Unbelievably, it has been a month since the 2016 Microsoft Australia Partner Conference where SkyKick was invited by Microsoft to participate and contribute. The theme this year was “Define Your Future” and SkyKick’s Co-CEO’s Evan Richman and Todd Schwartz were humbled to be invited in to the morning Keynote, along with head of Microsoft Partner Group, Gavriella Schuster. Todd and Evan discussed trends they were seeing for partners in this cloud-first world.
Key takeways were:
- Efficiency drives velocity
- Move beyond migration
- Think about the End Game
On the expo floor, we met with many of our existing Partners and so many new ones at the SkyKick booth in the Expo Hall, through 1:1 meetings and at the various evening activities. The week ended with a great SkyKick session titled “IP. The Ultimate Game Changer” which was well received by the Partners. It explored the first few steps to take in order to tap in to the secret sauce of IP. The session was led by Todd and Evan again and focused on IP not having to be as complex as hiring developers, but rather being as simple as packaging up repeatable differentiation and wrapping the Partners own unique value around it. Our Developer APIs are an excellent example of this – Partners can customize a unique experience on their own website for their customers. This customization is just one way for Partners to differentiate themselves from their competitors. (For more details about this concept, take a look at MPN’s Cloud Partner Profitability eBooks)
Our big take-away from the Microsoft Australia Partner Conference was just how advanced the Australian Partner community is in leading Cloud adoption through the channel globally. We look forward to being back at APC again next year sharing experiences, listening to you and providing thought leadership!
Cheers!
Ian, General Manager ANZ, on behalf of Team SkyKick
P.S. You can watch an interview with Gavriella Schuster here sharing how Microsoft and SkyKick partnered together to provide partners with the opportunity to back up and migrate their businesses for free in order to optimize their operations and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.