Expanding the #MSpartners Service Economy

A few years back at the Microsoft Inspire partner conference in Las Vegas, CEO Satya Nadella told the audience of global partners that “every company is a software company.” What he was talking about was the need for every Microsoft partner to expand upon their current slate of products and services and think more broadly about customer needs — and how their businesses should evolve and expand to serve those needs. There’s a similar theme brewing within the channel in recent weeks, with Microsoft encouraging partners to expand their thinking about “services economic opportunities” and to recognize the services opportunity generated for every $1 of Microsoft licensing they sell.

For the next #CollabTalk TweetJam on Tuesday, March 23rd at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern we will gather as a community to discuss “Expanding Microsoft’s Partner Service Economy”  and share these different perspectives and real-world examples of how Microsoft partner services opportunities are evolving and growing. Are you an ISV that is branching out into services? A consulting or training company developing products? Do you offer a wide range of products and solutions as a CSP or MSP, or are you expanding into one or more of these areas? Come share your experiences! Anyone can participate in this community discussion as we share feedback, ideas, insights, and impacts of participating in the Microsoft ecosystem.

You can join the community discussion using Twitter and the #CollabTalk hashtag or your favorite Twitter platform. You do not need to be an “expert” to participate in the online conversation, and can ask questions, comment on the questions posed, or just “lurk” in the background. These online discussions are open to anyone — you do not have to be on the panel to participate.

This month’s tweetjam is being sponsored by tyGraph and AvePoint. Thanks for your support!

If you have never participated in one of these tweetjams, it’s pretty simple: anyone can jump in and share their thoughts, or just lurk in the wings and absorb the wisdom of the crowd. Either way, it’ll be a TON of content to consume in a single hour. You can follow the live session using the Twitter UI of your choice (Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, whatever). How it works is that I’ll post a series of questions every few minutes, and people will respond to Q1, Q2, Q3 and so forth with A1, A2, A3, always including the #CollabTalk hashtag with their answers. Feel free to reply as often (or as little) as you’d like, ask your own follow up questions, share relevant links, re-tweet others, and engage with the audience.

The questions we will discuss during the session include:

1.  Microsoft talks about growing the “partner services economy.” Where do you see the greatest future opportunities within the Microsoft partner ecosystem?
2. Are you making changes to your business model or capabilities, or forming new relationships to expand your Microsoft ecosystem opportunity?
3. Has the pandemic changed your fundamental business activities? If so, how? If not, why not?
4. With Microsoft’s new industry cloud efforts, is your business model shifting focus toward verticals?
5. Many customers employ solutions across different cloud platforms. How important to your business is support for multi-cloud?
6. Microsoft has historically focused on the Enterprise, with channel driving the long-tail. Do you see this changing, and has your focus on Enterprise and/or SMB changed?
7. What are your Top 3 pain points as a partner within the Microsoft ecosystem?

As always, there will be side-questions, side-conversations, and wise-cracking throughout. This is open to the public, so please join in the discussion! The dialog is always thought-provoking and fun.

Participating on this panel (so far):

• Jason Beal (@varoholic), svp global channel & partner ecosystems at AvePoint
• Patrick Curran (@pcfromdc), federal cto at Planet Technologies
• Karuana Gatimu (@karuana), principle manager, customer advocacy group, Microsoft Teams Engineering at Microsoft
• Tobias Fenster (@tobiasfenster), Microsoft Regional Director, dual MVP in Business Applications and Azure, and cto for Cosmo Consult
• Scott Bekker (@scottbekker), editor at Redmond Channel Partner magazine and http://RCPmag.com 
• Shadeed Eleazer (@mrshadeed), founder and principal consultant at Managed Path Solutions
• Ed Senez (@edsenez), president at UnlimitedViz and TyGraph
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), Microsoft Regional Director, SharePoint MVP, and founder of PixelMill
• Martina Grom (@magrom), co-founder of atwork.at, Office 365 MVP and Microsoft Regional Director
• John Peluso (@johnconnected), Microsoft Regional Director, and chief product officer at AvePoint
• Adam Ball (@AdamCBall), co-founder of COUCUG, Teams and Skype for Business MVP
• Hal Hostetler (@TVWizard), Microsoft MVP and senior field engineer and social media coordinator for Roland, Schorr & Tower
• Jeffrey Schwartz (@jeffreyschwartz), editor-at-large for Channel Futures and Channel Partners Online
• Kevin McDonnell (@kevmcdonk), solutions architect at CPS
• Matt Varney (@thevarnish), intranet manager at KCTCS
• Corey Roth (@coreyroth), Microsoft MVP, vp of engineering at UnlimitedViz and tyGraph
• Eli Robillard (@erobillard), SharePoint MVP, musician, fly-fisher, collaboration technology guy
• Treb Gatte (@marqueeinsights), Business Solutions MVP, international speaker/man of mystery at Marquee Insights
• Tobiasz Koprowski (@KoprowskiT), Data Platform MVP, founder and consultant at Shadowland Consulting
• David Patrick (@DavidEPatrick),  Office Servers & Services MVP, user group organizer, subject matter expert with DSA, Inc.
• John White (@diverdown1964), dual SharePoint and Data Platform MVP, cto at UnlimitedViz and tyGraph
• Stacy Deere-Strole (@sldeere), SharePoint MVP and owner of Focal Point Solutions
• Alex Terentiev (@alexaterentiev), Office Development MVP, member of the PnP team, solution architect and developer for SharePointalist
• Eric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and ceo of Empty Cubicle
• Mike Maadarani (@mikemaadarani), Office Apps & Services MVP, cloud solution architect at MCM Consulting
• Shari Oswald (@shortcutshari), co-founder and productivity evangelist at PowerUP! Learning
• Kurt Kragh Sørensen (@KurtKragh),  intranet consultant and owner of IntraTeam.com
• Norm Young (@stormin_30), Office Apps & Services MVP, director of collaborative analytics at UnlimitedViz
• Nicki Borell (@NickiBorell), Microsoft MVP & RD, evangelist & consultant for SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure
• Wes Preston (@idubbs), SharePoint MVP, evangelist,  and owner at TrecStone
• Jason Rivera (@SharePointJR), SharePoint consultant and dev, M365 Philly organizer, Tri-State O365 user group organizer
• Noorez Khamis (nkhamis), SharePoint MVP, cloud technologies architect and vp technology at Creospark
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Microsoft MVP & RD, CollabTalk founder, Microsoft gtm director at AvePoint

If you would like to be included on one of these panels, please drop me a line via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter. And thank you again to tyGraph for your support of these CollabTalk tweetjams! And finally, if you are interested in being a sponsor of a future tweetjam, please contact me.