WASHINGTON, D.C. – Geeman Yip, the CEO and founder of BitTitan, sits in a unique position in the marketplace. He runs the largest vendor of business process automation tools specific for managed services providers.
The company announced at the Inspire 2017 Conference its new MSPComplete Publisher Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISV) expanding its market into a growing area of the channel. BitTitan has become one of Microsoft’s most notable up-and-company alliance partners. The company started roughly in 2007 and is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year by moving into a new facility in Bellevue, Wash., which will double its current space in Kirkland, Wash. Since the start, the company has maintained its commitment to be a 100 per cent channel friendly vendor and now sport more than 50,000 partners globally. That’s quite the jump because in 2015 BitTitan only had 6,000 partners.
Geeman’s viewpoint on the massive overhaul to Microsoft’s organization is that it’s a great move on the part of the software giant from Redmond, Wash.
How it will affect the channel ecosystem of which many are BitTitan partners?
Geeman believes these changes were necessary and needed to be made. “We have an indirect influence on Microsoft revenue and we do millions of licenses a year and yet we get no face time with Microsoft,” he told CDN.
Geeman likes the way Microsoft is incenting its people and channel partners under this new direction and believes it has the potential to unlock new business because Microsoft people will be incented to promote BitTitan and its roster of solution provider partners in more than 140 countries.
But how fast will it happen?
These changes are not going to result in a shift overnight. Geeman believes it will take a couple of years for the channel to know how to execute and align with this new structure; the same goes for ISVs.
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But Geeman foresees another issue. He believes this new plan of operation will open up more opportunity for alliance partners like BitTitan and the rest of the channel but there’s not enough people available to drive all those opportunities.
“You are going to have to focus on business and priorities. We need to work with Microsoft to define the opportunity, do enablement of products and we need to do this on a massive scale. There is low hanging fruit, but there will be a ripple effect throughout the partner community to get Microsoft adoption in the productivity suite and in the Azure suite. There is a lot of competition now on multiple fronts like AWS. They are the defacto in cloud now because they are the incumbent. There is still a lot of education that needs to take place and the partners will have to get ahead of that,” he added.
Geeman also indicated that channel partners should not forget about what Microsoft is doing on PaaS with server-less computing, Augment Reality and Virtual Reality too because all that will lead to more opportunity for partners.
“They are now competing with the Google’s and AWS’s and I think Microsoft will eventually win because they are the platform company.”
One quick hit before I go. Jeff Dunmall will be the new president of New Signature Canada. He was the founder of iMason, a company New Signature acquired in 2015.