Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Commercial Partners, Microsoft India believes that remote-work and business continuity solutions the services partners are delivering during this global pandemic, will be the foundation of workplace productivity moving forward
With Covid-19 continuing to impact people and countries around the world, teams everywhere are moving to remote work. As Satya said recently, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”
The cloud major is seeing digital transformation being fast-tracked by organisations around the globe. Helping organisations adapt and innovate quickly is critically important. Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Commercial Partners, Microsoft India informs, “At Microsoft, we have always embraced the evolution of technology—it’s what fuels our desire to always stay one step ahead of what’s next so we can continue creating opportunities that allow our partners to thrive through unpredictable, sometimes seismic shifts.”
The Microsoft partner community is a powerful ecosystem. It is at the centre of how it bring technologies and business transformation to the customers. Microsoft partners are playing a critical role helping companies everywhere adjust to a new way of working. The remote-work, business continuity solutions and services they’re delivering during this global pandemic will be the foundation of workplace productivity moving forward.
“We need to continue evolving in order to meet emerging customer needs and expectations. We’re committed to investing in and delivering what partners need to innovate, grow their businesses and deliver on the promise of digital transformation for customers across organisations and industries,” he says.
As the company looks ahead, it has identified areas for partners opportunity:
- Teams for modern business: Now more than ever, the ability to connect remotely is vital, whether that be with coworkers, friends or family. Partners have an opportunity to support activation and usage for their customers. “We’re seeing adoption and change management partners focus on extensions to further customise to their customers’ business needs,” he adds.
- Tech intensity: Partners have an increasing number of ways they can help meet customers’ emerging needs and expectations. One is supporting their movement toward tech intensity, as organisations move past adopting the latest technologies and develop their own digital capabilities.
- Azure migration: The latest versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Windows Virtual Desktop offer tremendous opportunity for businesses to secure and modernise their workloads. Our partners are in a unique position to help customers migrate to the cloud and unlock the benefits of Azure to transform workloads with the latest data and AI capabilities.
- Security: While the cloud has opened the door for a myriad of possibilities, it has also made security a top priority for customers. “Security is engineered into our products, but we are counting on partners to help secure the customer’s environment from endpoint to data centre,” he says.
“We’re committed to working together with our partners to continue evolving our programs, tools and resources to ensure we have the right mix in place today and in the future. The power of the partner ecosystem lives in that shared commitment and collaborative spirit. Transformation isn’t a one-and-done action—it’s fluid and driven by agile and nimble strategies informed by shared learnings and insights. This is why Microsoft continues to invest and innovate to help drive success and digital transformation for our mutual customers,” he affirms.
This continuing and constant investment reaffirms Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to positioning the company and its partners for growth. Krishnan highlights, “We will continue to collaborate with our partners to bring our joint technologies to customers. We’re truly inspired by the innovations within our partner ecosystem and the opportunities and solutions these provide for our partners and customers. Whether they are partnering with Microsoft or with other partners—or selling directly to customers—organisations can grow their business and bring value where it’s needed most. We continually seek feedback from partners and listen to the community to better tailor our programs and services to meet and exceed expectations, which ultimately drives profitability and business growth. And we place value in how these insights help keep us agile and able to continually evolve.”
Take for example, the recent launch of the Back2Business Solution Boxes that Microsoft has curated for helping Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) maintain business continuity and embark on their cloud adoption journeys. Tailored for specific scenarios in different organisation sizes, they bring together Covid-19 offerings around Windows Virtual Desktop and Microsoft Teams. The partners have the additional flexibility of customising the boxed packages with their own value offerings for migration and deployment.
“At Microsoft, we believe partners make more possible. This belief is truly at the core of why we continue to invest in our partner ecosystem, to ensure we’re adding value, visibility and relevance for partners. And it’s the inspiration behind many of the programmatic changes we’re working on this year and for the future. The evolutionary changes we’re making will unlock huge opportunities for all of us and reaffirm our absolute belief in the power of partnership,” Krishnan concludes.
