Americas Partner Insider Call series

Join our FY25 H2 series of Americas Partner Insider Calls for expert insights and guidance on how to leverage Microsoft 365 Copilot to grow your business.

To view the January 8 session on Navigating the Copilot Adoption Journey, see the list of previous sessions available to watch on demand.

For more details on the series and to register for upcoming sessions, bookmark this blog.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #AllRoles #News #DoingBizwMicrosoft #Taxonomy

Communications channels for Americas Partners

Check out this short video highlighting the communications channels available to help you stay up to date on the latest information and opportunities for partners.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #ISV
Relevant to: #AllRoles #SalesAndMarketing #Event #GeneratePipeline #BizApps

Biz Apps Partner Digital Summit

Co-created between Microsoft and Dynamics Communities, this free digital summit consists of five modules designed to help SI and ISV partners accelerate their business and pipeline. Each module features Microsoft leadership discussing partner initiatives and programs, along with partners sharing best practices and real-world examples. Register once and choose from any of the following modules:

January 23 – Module 1: Partner Solutions Designations
January 30 – Module 2: Creating Funded Engagements
February 6 – Module 3: The Co-Sell Opportunity
February 13 – Module 4: AI, Copilot & ISV Success Programs
February 20 – Module 5: ISV Best Practices for Scale

Learn more and register here.

Migrating your customers from Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central

This four-week Digital Marketing Content OnDemand campaign is designed to help Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners engage and nurture SMB customers with an existing on-premises Dynamics GP solution and drive momentum towards migrating them to the cloud with Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Week 1 – Why migrate from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central?
Week 2 – On-Premises vs. Cloud: Growing Your Business with Dynamics 365 Business Central
Week 3 – Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central
Week 4 – Industry deep dive

Campaign content includes editable assets for you to customize with your Business Central solution, GP End of Support messaging, and FAQs to facilitate customer conversations.

Learn more and get started.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #AllRoles #Event #GrowSkills #CrossSolution

January 8 Americas Partner Insider Call

The first in a series of Americas Partner Insider Calls in FY25 H2 on Microsoft 365 Copilot, the focus of our January session will be Navigating the Copilot Adoption Journey. Register now.

And mark your calendar for these upcoming Americas Partner Insider Calls:

• February 5 on Maximizing ROI with Copilot
• March 12 on Understanding Role-Based Copilots

See the list of previous sessions, now available to watch on demand.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #AllRoles #Event #GrowSkills #CrossSolution

No Slides Attached: Episodes 5 and 6 available now

In the podcast No Slides Attached: AI Stories with Microsoft Partners, we explore the latest technologies with expert guidance from Microsoft leaders and partners. Season 1 focused on how our Microsoft Copilots are already transforming businesses. In Season 2, we’re building on that momentum, diving even deeper into AI innovation across industries.

Check out the latest episodes:

Episode 5 – [AI in Retail] Avanade is empowering workers to automate and personalize their customer’s experience
Rob Want, Industry Director at Avanade, shares his insights on the integration of AI to enhance customer experiences and streamline operations. Later, Microsoft RCPG GTM Lead and prominent retail influencer Ricardo Belmar joins the discussion on the importance of data in retail and consumer goods.

Episode 6 – [AI in Energy] AspenTech is taking sustainability to a whole new level
Heiko Claussen, Co-Chief Technology Officer of AspenTech, explores how the global leader’s technology is tackling energy efficiency and sustainability in industries such as chemicals, electric grids, and subsurface engineering. Next, our industry experts discuss Microsoft’s collaboration with industry leaders like AspenTech on sustainable energy innovations.

Real Stories, Real Success. Tune in and subscribe today, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive data and analytics platform designed to help organizations democratize data, share insights, and drive data-driven decision-making. Fabric presents Microsoft partners with the opportunity to provide leading analytics capabilities to customers in a SaaS solution, and at a price point that resonates with customers in the small and medium enterprise range. Leverage Fabric to help your customers improve data literacy and drive business.

Let’s look at a successful implementation by one of our partners.

Anatomy of a partner win

Microsoft partner Wipfli is a seasoned digital and business services consulting firm that delivers integrated solutions to help organizations transform through digital innovation. Microsoft Fabric fits well with Wipfli’s strategic “listen and learn before we advise” approach, having completed implementations of Microsoft Fabric to simplify, unify, and accelerate their customers’ digital transformation journey.

The challenge

In a recent customer deployment, Wipfli was working with a customer in the nonprofit industry that was having difficulty measuring the impact and effectiveness of their programs across disparate locations. The customer was actively using Microsoft Power BI, but they hadn’t seen widespread adoption across the organization and were looking for a more comprehensive solution. The decentralized nature of the business resulted in siloed data that required extensive data cleansing and made broader performance and production reporting difficult, labor-intensive, and inconsistent.

Additionally, the customer’s limited infrastructure support team was burdened with extensive data engineering work for Azure SQL and other Microsoft data tools without a cohesive data strategy in place, which resulted in fluctuating, unpredictable costs.

They needed a solution that would provide centralization and visualization, while capitalizing on existing investments.

The considerations

Wipfli went to work developing a strategic data foundation roadmap to meet their customer’s needs. The customer had existing investments in Microsoft technology (PowerBI, Azure SQL Server Database, Azure Data Factory) and was looking for options that would limit total implementation costs.

Wipfli knew that part of the project would entail building out a centralized data hub to allow all the customer’s locations to leverage and access a single data source. A centralized hub would better support local reporting and analytics, along with several automated reporting and benchmarking capabilities for different business groups.

 “Fabric is specifically designed to bring information together, centralize how you manage data, standardize how you structure it for reporting, create a single source of truth, and then report off that one source of truth instead of a number of different siloes,” says Matt Sabo, Director of Analytics Delivery at Wipfli.

Microsoft Fabric was the right tool for the job. Fabric is also able to support the need for diverse system integrations with its multitude of community partnerships through OneLake, a consolidated data repository that can leverage and allow queries across all data types, both structured and unstructured.

The sales win

Wipfli proposed Microsoft Fabric as a comprehensive data management and analytics platform to help streamline costs and utilization of Azure toolsets while consolidating, managing, and analyzing data all in one place. Fabric also provides simplicity and predictable pricing by “bundling” tools that the customer was already using with new capabilities. The customer would avoid having to manage usage and costs of each individual component.

Wipfli also used as a selling point the customer’s existing Power BI Premium investment automatically transferring to support Fabric workloads.

“That’s part of what has made this a really easy conversation,” recounts Dean Roder, Director of Alliances at Wipfli. “We’re able to show them, here’s this new consolidated set of tools you were already using and paying for, with added functionality and simpler management, and you don’t have to buy anything additional or swap anything out. It was a really easy ‘yes’ for them.”

To empower its diverse organization with access to consolidated datasets and insights to improve reporting, decision-making, and experiences, Wipfli used their “Level-Up initiative” to digitally transform their data estate and ensure that the implementation was successful.  Delivering technology requires training customers and ensuring that stakeholders are able to make the most of their investment.

The implementation

Leveraging Microsoft Fabric to transform the customer’s data estate is accelerating the delivery time for Wipfli by roughly 20 percent (as compared to previous customer implementations using Azure PaaS solutions), with less effort spent on data engineering and navigating complications.

Fabric is also much simpler to manage and administer than individual tooling, enabling the customer to adopt a powerful data management and analytics platform without staffing a high-cost IT specialist.

“Microsoft took all the tools we love the most and use all the time and put them together in a perfectly aligned, engineered framework with a simplified pricing model and made our lives a lot easier in doing what we need to do,” remarks Sabo.

“They don’t need to have someone who understands all the working components of the individual Azure products, they only have to learn one thing—Fabric, and how to manage it. Everything is lined up to work together so it makes it much easier for them.”

Furthermore, Fabric creates an ideal foundation to facilitate future artificial intelligence (AI) vector models and queries as their data maturity progresses.

“I really think it’s amazing that Microsoft can make something like this, a best-in-class platform for cloud data management, attainable for a non-profit like Junior Achievement. Fabric is providing an easy, affordable path for companies that already have a PowerBI Premium license to bring a lot of tools together for even greater capability. You’re getting a database, data science, real-time analytics—it really delivers a lot of value for the money,” remarks Sabo.

Next steps

Interested in learning more about Microsoft Fabric? Get started with Microsoft Fabric or register for a virtual technical workshop live event on June 11-13, 2024.

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

GitHub Certification Fundamentals

Register today for this four-episode series designed to help you enhance your software development skills and prepare to obtain certification. Sessions cover the basics of GitHub to hands-on exploration of GitHub Copilot and Codespaces. At the end of the series, you could be eligible to receive a free certification voucher on a first-come, first-served basis. See details.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #AllRoles
Relevant to: #Deadline #UnderstandBenefits #CrossSolution

FY24 Co-op reminder

Start earning and spending your eligible co-op funds before it’s too late!

Co-op (Partner Incentives Cooperative Marketing Funds) provides reimbursements of earned funds to participating partners to help differentiate and build channel awareness and preference for Microsoft products. You can use co-op funds to conduct marketing activities that increase brand awareness and drive growth of your sales pipeline. Invest your co-op funds in activities to facilitate readiness, develop specializations, or attain Microsoft certifications—activities that foster focused solution practices and Centers of Excellence. Read this blog to learn more.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #AllRoles
Relevant to: #Event #GrowSkills #CrossSolution

Microsoft Copilot for Security now generally available

Last month, we announced that Microsoft Copilot for Security would be generally available worldwide starting April 1, 2024. To understand how generative AI will streamline and enhance security tasks with exciting new product innovations and how Copilot for Security can seamlessly integrate with other products, read this Microsoft Security blog.

Upcoming training events

• • Learn Live: Get Started with Microsoft Copilot for Security
  • Microsoft Secure Tech Accelerator
  • Microsoft Copilot for Security Partner Bootcamp
  • Bookmark the security partner training events page for more upcoming training opportunities.

Recommended reading

• • Microsoft Copilot for Security: Protect at the speed and scale of AI
  • What is Microsoft Copilot for Security?

Partner Audience: #CSP
Relevant to: #DoingBizwMSFT #GeneratePipeline #Azure

Boost your hybrid cloud profits

Explore the innovative solutions and strategies that are helping Microsoft CSP partners integrate their on-premises solutions with the benefits of Azure. Register today for our one-hour April 9 webinar Microsoft CTO on Boosting Profits and Flexibility in Cloud Hosting to gain insights from Tony Surma, Microsoft Americas GPS CTO, on how to capitalize on the latest cloud hosting opportunities.

Leveraging the Copilot for Security opportunity

Join the next Americas Partner Insider Call on April 3 for a discussion on Copilot for Security, the industry’s leading AI security solution. Hear firsthand from our security experts about how generative AI is changing the security landscape and how to leverage this fast-growing opportunity. Register today.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #AllRoles
Relevant to: #Deadline #GrowYourBiz  #CrossSolution

Microsoft Partner of the Year Award nominations close April 3

Each year, the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards acknowledge outstanding successes and innovations by partners in over 100 countries and in a wide variety of categories and industries. Don’t miss the chance to nominate your business for the 2024 Partner of the Year Awards. Learn more and start your nomination here.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #AllRoles
Relevant to: #News #GeneratePipeline  #Surface

Advancing the new era of work with Copilot

Last week, Microsoft announced the release of two new AI-powered PCs, Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10, along with advances in its management portal and the commercial availability of its Microsoft Adaptive Accessories. Read this blog for all the details.

Microsoft offers a range of investments across each stage of the partner sales cycle. These investments are intended to enable deal acceleration and conversion, and help partners drive digital transformation with their customers.

Understanding partner investments 

Two investment categories are available to partners: offers and incentives. Offers are designed to fund specific pre-sales or post-sales engagements with customers and are not fundamentally tied to a transaction. Incentives are transaction-based, paid on a percentage of sales revenue or on the end–customer consumption or usage in the post-sale phase.

You can increase your sales velocity by taking advantage of the offers and incentives available through the Partner Investments Engine (PIE).

Offers and incentives align to the partner-customer sales journey phase, as shown here:

What is PIE?

The Partner Investment Engine (PIE) is a portfolio of offers and incentives through which eligible Microsoft US-managed partners can request funds to support the execution of key sales and marketing activities with their customers. are well-defined with specific eligibility requirements to provide agility and time to funding. The offers and incentives are well-defined with specific eligibility requirements to provide agility and shorten time to funding. If your engagement does not fit within the requirements of PIE, you can still request funding through the Area Win Room with the help of your Microsoft field representative.

Partners can stack pre-sales and post-sales PIE offers with an end customer. However, PIE is not available for customers with any other ECIF investment already applied in the fiscal year for the requested solution area. Partners are encouraged to leverage their PDM to ensure funding potential is maximized as they bring their customers through the investment win formula.

What PIE offers are currently available?

The FY23 PIE program currently includes three offers and incentives, each supporting pre- and post-sales engagements:

• • FY23 Azure Everywhere provides funding to help eligible customers along their cloud adoption journey through partner-led activities aligned to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework.
  • FY23 Modern Work Everywhere funds activities that partners can leverage to drive sales, deployment, and consumption of strategic Modern Work products.
  • FY23 Security Everywhere funds activities that showcase the security capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Azure to drive sales, deployments, and consumption with eligible customers.

Get started and stay informed

US-managed partners can request access to the PIE Portal to begin onboarding. If you meet the general program requirements, an access code will be provided, allowing you to sign in to your personalized PIE dashboard. From there, you’ll have access to the specific offers you’re eligible for based on offer-specific requirements (such as Solutions Partner designations).

To stay informed and engaged with the PIE community:

• • Join the Partner Investment Forum.
  • Leverage the PIE asset collectionon Partner Center.
  • Attend our Partner Investments Office Hours every second Wednesday at 10AM PST. The sessions are also available on demand.

If you have questions or need assistance, our support team will be more than happy to help.