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If you’ve ever wondered the value of partner programs from software/hardware companies, let me give you my perspective from the front lines. My clients should encourage me to come to this every year. (If you’re a Cogent client, I fully give you the right to hold me accountable to be at these things!) 

After evaluating the first full day of the conference last night, after my ears stopped ringing from the GoGos concert, I believe that the format of the conference is fantastic. I tried to put myself in the seat of my clients, and I would hope that my service providers are doing things like this with strategic partners. I had such great meetings yesterday with other partners and with Microsoft folks. Here’s my assessment of the value from a depth and breadth perspective.

I had great meetings yesterday with folks from Corasworks and HunterStone. Just those two companies provided me so much information on how I can offer my clients a more complete solution to their business challenges. I think that the value of understanding the offerings of other partners would prevent me from trying to do something from scratch for a client, who would greatly benefit from me knowing how to access the knowledge or products to keep his/her costs down. This also helps me because it lowers my risk and allows me to stay in my core competency.

I’m also amazed at the solutions that are already out there. Just the CorasWorks guys for example: they’ve developed a great workflow layer over SharePoint that could go a long way to moving a business toward process automation. Admittedly this is something that we could build. It’s all built in .NET around SharePoint… that’s what we do anyway. The cool thing is that they’ve got a supported customer base that drives them and holds them accountable to keeping the product improvement going. That should be a great comfort to a client executive.

Meeting with and listening to the Microsoft guys is also very valuable to increasing this horizontal solution capability. Not only are these guys, like Rick Herrera and Dale Schalgel, pointing us to great partners who extend can our capabilities, the resources given out at these events are unparralelled. When I was at E&Y, we developed our own knowledge base to deliver from. We’re working to replicate that type of knowledge management environement at Cogent, but it’s a difficult and time consuming discipline. As a partner of Microsoft, Microsoft allows us to access a bunch of collateral to ensure that we have the best informaiton to deliver a quality solution. Lots of stories about how we’ve cut out lots of time in augmenting our proprietary assessment frameworks to developing requirements. My clients want me here.

On the depth side, unquestionably, the knowledge passed along in the sessions here is unparralelled. My experience so far has been that you really have unfettered access to the people who know these products here. Microsoft has so much invested in the partner network that they can’t afford not to throw their best people at this conference. Partners are the Microsoft sales channel. They depend on us to keep their messages fresh and the delivery quality high. Really some great stuff here. Partners only extend the depth of knowledge at this event. More to come on how we’re looking to Partners to help us go deep in some offerings.

So, a week off the frontlines of client service. It’s definitely worth the investment so far.All for now.

I wrote before about how cool the Office products that are coming are going to be, but just to expand on some of the items that popped out of the presentation.

SharePoint has really taken on a complete focal point. It will become the center of how a company creates community and aligns it’s business processes and people to improve productivity. The current version of SharePoint has proven it’s value and flexibility. The real value of this Office 2007 suite is it’s ability to allow fast integration to prove in a solid business case, and the same old extensibility is enhanced because of the improvements to the Office core apps, like Excel, Word, and PPT. The Web Part concept is still valid.

Couple of observations about Office 2007. The danger that Microsoft faces is that they have over-innovated. I’m just not sure that their customers understand the power of what they have in their enterprise with the Office 2003 product set, and I fear that we’ll have similar objections with the Office 2007. Bottom line is that most users of this stuff can’t absorb much more innovation.

The challenge we have when we talk to our clients about SharePoint is that the clients don’t have an immediate need for SharePoint. Collaboration isn’t the same type of ‘automatic’ business case as an ERP or CRM or email business case. However, this is the opportunity for me. We’ve got to put a bunch of effort into helping our clients understand how to get more value out of this software they’re buying.

 I’ve still got the video images of Steve Ballmer bouncing around on a stage yelling, ‘Developers!’ at the top of his lungs at PDC. I’ve seen plenty of video of Steve Ballmer, but he’s really something to see in person. I respect a guy who can cover so much material in front of an audience like that in a reasonably entertaining way. I will admit that I was left with a very Pattonesque feeling as he addressed his ‘troops’.

All right, so how about the content. Three messages I took from his presentation:

• Vista
• Office
• Crm

Vista… So, Vista’s late. Not expected out ’til next  year. I’m personally not willing to install the beta, but what I’ve seen is VERY cool. Whatever the naysayers may say about Microsoft being late, Microsoft finally catching up to the Mac, Microsoft having security problems, this product is impressive looking. Who cares.

If you look at how integrated the new Office suite is to Vista, you can’t deny that there’s a whole lot of stuff they had to get in there. Now, the real issue for Microsoft is adoption. I know that Office 2007 works on XP  because my company’s running it that way. I’m just not sure that midmarket and enterprise customers are going to be able to adopt this technology for some time…. I’d need to see a pretty substantial business case to recommend my enterprise clients make that kind of move. Without knowing the tech specs or real compatibility issues, I can foresee risk areas like  legacy app compatibility, desktop and server hardware upgrades, and training.

I thought one of the more interesting things that Ballmer mentioned was the peer pressure that the Vista consumer launch will put on CIOs… the thinking being that when a company’s users come to work talking about how cool their Vista install at home is or how cool the consumer ads look, CIOs will succomb to peer pressure and move to migrate. I’m going to specifically ask my clients about this, but I’d be surprised if CIOs are so weak minded. Sure as I say that…. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Office… almost too much to write about how excited I am about the new Office 2007. Cogent’s using the Office 2007 beta and it’s definitely worth it. Excel alone is worth the time to migrate. Excel is truly on track to be the BI client for Microsoft. The ability to get that data from any source you like. Very good stuff. I think the thing I see for my client base is that more and more integrated capabilities are included in the new Office. From an integrator’s perspective, you’d expect me to want more integration from SharePoint, Excel, Outlook. Honestly, I like integration. But what I like more is being able to focus on the business problem, and this makes my job of achieving a business case better. If I can delivery a client a solution faster, better, and cheaper, that’s good for both me and the client.

CRM… Ballmer announce this morning that they’re going head to head with Salesforce.com. It’s about time. I’m really excited about this offering. As Microsoft adds multi-tenancy to their app and tune it up for a hosted environment, this is only good for consultants like me. We’ve adopted CRM 3.0 into our business. We think there’s a lot of value for us. We also have helped some of our clients move onto CRM. We’re seeing the value in their businesses as well. I’m really excited because this will allow us to keep recommending CRM into the smaller midmarket clients that don’t have any interest in running their own server with CRM on it. There’s no reason now that you can host your CRM and Exchange, which puts your entire front office on outsourced servers. What a relief for smaller firms.

Now to the security issue, I think that we’re moving past that. The real risk is that the CRM market is still so fragmented. From my experience talking to execs about CRM and sales force automation, I find two scenarios play out:

• They’ll postpone a decision because there’s no clear winner.
• They’ll make a cost-based decision because the low cost is seen as low risk.

Either way, there’s additional expense from either a manual conversion or an automated conversion. I’m not sure that the technology really matters. I believe, as I’ve written before, that business success is less about the software you choose for a specific business problem. If you’ve done you’re due diligence and invested on a strategic plan, you’ll be fine if you’ve spent your time worrying about the cultural change components and the business processes to account for the new processes.

Still flying… man, I get a lot of writing in when I’m flying. This flight to Boston is like the flights to Seattle last year. I used to get a ton done on the plane with so much uninterrupted time.

I’ve been trying to get my schedule lined out for the week in Boston at WPC. Microsoft has done a great job of getting plenty of activity on the books for the week. Without shame, I don’t care as much about the conference content as I do the structured networking. I’m focused on meeting other folks like myself and in complementary businesses. I’m going to go to sessions when I’m not in scheduled meetings, but frankly, I’ve booked up most of my afternoons in the structured networking meetings. (Which, as I look into the future, is the thing that’s been the best about the run up to the conference.) I’ll go the morning sessions and a few afternoon sessions, but the content is the content, and I’m assuming it will all be available on CD/DVD afterwards. We’ll see. I hope to meet some great new folks, and I’m looking forward to meetings with people I already know.

So, my predictions:

• I think one of the key messages from the conference will be SAAS… software as a service. Microsoft is moving this way on so many of their products, Exchange, SharePoint, and most recently CRM. I think that their model of allowing partners to sell the Microsoft stack as a service is fantastic. It’s going to allow guys like me to meet my clients needs in a whole new way. I’m hoping that they will exceed my expectations in terms of the products that are moving to a SAAS model. While I don’t believe this will outstrip the demand for traditional licenses, it does meet a definite client need, especially in the midmarket and non-sensitive application area. I think that this hosted model will extend to the types of offerings and Partners that Microsoft is highlighting. I will expect to see Microsoft shine the spotlight on the infrastructure guys (don’t get me started), and I think that the guys who do hosting and network management will get special attention this week. It’s all good stuff for my clients.
• I also think that we’re going to hear a lot about Vista and Office 2007. I’m not as excited about this. I think the delays in Vista and the long-term adoption rate of the Vista OS will not mean a lot to me or my business. (I’d love to be surprised, but I just can’t get my mind around a compelling business case for this.) Now Office 2007 is a whole different story. Maybe because Ty and I have adopted the 2007 beta and think it’s cool personally or maybe because I see the potential productivity lifts for some of my clients, I think that in Office 2007, Microsoft has moved the ball down the field in a big way, and I can’t wait to see what else they come up with for its release. I’m all in!!!

I’ll report in on my perceptions of whether I’m on or off on these two biggies!

OK… I’m going to blog my way through the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. I will start posting next week as I finish getting ready for the conference. I’ve spent the last week trying to set up my RIO meetings. I hope to get some good meetings with both folks from Microsoft as well as partners who can enhance our business at Cogent.  I’m anxious to see what Microsoft’s got in store for us. More to come.