Microsoft Cloud Partner Profitability Guide: An interview with Marie Huwe and Kees Hertogh

Dear Readers, There was an interesting interview with Marie Huwe, General Manager of Marketing for Microsoft Dynamics at Software Advice. Here is the guest post by Hunter Richards, Accounting Market Analyst at Software Advice.

This year, Software Advice got to attend Microsoft’s Convergence conference. They spoke with Marie Huwe, General Manager of Marketing for Microsoft Dynamics, about the inevitable change to the partner channel’s business model when cloud computing really takes off. Partners will need to change to survive.

In the video below, Marie speaks about the new Microsoft Cloud Partner Profitability Guide, a collection of strategies and best practices for staying afloat as a partner in the cloud era.

Software Advice also got a private meeting with Microsoft Dynamics AX product manager Kees Hertogh. Kees gave the scoop on Dynamics AX 2012, which just entered beta, and is expected to be generally available this upcoming August. Kees explained the new embedded business intelligence tools and role-tailored user interfaces, among other new additions to this version. Check out the video below for the full interview.

Both of these videos were originally posted on the blog at the Software Advice website.

In the clouds: Microsoft and the New York City

New York City, perhaps with one of the biggest customer base with over 100,000 city employees certainly catches the eye when its Mayor Bloomberg wants to make an announcement with Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer. At City Hall, they both have announced a new five-year deal which will turn up dozens of separate city contracts with Microsoft into one master agreement and is projected to save the city an amount of $50 million. The value of the deal itself is about $100 million, or $20 million a year.

These savings will not only come from different contracts’ consolidation, but also by shifting some of the software needs of the New York City to the Cloud. The first phase of the deal impacts 30,000 city employees, and will include Microsoft Windows 7, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Live Meetings, Azure, Windows Server, development tools, and database products. (also, when Office 365 becomes available that too could be show up as the part of the agreement).

City workers will fall into one of three buckets: occasional users, basic users, and power users. The city employs a lot of desk-less workers who are out on the streets. Giving them access to Office, email, and collaboration tools in the cloud makes more sense than giving them desktop versions of Office. Power users, on the other hand, will require both desktop and cloud versions. The more software that Microsoft hosts on its own servers, the more the city saves on hardware and IT costs.