Why Services Ready?
I do a lot of work with Partners around the world and they sometimes ask me, “Hey, what is this thing with Services and Partners? Is Services Ready for real? Why are you doing this?”
I realize that it is important for our Partners at large to understand why Microsoft and Microsoft Services in particular are making this massive investment in Partners through the Services Ready program. At the end of the day, it is all about Partners and how you can build a strong business using Microsoft technology. Services Ready is here to help.
For a long time, Microsoft Services has participated in (and may I say rather successfully) numerous complex, high risk engagements for some of the largest customers on the planet. Not surprisingly, we learned a lot from these engagements on how our products can best be used in a real world, complex environment.
Historically, we have taken these learnings and made them available to Microsoft Services Consultants for use in their customer engagements. (For those of you who may not be familiar with this organization, Microsoft Services is the consulting arm of Microsoft.) What we have never done in a programmatic way, until now, is to share this IP with our Partner community at large.
Why is Microsoft doing this?
One of the most common questions that Partners ask me is what’s in it for Microsoft? At the end of the day, what is good for customers and Partners is good for Microsoft.
Microsoft is and will continue to be a Partner-centric company. While Microsoft Services has a role to play in building demand for new Microsoft technologies, it is our Partners that give us the scale and ability to go out and meet the needs of our customers around the world. This is one of the secrets to our strength. Anything that we can do to help our Partners predictably and quickly drive value to customers is good for all of us.
Services Ready is the vehicle we use to provide our Partners with best practices, tools, templates, and the information needed to more predictably take Microsoft technology-based solutions to market.
I travel regularly, meeting with Partners and Customers. Recently, I was in our Asia Pacific region meeting with a large Partner who has been a part of Services Ready since its inception. I was trying to understand from them their experience with the program and how we could make it more valuable for them. This Partner is a large outsourcer who has been in this business for a long time. They were talking about how much they liked our Services Ready IP on Windows deployment.
I am a patient guy, but after 20 minutes of this, I could not control myself and finally blurted out a question that was nagging me. I asked them that given they had been in the infrastructure outsourcing business for many years, way longer than the 20 months that Services Ready has been around, whether they were trying to just humor me with their feedback. My counterpart sitting across the table from me said, “Ram, before we had this program, when I went into a new customer, I often spent the first couple of meetings speaking about business risk and how I could mitigate this. Now, when I go in with Microsoft by my side, the focus is not about risk. After all, I am using Microsoft IP and Microsoft is working with me. Now the focus is on business value and how I can impact my customer’s bottom line.”
At that point, I really grasped the true value and mutual benefits of the Microsoft Services Ready program.
It is still early in the game, and we have only just begun.
All of you Services Ready Partners out there, send me your feedback, anecdotes, and stories. The good, the bad, the ugly. All of it is welcome.
Until next time …
