by James Butler – Trustmarque CTO
Yesterday was the second day of Microsoft’s Inspire event, Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Las Vegas.
Partners working together
Today’s keynote speeches presented a number of new initiatives, including a new approach to partnering. This year, the tech giant is focusing on a partner-to-partner model, where partners can work together to better serve customers. This ISV co-selling opportunity means smaller, more specialist partners can collaborate with larger partners to not only reach more customers but also offer greater capabilities and services to customers to help them deliver change within their organisation.
Microsoft partner, Trustmarque, has already adopted this co-selling approach. Working with KenSci, a healthcare risk prediction platform provider, we have created a trial risk prediction platform, which aims to help predict pulmonary risk and improve care for patients suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) for NHS Scotland . It will be tested using anonymised data across 2.1 million patients based in Glasgow and includes a physician decision support solution and COPD predictions. You can read the full article here.
Getting more from Technology
Throughout the day, all the Microsoft speakers emphasised the value of its partners and how enabling customers to get more out of their technology platforms whilst helping customers overcome the complexities of Microsoft solutions remains high on the agenda.
The day also focused on the forthcoming investments and innovations in Azure and Azure marketplace, and how this powerful platform will help customers deploy what could be considered a complex stack effectively and achieve digital transformation swiftly.
Microsoft 365, Microsoft’s desktop and Office solution, along with its now integrated analytics and security were discussed. This combination of tools efficiently manages the threat landscape and offers an end-to-end solution around infrastructure, data and devices. As it touches all these layers, Microsoft 365 can really help users become more productive and organisations become more secure.
Industry-focused solutions
Microsoft also mentioned that it would be focussing on vertical solutions and markets – in fact, 8 vertical markets and 20 sub-verticals. They are looking to build a Line of Business for specific verticals to dive deeper into how they can help customers use technology to solve their industry-specific problems and access the tools they need for Digital Transformation.
Jason Zander, One Commercial Partner, concluded with the importance of transforming infrastructure and building an application roadmap to make organisations more modern. He reminded us how Azure Migrate and other tools can transform applications and make them more modern and cloud-ready, which in turn makes AI and data easier and offers the ability to unlock more technical advances.
To sum up the day, it seems that Microsoft has not changed direction – it is more refining and accelerating it’s strategy from last year to drive more digital transformation, create powerful technical platforms and strengthen its partner eco-system. This really sets Microsoft apart from the competition no other platform has the vendor experience and partner ecosystem to unlock the value for customers – it’s a real game changer.
