TORONTO – Microsoft Canada channel chief Jason Brommet announced at the Worldwide Partner Conference that the subsidiary is embarking on the biggest investment in the channel ecosystem in 13 years.
The Microsoft partner team, which Brommet leads, will be onboarding six new business development managers and 12 new technical architects specifically for helping partners build cloud solutions. Brommet will also be hiring a senior leader to manage these two teams under his direction.
“We are looking to shift from a sell-with type of relationship and work to find profitable paths to the cloud in a new approach called build-with type of partners,” he said.
The company is managing through double digit growth as Azure increased a whopping 800 per cent with enterprise partners. But Brommet admits this group needs to do more and its incumbent upon Microsoft Canada and the channel team to help the solution providers become more profitable with cloud.
However, the cloud landscape is providing new challenges for Microsoft in terms of partner types. Brommet is seeing non-traditional partners coming into the fold such as Sid Lee. The Montreal-based Sid Lee is a digital marketing, design and advertising agency. The company developed an app with Microsoft alliance partner Sitecore for Cirque Du Soliel.
Another new partner is Arrow. Arrow, in its history, has never had a formal relationship with Microsoft.
The value added distributor plans to develop products and services to support Microsoft technology and create integration opportunities for its network of solution providers.
“The economics of the cloud is changing everyone and we are not all in the same boat anymore. There is no one silver bullet with the cloud and I think this will be the new norm,” Brommet said.
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The two new data centres are also providing new partner opportunities for Microsoft Canada. In the last year two American solution providers New Signature and Comparex have entered the Canadian market each siting as one of the main reasons being the new Microsoft data centres. Just last month Microsoft alliance partner BitTitan also plans to establish a Canadian office again saying the two data centres was a big factor for coming to Canada.
Brommet said that the new data centres takes away the last argument out of ‘why not move to the cloud’.
“There will be partners who do not want to move to the cloud and embrace it fully. That’s ok. I love all our partners no matter what area you are in. But those who invest in the cloud I love just a little bit more. That’s the world we are moving towards,” he said.
It will be interesting to analyze how the IT versus telecom oriented partners adapt to this shift. Good move by Microsoft to do this investment in Canada!