Copilot Partner Prompt-a-Thon

The Copilot Partner Prompt-a-Thon is an online series of actionable, hands-on sessions designed to help Microsoft partners make the most of Copilot.

Learn more and register now for the October 17 session on Adoption with User Personas.

Partner Audience: #ISV #Services
Relevant to: #AllRoles #Event #GrowYourBiz #CrossSolution

Ultimate Partner LIVE: Executive Summit

Join more than 300 other partners in Dallas, Texas, on October 22–23, at this unique event designed to help you align with Microsoft executives and award-winning advisors to drive success with Microsoft’s FY25 priorities.

Engage, learn, and connect through hands-on workshops, networking opportunities, and insights into Microsoft’s strategic goals. This highly acclaimed event also emphasizes inclusion—featuring women in tech, black channel partners, and more.

Check out the growing list of speakers and register today.

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

October 2 Americas Partner Insider Call

It’s not too late to register for the next Americas Partner Insider Call! Join the call to learn about partner training and certification resources designed to help you build the skills you need today—and the expertise to achieve more tomorrow. Then, go on an expert-led deep dive into Copilot licensing for partners.

Register here
The event will be held in English, with closed captions in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

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

September 4 Americas Partner Insider Call: Copilot and Co-op

Reserve your spot today for the next Americas Partner Insider Call and gain valuable insights from our expert speakers. Highlights include a Copilot demo for CPEM and guidance on using your Cooperative Marketing Funds (Co-op).

Register here
The event will be held in English, with closed captions in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

If you missed the August 14 call on Microsoft Copilot licensing, this and other previous sessions are available to watch on demand.

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #AllRoles #SuccessStory #LearnSolutionAreas #Azure

No Slides Attached podcast—Episode 5 coming August 21

No Slides Attached: AI Stories with Microsoft Partners is an exciting new podcast series featuring meaningful conversations that combine the expertise of Microsoft leaders and inspiring stories from our partners.

Check out the Season 1 schedule and look for the release of Episode 5 tomorrow on Fueling your data with Microsoft Fabric, featuring Microsoft partner Lantern and John Turk, Senior Partner Marketing Manager for Azure. In this episode you’ll learn:

• The importance of understanding your data to understand your business.
• How Copilot capabilities in Fabric allow for democratized insights in organizations.
• The most common challenges for organizations with their data.

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

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #AllRoles #DoingBizwMSFT #GrowYourBiz #CrossSolution #Azure #Security

Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast—inspiring stories and innovative solutions

In the Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast we explore the latest opportunities to enhance your profitability and prepare for the future with AI. Each episode features an inspiring story from industry peers and innovative solutions for scaling your business profitably. Listen to the latest episode and check for more coming soon!

Subscribe today to listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts:
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | RSS

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #ISV
Relevant to: #Tech #Developer #Event #GoToMarket #GrowSkills #DoingBizwMSFT #CrossSolution

AI Create | Tech Track

Register today for this innovative virtual event series on September 9–12 designed to help ISV partners navigate the paradigm shift created by AI and accelerate their AI journey with Microsoft. This four-part series will cover:

• Creating AI plugins in Microsoft Copilot Studio. Explore how to use AI Plugins to extend Microsoft Copilot or create custom Copilot extensions.
• Integrating ISV Apps with Microsoft Fabric. Learn how to seamlessly build products and services on top of Microsoft Fabric.
• Designing Your Own Copilot. Learn how to create custom copilots with Azure AI, on your data.
• Unleashing AI Superpowers: Task Automation with Agents​. Build Gen AI solutions and LLM workflows with multi-agent conversation frameworks.

These sessions aim to inspire and empower product, engineering, and technical leaders and practitioners with the knowledge and tools to innovate in the field of AI and technology. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from industry experts and take your skills to the next level.

The event will be held in English, with closed captions in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

August 14 Americas Partner Insider Call: FY25 updates

Mark your calendar for the first Americas Partner Insider Call of FY25!

Featured topics include:

• The latest updates to the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.
• A Copilot Licensing deep dive.
• How to help customers deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365 while simultaneously auditing and enhancing security posture with Restricted SharePoint Search.

Register here
The event will be held in English, with closed captions in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

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

Partner Audience: AllPartners
Relevant to: #News #SuccessStory #GrowSkills #CrossSolution

No Slides Attached podcast—Episode 4 coming August 7

No Slides Attached: AI Stories with Microsoft Partners is an exciting new podcast featuring meaningful conversations that combine the expertise of Microsoft leaders and inspiring stories from our partners.

Check out the Season 1 schedule and look for the release of Episode 4 tomorrow on Responding to threats in minutes, not hours with Copilot for Security, featuring Microsoft partner BlueVoyant. In this latest episode you’ll hear:

• How Microsoft Security integrates across clouds and platforms.
• The importance of prioritizing security into AI projects from the beginning.
• BlueVoyant’s learnings as a member of the Microsoft Copilot for Security Design Advisory Council.

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

Partner Audience: AllPartners #ISV
Relevant to: #SalesAndMarketing #AllianceMgmt #Event #GoToMarket #GrowYourBiz #DoingBizwMSFT #CrossSolution

AI Create | Business Track

Register today for this innovative virtual event series on August 19–22 designed to help ISV partners navigate the paradigm shift created by AI and accelerate their AI journey with Microsoft. In this four-part series we will:

• Uncover the Business Value of AI. Learn how to prioritize use cases for maximum impact.​
• Gain Insights from AI Pioneers. Navigate business transformation with principles that drive success.​
• Master AI Marketing Strategies. Discover best practices for bringing AI solutions to market, including buyer behavior and effective positioning.​
• Design Your AI Blueprint. Integrate AI into your business strategy for robust transformation and growth.​

This series promises to empower product, marketing, and sales leaders and practitioners with the knowledge to leverage AI for competitive advantage and customer satisfaction as you build and execute your Go-to-Market with Microsoft.

Partner Audience: AllPartners
Relevant to: #AllRoles #GrowSkills #GoToMarket #Copilot

Using Copilot in Marketing

Looking for ways to improve your marketing strategies? Bookmark the Microsoft Copilot Adoption site to get inspired and explore scenarios where Copilot can help!

In the Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast, we explore the latest opportunities for you to enhance your profitability and prepare for the future with AI. New episodes are now available in all podcast platforms and share the stories of Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) partners scaling profitably and the innovative hybrid cloud solutions behind them.

Rackspace Technology is a trusted Microsoft partner and a leading driver of Azure Arc. Read their story here and listen to this recent episode of the Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast to learn how they will save $40M in the next three years with their hybrid cloud implementation of Azure Arc.

Rackspace partners with Microsoft to reduce costs and provide more value to customers

Rackspace has been an innovator and leader in the technology services industry for more than two decades. The latest innovations in hybrid cloud led to a partnership with Microsoft around Azure Arc, transforming how they help customers, both in the security space and in managing their workloads running Windows Server and SQL Server.

“This is the perfect world for Arc. It allows us to have a single pane of glass, to be able to manage and secure our customers’ workloads. It’s a bridge to hybrid computing.” —Jeff DeVerter, Chief Technology Evangelist

When Rackspace started looking into transitioning from their SPLA SQL Server to Arc-enabled SQL, they realized the potential to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) was massive—an estimated $40 million over the next three years. Along with the financial benefit to Rackspace, Arc would enable their customers to manage, through a single pane of glass, their day-to-day business more cost-effectively and provide improved billing economics.

“Coming to us for not just our SPLA licensing but also for extended support is a huge value to our customers. They’re able to access and see in real time what their utilization is. It leads to better visibility or observability, as we like to say, which at the end of the day is what all customers want.” —Zachary Symm, Product Manager for Managed Public Cloud

Empowering partners and customers in a hybrid world

Rackspace plays a critical role in the hybrid world. Their ability to support customers in their data center and in Azure enables customers to utilize resources where it matters most. Azure Arc empowers customers to get the services they need in a more manageable and efficient way. The shift, says Symm, “opens up AI, it opens up security like Sentinel, it opens up licensing, it opens up as Microsoft evolves all these future services that they can now consume. It’s a massive transformation journey for the customer to be able to utilize all those benefits.”

Rackspace worked with the Microsoft Datacenter Optimization (DCO) team to successfully make the move to Azure Arc.

Looking ahead, Rackspace plans to continue growing their partnership with Microsoft as they continue to build out new capabilities and provide managed services on Azure and across their datacenters with Azure Arc. In Azure Arc, they now have a single management tool that reduces complexity and security risks while providing greater benefits to their customers.

Says Symm, “The ability to use all the new services from Azure and transport the scalability, the portability, all of those things, into the on-premises or multi-cloud world is a massive opportunity for all MSPs.”

Next steps

Learn more about this story in the latest episode of the Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast.

Subscribe today to listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts:

YouTube* | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | RSS

*With closed captions in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

For exclusive resources and to become part of the Microsoft DCO community, visit dco.microsoft.com.

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.

87% of customers believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage,¹ but not every customer knows how to get started. Providing viable use cases, sharing best practices, and setting clear desired outcomes help organizations undergo successful AI implementations.

Azure OpenAI Service is a powerful offering that integrates OpenAI’s advanced language models and services into the Microsoft Azure platform. With Azure OpenAI, customers get the security capabilities of Azure while running the same models as OpenAI.

Let’s explore how the testing of various Azure OpenAI use cases led one innovative company to realize increased productivity and cost-savings across the business.

A culture of innovation drives AI initiatives

North Atlantic Industries (NAI) supplies rugged embedded computing solutions and power supplies for the world’s largest and most demanding defense, commercial aerospace, and industrial applications. With over 65 years of experience and a focus on delivering rapid, reliable solutions that meet mission-critical needs, NAI defines every action and investment based on the ability to help its customers “accelerate their time-to-mission.”

A small company of 250 employees, NAI fosters a culture of innovation and exploration of new technologies to help improve processes and drive initiatives around reducing technical debt and maximizing efficiency. This culture sets the stage for employees to test various AI use cases and take a company-wide, iterative approach to AI adoption, resulting in numerous successful implementations that enable intelligent automation of routine tasks to deliver significant time, cost, and efficiency gains.

I am extremely supportive of our teams leveraging emerging technologies to solve previously unsolvable problems. Azure OpenAI is a force multiplier that is accelerating our productivity and letting us compete on a higher playing field.”

– William Forman, President and CEO, NAI

Leading the charge and realizing impact with AI

Staying true to its innovation-driven culture, NAI’s software engineers began looking for ways to incorporate AI to drive efficiency in their daily tasks and, ultimately, for the business. The first use case that became apparent was during a modernization effort to add comments to and clean up a code base of over 100K lines of code, all written in C#. Making the updates manually proved to be an enormous effort, which inspired the idea to implement an AI-driven solution to help automate and accelerate the process. “We wrote a program with Azure OpenAI that takes the source code and writes a comment for every function automatically, and everyone is excited about that because it ensures consistency and helps save programmers a lot of time,” says Lacey Stein, Software Engineer at NAI. “It really got everyone interested in wanting to explore AI more.”

When it came to selecting an AI solution, Tim Campbell, Director of Workplace Technology at NAI, notes several reasons that made Azure OpenAI the obvious choice. “From a cost perspective, the context window and rate limit Microsoft is giving us is beating anything else on the market,” shares Campbell. “We were also already familiar with OpenAI, so realizing the partnership with Microsoft led us right to Azure OpenAI services, which is our bread and butter right now.”

Taking Azure OpenAI company-wide

Following the success that the engineering team was finding with its initial Azure OpenAI use case, interest and involvement in AI initiatives grew across the company. They established a regular “best practice” session with other business groups to share how AI initiatives are performing and discuss ideas for additional use cases that could bring improvements to other departments. “It’s not just IT or engineering who participate in these discussions, we bring everyone together across sales, purchasing, program management, and manufacturing to talk about this AI and how we can use it to our advantage,” says Campbell. “Every corner of the company knows about it.”

These company-wide sessions have led to a growing number of AI use cases that have driven productivity and efficiency gains across the business.

Engineering

To meet customer assurance requirements for embedded software, NAI must perform software testing at many levels of the electronic system integration process. This effort includes writing and executing unit tests covering 500 different product functions on hundreds of hardware modules. Despite bringing in a third-party vendor to help aid in this extensive, manual task, progress was too slow to meet customer schedules. To accelerate the testing process, NAI brought testing back in-house, leveraging Azure OpenAI to detect missing unit test cases and significantly reduce the manual work and time necessary to complete each test. Ultimately, this strategy will save the company thousands of outsourcing hours and millions in costs. The team is seeing additional efficiency gains with Microsoft Copilot. “All of our engineers now have Copilot installed on their IDEs and love it. When AI can scaffold out a bunch of code that would take them a lot of time to do themselves, it is a huge time saver,” remarks Campbell.

Sales

When statements of work (SOWs) and client inquiries are received, program managers have traditionally needed to manually review and respond by locating and referencing past SOWs, which is time-consuming and inefficient. “Now, when we feed a statement of work into OpenAI it can refer to our prior proposal responses and assist our proposal writers. This improves the quality of SOW responses and gives our program managers a head start, saving them about 16 hours of manual work per proposal while improving accuracy and accelerating response times,” notes Campbell. NAI is also expecting to implement AI to streamline the request for proposal (RFP) process in a similar way.

Service

Currently in the proof-of-concept phase is a new AI-driven return merchandise authorization (RMA) system that improves the data infrastructure. With unstructured data, the current system requires service technicians to manually note problems and resolutions and then appropriately categorize the issues for future reference. The new system will leverage OpenAI to use the unstructured data and a set of standardized reason codes to automate RMA categorization and save technicians considerable time and manual effort.

In addition to the millions in cost savings achieved by eliminating outsourced code testing, NAI estimates that Azure OpenAI has delivered 60-70% time and efficiency gain by automating time-consuming, manual processes while dramatically increasing employee productivity.

Figure 1. Azure OpenAI delivers both cost savings and a gain in time and efficiency for customer NAI.

NAI has no plans to slow its exploration and expansion of AI use cases across the business and has several new implementations already in mind. One such initiative is creating an AI-driven Microsoft Teams site that has a complete knowledge base of the company’s products and manuals to answer queries on things like tolerances and tests right within the collaborative foundation of Teams.

The marketing team is similarly looking to incorporate a customer-facing AI bot for the company website that can leverage a deep knowledge base to help answer customer questions, as well as exploring AI-generated content to help the marketing team accelerate customer-facing content creation.

The engineering team is also working toward creating an AI program to automate hardware documentation. Currently, module manual writers must search and gather information across various sources, which is difficult and inefficient. Knowing how AI needs to ingest information has already inspired the team to start creating a central database of information in the hopes of eventually harnessing an AI-driven program to automate the documentation process. “Even if the program isn’t ready yet, just the thought of having AI has already been really helpful to our process,” says Stein.

Learn more about Azure OpenAI

What is Azure OpenAI Service? – Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn

Azure OpenAI Service | Microsoft Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure

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.

¹ Expanding AI’s Impact with Organizational Learning, Findings from the 2020 Artificial Intelligence Global Executive Study and Research Project, MIT Sloan Management Review, October 2020.

The surface Breadth Reseller Expansion Program has been extended through June 30, 2024!

Now is a great time for Microsoft partners to promote Surface to your customers!

On September 21, we unveiled updates across our device portfolio, including Surface for Business products geared towards modern work and collaboration.

As a Microsoft partner, you’re always at the forefront of innovation and technology. Explore the new features that will help elevate your customers’ work and creativity.

Key highlights

Surface Laptop Studio 2. Our most powerful laptop is now even better—with more ports, more RAM, an NPU made for AI and machine learning workloads, and Window Studio Effects to improve the video-calling experience. Surface Laptop Studio 2 is built for pro-creators and power-professionals. Learn more.

Surface Laptop Go 3. The latest generation of our affordable Surface laptop offers sleek portability, improved performance, and more RAM and storage options. Surface Laptop Go 3 is ideal for everyday achievers, students, educators, and information workers. Learn more.

Surface Go 4. Our most portable 2-in-1 device gets a performance boost with a new Intel® processor. Surface Go 4 is the perfect companion for on-the-go productivity, learning, and fun. Learn more.

Surface Hub 3. Now powered by Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, this collaborative digital whiteboard includes features like portrait mode and snap rotation. Surface Hub 3 is the ultimate tool for teamwork and innovation. Learn more.

Microsoft continues to advance its AI initiatives. Read how select Surface devices¹ play a significant role.

Surface Reseller Expansion Program

To assist our reseller community in providing top-notch modern work solutions, we’ve launched the Surface Breadth Reseller Expansion Program. This program allows resellers that have an existing business relationship with a Surface Authorized Distributor² in the United States or Canada to sell the Surface for Business portfolio (excluding protection plans) to their customers now through June 30, 2024.

What to do now?

• • Learn more about the program.
  • Reach out to one of our Authorized Surface Distributors to get started today:

¹ Devices include Surface Pro 9 with 5G, Surface Hub 2S, Laptop Studio 2

² D&H, Ingram Micro, and TD SYNNEX

Join the conversation

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

As part of this transition, Microsoft has evolved their partner personas as well as the resources available throughout the partner journey. 

Microsoft has simplified key partner journeys to help partners navigate the Microsoft partner ecosystem of innovative programs, services, and the tools designed to drive growth and profitability.  

Key partner benefits include:  

• Partner enablement to support innovation and growth  
• Expanded capability to create value in-market, connect with customers and win new business 
• Benefits specific to solutions partner designations

Microsoft resources by persona type 

Microsoft has crafted these personas to better align with partners and the tools and resources they need making it easier for all partners (including new) to get to market faster and more efficiently. This is just a small sample of what is available to each of the persona types.  

Persona 1 (click here to access Persona 1 resources slide)
I’m a partner that provides services and want to learn about Microsoft’s ecosystem of programs, services, and tools.

• Partner Essentials: How to succeed as a partner
• Learn more about the new solutions partner designations that are aligned with the Microsoft Cloud
• Go-To-Market faster and grow your cloud business with efficiency with indirect provider partnerships: Cloud Solution Provider program

Persona 2 (click here to access Persona 2 resources slide)
I’m a partner that provides services and want to deepen my capabilities and achieve faster
growth.

• How to leverage the Microsoft ecosystem for meaningful growth | Partner Success Guide
• Provide better technical support to your customers
• Learn how to showcase your solution directly to customers, build customer trust, and create strategies for better-together selling

Persona 3 (click here to access Persona 3 resources slide)
I’m a partner that is interested in publishing software solutions and want to develop, publish, and market my application.

• Get started on your ISV membership journey
• Explore the benefits of Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub
• Gain Training and enablement resources

Persona 4 (click here to access Persona 4 resources slide)
I’m a partner that provides software solutions and want to gain scalability and agility through enhanced Microsoft support.

• Benefits of being a Microsoft ISV – Developing Strategic Alliances and Partnerships with Tech focus
• Build for the future. How Azure can help ISVs differentiate their business
• Boost offer visibility and incentivize sales through marketplace

In Summary

These one-stop shop resource templates by partner persona enable Microsoft partners to self-identify and quickly locate resources mapped to key steps in the partner journey. The benefit being partners are able to grow customer accounts and scale more efficiently in terms of GTM with Microsoft. 

Related posts 

• How to become a Microsoft partner – US Partner Community Blog – Microsoft 
• How to leverage the Microsoft ecosystem for meaningful growth | Partner Success Guide – US Partner Community Blog – Microsoft 
• Partner Essentials: How to succeed as a partner – US Partner Community Blog – Microsoft 
• Develop or Migrate Your App (microsoft.com) 
• Benefits of being a Microsoft ISV – Developing Strategic Alliances and Partnerships with Tech focus  
• Build for the future. How Azure can help ISVs differentiate their business 

Join the conversation

Be a part of this conversation as it emerges – join Microsoft and other US partners in the US Partner Zone within the Microsoft Partner Community!