard but over the last 12 months we’ve really dug in deep. And in the US specifically, we’re doubling down right now. Toni Townes-Whitley, who led that from a global standpoint for Microsoft has actually moved over into the US business and she will lead our focus here for the US as we go forward. And there’s been a lot of great work from research through to aggregation of assets and tools that partners can use to where we can go partner with our channel to actually start to go out and drive that.

One of my favorite examples of resources to help partners in that way is what we call the book of dreams. And there’s a number of these that exist today and every one of them is focused around an industry, whether it be the airline industry or it’s healthcare, and what it does is it helps you as a partner to understand specifically what’s the market opportunity, how’s Microsoft value position, what tools and resources and programs are there to help you go out and attack that segment of the market. So we absolutely are there to help you in that way.

And then, I’m actually working with my team to help them ramp up their knowledge to where they can go out and speak the language of that industry with those partners and be in a better position to think about how they build practices around that using our technology.

Vince:                 A lot of great information there. So book of dreams is a new term for me. I know about solution maps. Maybe you can differentiate a little bit more, peel back a little bit more on the book of dreams and what solution maps are.

Brent:                 Well, for me, book of dreams takes the solution maps a step further. The solution maps help us to understand what those solutions look like, but the book of dreams go beyond that to talk about the value proposition, the programs and tools and resources that Microsoft makes available for you to actually go out and drive that opportunity in the market, so it’s something that I would consider a great augmentation to the solution maps and something that any partner that wants to think about becoming focused should take a look at.

Vince:                 And Brent, you’re going to provide a link to that for our listeners so they can view that information or digest that information in our show notes.

Brent:                 Yeah, I’m more than happy to do that.

Vince:                 Great. Thank you very much. So we talk about some of the technologies and I’ve been hearing a lot about AI and IOT, machine l;earning and the like. How are these technologies impacting or being put to use by your partners to drive transformation?

Brent:                 Well, it’s still early for some of these very advanced technologies, like the ones you called out there, but we’re starting to see partners consume and understand how to build practices around that and build that journey out. You know, we’ve developed things like the partner playbooks that can actually take a member of our ecosystem step-by-step through how to actually develop this practice. Everything from what services are available, what tools does Microsoft make available for you, all the way through to what should you be monetizing around this and giving you real-world examples of what Microsoft has done with that.

But we’re starting to see some partners find early success with it. We’ve got NathCorp as an example, out in Southern California, that’s in our portfolio, has built a very compelling solution for airlines and is now looking to take that even more broadly into the market.

One of my favorite partners in Colorado, SSB Info, has built a phenomenal analytics practice around Azure and some of these more advanced workloads that we have, and they now provide tremendous managed services around business intelligence and data warehousing out to professional sports teams, out to collegiates, universities, like the University of Texas and Arizona state. And then, beyond that, they’re looking at other verticals inside of healthcare, inside of government, where they can deliver these types of solutions. But it’s still … It’s not a pervasive thing widely across the channel yet so there’s a ton of opportunity, but I’m really excited about where it’s going to go.

And, you know, we’re even using it ourselves and building around it in my team. We built something just this last quarter called the growth propensity index and what it helps us to do is understand what are the leading indicators that are determining a partner’s propensity to continue on the growth trajectory that they’ve been on.

Vince:                 Wow.

Brent:                 Yeah, and if there’s some risk there, what can we do to help them, and we’re bringing in Azure and machine learning and I’ve got a couple of folks on my team that, as a side project, they’re deeply technical and passionate about this topic, they’re working through machine learning to perfect this algorithm, this model so that we can work with partners to either drive a continued success trajectory or work with them to correct any issues they have.

Vince:                 So growth propensity index. GPI.

Brent:                 GPI, that’s right.

Vince:                 And so you got … So you could have leading indicators, you could see if a partner’s lacking in an area, you can give them help specifically in that area if it needs attention?

Brent:                 That’s right.

Vince:                 That’s amazing. That’s something new for me. We’re going to peel back … That might be another podcast episode for us.

Brent:                 Happy to od it.

Vince:                 But we’ve got a really important timeline ahead of us. We’ve got Microsoft Inspire very soon and one of the reason why I asked you to join this podcast today is to share with our listeners what your thoughts are, why partners should attend Inspire and maybe some specific sessions they should attend or how they should focus their time at Inspire.

Brent:                 Sure. You know, I think this’ll be my 12th or 13th Inspire, even before it was called that, Worldwide Partner Conference, and even going back earlier than that. And to me, in all transparency, it’s my favorite week of the year. It’s a chance to go out and see face-to-face so many great partners that I’ve had the chance to meet and learn from and coach over the years in the channel and then beyond that, you think about the networking opportunity that exists out there today between Microsoft employees and members of our channel. There’ll be about 3000 Microsoft employees just at Inspire and so there’s all kinds of subject matter experts, all kinds of unique perspectives from around the world. Imagine sitting down if your a partner with the PDM for the fastest growing partner from Australia or the fastest growing partner from Singapore or the UK and learning from them. There’s so many ways to connect the dots and learn from so many people that you just can’t match that in any other week or any other location during the year.

And then, from our standpoint, this is where we share out to that channel what’s our agenda for the year. So the key notes that Judson and Satya will deliver are rich with our focus areas and kind of give you a chance to, well very bluntly, read the tea leaves of where our focus areas going to be and where you’ll want to align to maximize your success in the coming 12 months.

P2P has become really, really big, that peer to peer or partner to partner activity. I remember five or six years ago, we really struggled to get that actively off the ground, but we’re seeing a flurry of activity there now and this is where so many of those relationships are established, connections are made and revenue starts to be generated behind these engagements that happen at Inspire.

And then, if you’re thinking about an infinite set of opportunities to create monetization for your business, the expo floor, with all of the vendors and ISVs that are there that sell through a channel, it’s a great chance to go see, literally hundreds of them, see what they have to offer, see which ones make the most sense for you to bring into your portfolio to go out and sell.

And I think that last one is probably the most unique to this year. It’s the first time that we’re bringing together Inspire and Ready and I have the great benefit of attending both this year and they’re taking place largely in the same week and they’ll overlap for a couple of days there and there’ll be about 40 000 people between Inspire and Ready attendees in Las Vegas at the same time. So there you’ll have a chance to see and meet, not just our focus on the partner business but also our enterprise sellers and our territory channel managers and all kinds of even technical individuals that maybe you don’t have access to on a normal given day, that you can literally sit down face-to-face with and have a rich conversation about how do I engage with you, how can we partner together, how do I work with you to be brought into certain accounts. It’s a very rich environment to have a lot of important connections for the year.

Vince:                 Well like you, I’m very excited by this and this overlap with the two events, the Ready event, which we used to call MGX back in the day, and then having that overlap time, partners have always craved or had the desire to have the sales people, the feet-on-the-ground, talking to customers to connect with and collaborate with at the same event, so this is going to be a terrific week in Las Vegas for everyone.

Brent:                 Absolutely.

Vince:                 So for our listeners who want to engage with you and the team or maybe want to say hello to you at Inspire, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Brent:                 Well, Inspire, I’ll be around. I tend to be … Use that time to meet with partners as much as I can, so if I’m not sitting in a core note or we used to call a keynote, then I’m in dedicated meetings with partners, but I’ll be at the US celebration as well. A number of other events that are ongoing there. I’d love to bump into you, have a conversation with you. But outside of that week, you know, I’m very active on LinkedIn, that’s a great way for me to connect, so I’m more than happy to do so in that medium if that makes sense. Partners can plug in to a lot of the other great assets of communication streams that we have, whether it be the SMB insider community or one of our other MPN assets as well and that’s another way for you to reach me and I’m always available by email at bccombest@microsoft.com.

Vince:                 Great. Thank you very much, bRent, and thank you for taking the time today.it’s been a great discussion. Excited to be with you and with Microsoft at Inspire this year and thank you for joining.

Brent:                 Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I really appreciate you having me.

END OF INTERVIEW