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Master the new Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem. Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Discover the tectonic shifts happening within the Microsoft ecosystem as Cyril Belikoff and Jon Yoo dive deep into the unification of the Microsoft Marketplace and the explosive rise of AI-driven commerce. This comprehensive discussion explores how the marketplace is transitioning from an incubation island to the mainland of Microsoft’s go-to-market strategy, allowing partners to tap into massive Azure consumption commitments. Learn how product-led growth, AI agents, and optimized digital flows are replacing traditional sales motions, making cloud marketplaces the default engine for scaling revenue in 2026 and beyond. https://youtu.be/cAeSIEXbnNo Key Takeaways Microsoft unified its various marketplaces into a single digital flywheel for customers to discover, try, and buy applications. Applications, such as Copilot certified agents, are contextually surfaced directly within Microsoft products to meet users in their flow of work. Customers are making massive Azure commitments, and purchasing full software stacks through the marketplace retires those commitments entirely. Cloud marketplaces have evolved from a secondary channel into the default go-to-market engine with triple-digit revenue growth. Partners must shift from deal-led transactions to product-led growth by optimizing their digital marketplace listings for AI and search engines. The future of software procurement will increasingly involve AI agents acting on behalf of organizations to seamlessly integrate multiple smaller applications. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Microsoft Marketplace, Azure commitments, AI agents, Frontier transformation, M365 Copilot, Foundry, digital flywheel, co-selling, product-led growth, ecosystem shift, SaaS distribution, REO, resale enabled offer, listing optimization, search engine optimization, agentic commerce, cloud go-to-market, revenue recognition, multi-party private offers, Hyperscalers Transcript: Cyril Belikoff and Jon Yoo Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Cyril Belikoff: Why do you have to outsource this or create this vi? Just edit the video right there yourself. Like why do you have to just go do the, as a marketer you want to create a beautiful piece of content, just go and create it. ’cause it can create it for you. Now [00:00:13] Jon Yoo: you can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering. [00:00:19] Jon Yoo: How AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:25] Vince Menzione: Welcome to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Manzione, your host. [00:00:30] Jon Yoo: We just wrapped up two days in Bellevue with some of the sharpest partner leaders in the business, and what we heard wasn’t incremental, it was tectonic. In this series, we’re going deeper into these conversations, the insights, the frameworks, the real movement we’re seeing in this market right now, because being in the room changes everything and we’re bringing that room to you. [00:00:55] Vince Menzione: And I am thrilled actually for this next one. Uh, I’ve had this opportunity to spend a little bit of time with this gentleman before, and welcoming him back is a pleasure and an honor. Cyril Beov, the vice president. I’m gonna botch up your title ’cause I always say marketplaces, but it’s much more than that. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: So come on up, zero. And we’re gonna have a conversation and Cyril is amongst other things at Microsoft. Good to see you, sir. Yeah, [00:01:24] Cyril Belikoff: you too, [00:01:25] Vince Menzione: uh, is responsible for the, the Microsoft marketplace. [00:01:29] Cyril Belikoff: Are these your notes here? [00:01:30] Vince Menzione: These are, um, what is that? Yeah, these is gonna be our, our questions, so we, yeah, I, I need help sometimes so prompting, but, uh, so great to have you. [00:01:38] Vince Menzione: So just for purposes of title and context, ’cause your role is much bigger than just marketplace. Yeah. And we’re, we’re gonna sit down and John, is this me? Yes. And then John’s gonna join us. [00:01:47] Cyril Belikoff: Okay. Great. [00:01:48] Joe, [00:01:48] Vince Menzione: well, we’re gonna get started and start having a conversation. And we’ve, we’ve done some of these things before. [00:01:53] Vince Menzione: I’ve, I’ve had, you had me on your stage Yes. In your event at Alyssa Taylor’s event. [00:01:57] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. [00:01:58] Vince Menzione: And then, uh, we’ve, we’ve done some nice things together on stage, both at, at our event in Redmond last year. Yes. Then at our big, uh, ignite breakfast back [00:02:07] Cyril Belikoff: and forth, we had Vince come to our wider org and sort of, uh, I got to do the reverse. [00:02:13] Cyril Belikoff: And so interview him in front of a bunch of, uh, 500 marketers on what do we have to think about for partners. And so he gave us sort of the what’s going on in the partner ecosystem, how to think about it as we think about it, our marketing. [00:02:26] Vince Menzione: And I tried to be candid and represent this group. [00:02:28] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, that’s great. [00:02:29] Yeah. [00:02:30] Vince Menzione: Was wonderful. Thank you for doing that. [00:02:31] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:02:32] Vince Menzione: You, you work, you work in an amazing organization. Um, I’ve known Alyssa for many years as well, and you’re an incredible leader. And I just, I wanna frame this maybe with a conversation about, ’cause we’re gonna talk about what’s changed, but, but I think it’s still important for everybody in the room to understand what you did and what your team orchestrated around market. [00:02:52] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, [00:02:52] Vince Menzione: because it was fragmented, it was in different organizations, it felt very dis disorganized, I guess. Yeah. For lack of a better word. [00:02:59] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Thank you. Um, essentially we took it from incubation Island to the mainland Microsoft. I love it. Uh, GTM [00:03:07] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:03:07] Cyril Belikoff: Is the simplest way to think about it. Um, and, uh, come September last year now, uh, we unified the, the, the, the many marketplaces. [00:03:19] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, whether it was an Azure marketplace or AppSource and others, and we created the new Microsoft marketplace. Yeah. So one single place for customers to come, discover, try, buy, and for partners, software companies and other NSIs to put their wares up. And, uh, it was the first step in a vision for us to create this digital flywheel for us to bring our customers and our partners together in a more, you know, automated way. [00:03:47] Vince Menzione: Which it, it sounds crazy when you think about it, right? Microsoft has always been like the partnership leader, the leader in the technology, and to have fragmented marketplaces before, right? Yeah. And so what clarity to bring that all together. [00:04:00] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. It was a big, it was a big step for us and I think what we realized is that customers and partners were saying, Hey, uh, it’s all one place. [00:04:07] Cyril Belikoff: If I’m looking for a SaaS application or an agent or, and plug into teams or whatever it is. I just want to get it all in one spot. Uh, and, uh, and then we need you to connect us to your channel. [00:04:21] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:04:21] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, and your partners and, uh, can you build out, you know, partner capabilities for that Connects channel to software companies, to, to customers in a digital flywheel way. [00:04:30] Cyril Belikoff: Um, one of the things we actually also announced at that time was this concept of what we call. The marketplace framework. So it’s not just the fact that we have this digital experience or web experience, but that, um, applications that go into the marketplace, depending on the type of applications they get contextually surfaced within Microsoft products. [00:04:53] Vince Menzione: Okay. [00:04:53] Cyril Belikoff: And so if you’re, [00:04:54] Vince Menzione: explain that for this Yeah. For me and for this crap. [00:04:57] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. So if you are a, um, if you’re a co-pilot certified agent. M 365 copilot agent, you’ll be in the marketplace, but you’ll also be automatically surfaced inside the M 365 copilot, um, product. [00:05:11] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:05:12] Cyril Belikoff: Same for, uh, large language models in foundry, add-ins in teams, those sort of things. [00:05:18] Cyril Belikoff: ’cause it’s one thing to be where people go to discover Tribu, but users also go into these stores, whether it’s a developer user or an end user. They go in the flow of their work and they want to move quickly. Yes. And so, uh, so they have access. We think that’s very attractive. And the feedback was, Hey, that’s quite differentiated. [00:05:35] Cyril Belikoff: ’cause we have, uh, hundreds of millions of customers in these products every day. [00:05:39] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:05:39] Cyril Belikoff: And so giving our customers access, our partners access to it and improving their customer experience, um, has worked out well. [00:05:47] Vince Menzione: And something else you did too, because at one point, you know, we were talking about co-selling and single-threaded. [00:05:53] Vince Menzione: And Microsoft has this incredible ecosystem and channel. [00:05:57] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. [00:05:58] Vince Menzione: And it, it was totally disconnected from the whole marketplace strategy, right? Yes. Yeah. [00:06:03] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. So we, uh, um, we launched, I think in, uh, sorry. At that time in September, we launched five of our largest distributors who were also federating the Microsoft marketplace into their marketplaces. [00:06:16] Cyril Belikoff: And then in the November timeframe at Microsoft Ignite, we launched resale enabled offer [00:06:23] Vince Menzione: RO, [00:06:23] Cyril Belikoff: which is REO, which is a new capability that is proven extremely popular, that connects the software company and the reseller, you know, um, to go and do more deals at scale faster. So [00:06:36] Vince Menzione: we have, we have four of the Es in the room, [00:06:38] Cyril Belikoff: right? [00:06:38] Vince Menzione: Some of the four at the top. Five or six. And then also one of your largest resellers software, one is here as well. [00:06:45] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Great. [00:06:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:47] Cyril Belikoff: Great. So it’s, uh, we’ve been busy. [00:06:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:49] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Like I said, um, uh, much more work to do. But we are moving from like this incubation project to mainland get it integrated into our core customer, go to market, uh, so that our, uh, software companies and partners have access to those customers. [00:07:03] Cyril Belikoff: And then integration, uh, with the channel. So [00:07:06] Vince Menzione: it’s been a lot happening these last 12 months. Uh. Then Frontier, let’s talk about Frontier. That’s another piece of this. [00:07:14] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. I’m sure Steven touched on, uh, frontier Transformational or becoming Frontier or Frontier Firm. So probably not helpful to me rehash that. [00:07:23] Cyril Belikoff: I think in general. If you go to a Microsoft discussion or session and you don’t hear about frontier or Frontier transformation, please like, raise your hand and give feedback because that is, um, [00:07:34] Vince Menzione: I kept away from the word frontier with Steve. We were talking about it, but we weren’t using the term frontier. [00:07:38] Vince Menzione: Yeah. ’cause I feel like it gets overused. It’s, [00:07:40] Cyril Belikoff: yeah, it does. It’s, it’s sort of, um, what we try to do with it is articulate it in a way that it’s not just about AI for AI’s sake. [00:07:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:07:48] Cyril Belikoff: But it’s AI based on what the customer outcome is trying to, what the customer is trying to achieve on their outcome. Um, and so as part of that, of course, you know, agents, AI applications is a big part of what’s driving customers’ capability of, uh, to become frontier. [00:08:05] Cyril Belikoff: And, uh, the marketplace is part of that. ’cause they can either custom build that. Uh, or they can, you know, buy off the shelf, right? Uh, or, and actually in Combin they do mostly they do both, right? And so, um, in order to accelerate their ability to become more frontier, we have these, uh, partners that build, uh, third party solutions through a marketplace. [00:08:27] Cyril Belikoff: And then, uh, uh, those same partners or others that build bespoke solutions around that. So, um, a lot of momentum around, uh, AI apps and agencies, as you can imagine. Um, we have, I think, 5,000 plus AI apps and agents. [00:08:43] Vince Menzione: I was gonna ask you what you’re focused on now, but you, I think you’re tying into this now already. [00:08:47] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um, so of course that’s important. [00:08:50] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:50] Cyril Belikoff: But really for us it’s about doubling down on driving customer, customer demand. How do we merchandise the right things that customers are looking for? How do we, uh, accelerate any of our flows? Like we will spend hours just looking at like the flow of one scenario. [00:09:07] Cyril Belikoff: Where is it getting stuck? How do we improve it? Um, and then how do we connect it to the channel? And, and what, what more things can we do like EO or multi-party private offers and the like, and we have. Probably an announcement a month in the next three or four months. [00:09:24] Vince Menzione: Oh, come on. Let’s, [00:09:24] Cyril Belikoff: that will, [00:09:25] Vince Menzione: I know, I know it’s early. [00:09:26] Vince Menzione: I know it’s early, but you, you’ve got some, I know you’ve got some things. Think [00:09:29] Cyril Belikoff: about the customer experience. Think about the channel integration and dream about [00:09:33] Vince Menzione: what maybe more of a global scale with some of the offerings, maybe, maybe. Um, so, you know, I, so I, the earnings, we talked about the earnings with Steven, but I thought that there was a very compelling number around the commitment number. [00:09:46] Vince Menzione: Yes. You and you run your Azure as part of your remit. We didn’t go through your entire remit. [00:09:50] Cyril Belikoff: Yep. [00:09:51] Vince Menzione: It’s not just marketplace. You also, you also own the Azure number. [00:09:53] Cyril Belikoff: Yep. [00:09:54] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that. [00:09:55] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um. You know, it’s, it’s exciting times for customers. They want to do things not only with us, but with everyone in the room. [00:10:04] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and they are making very large commitments, huge commitments over the next two to three years to spend on Azure. Um, and so it’s now our joint jobs to go and help them identify the right business outcome and go and, you know, consume that commitment. It is just a commitment. It’s not actual. Consumption. [00:10:27] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. And so it’s all of our jobs to take advantage of that. The, the customers are saying, Hey, we have line of sight to the types of things we want to go do over the next two to three years. Uh, probably not everything is, you know, i’s dotted and t’s across, but they have line of sight to most of it. Um, and how do we go help them drive that? [00:10:46] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and so from an Azure perspective, obviously that’s very encouraging for us. It, it allows us to. Invest in more data centers and more capacity that we are doing as fast as we can. Um, and then, um, and then of course on marketplace, the marketplace can retire. [00:11:04] Vince Menzione: That’s [00:11:04] Cyril Belikoff: that Azure commitment. That’s, [00:11:05] Vince Menzione: I wanted to make sure [00:11:06] Cyril Belikoff: people understand that the, in fact, not only the Azure component from the marketplace, but the full software stack from the partner, uh, the software company retires the Azure commitment. [00:11:17] Cyril Belikoff: So if it’s. Uh, I’ll make it up if it’s, uh, a hundred bucks and it’s 50 50, it’s not 50 50, but, um, I won’t disclose any percentages, but let’s say it’s 50 50, it’s much more for the software company, by the way. Um, if it’s 50 50, it’s not just like the $50 for Azure that gets retired. It’s the entire a hundred dollars that gets retired on the customer commitment, commitment, which is great for the software company. [00:11:39] Cyril Belikoff: It’s also great for the customer that they can, you know. Bring that through, uh, to, uh, to their Azure commitment. And we do the same thing with our sellers. So the marketplace sales retire our sellers compensation. So we’re like checking every box so that there’s no friction in the system. So that, so the partner, the customer, our sellers, they’re all juiced to go and. [00:12:03] Cyril Belikoff: Deals with marketplace. [00:12:04] Vince Menzione: I, I hope everybody un understand. I mean, I understand this. I hope everybody else understand this too. ’cause I, I was, watch, you know, I, I, I watched LinkedIn and I see people post things and somebody made a comment about how difficult it was to use Microsoft Portal. And I was thinking to myself, do you realize that there’s, I’ll say 150 billion, but it’s probably a bigger number than that. [00:12:22] Vince Menzione: That’s a total addressable market available to you if you’re a Microsoft partner. You can access these customer commitments. [00:12:30] Cyril Belikoff: Oh yes. [00:12:30] Vince Menzione: If you bring your product on Mark over 400 now [00:12:32] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:12:33] Vince Menzione: You bring your product into the marketplace, you have access and the customer can retire that commitment. [00:12:38] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:12:39] Vince Menzione: Without having to justify a new cost justification. [00:12:41] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. They don’t have to go to procurement. They don’t have to. Yeah. [00:12:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah. I mean, it’s a huge opportunity. [00:12:46] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:12:46] Vince Menzione: So, um, so you’ve been focused on quite a bit. We wanted to invite John on stage. [00:12:53] Cyril Belikoff: Great. [00:12:53] Vince Menzione: John, you from Sugar is here. Where’s John? Is John in the house? Where’s John? [00:12:57] Cyril Belikoff: There he is. [00:12:58] Vince Menzione: Who’s also an expert in Marketplace. [00:13:00] Vince Menzione: A great friend of Ultimate Partner. Great. Hey, how’s it going? He’s a great partner of Ultimate Partner. Great to see you, sir. All the way from San Fran. Oh, actually we’re on your side of the coast, so, uh, it’s long. He looks [00:13:12] Jon Yoo: cooler than us [00:13:12] Vince Menzione: though. He, he always looks cool. I said that about time. [00:13:15] Jon Yoo: You know, I gotta be comfortable. [00:13:16] Jon Yoo: I gotta be comfortable. [00:13:18] Vince Menzione: So John, good to, good to have you. You’re thanks for having us. You guys are like, every time I see a post from you, you’re moving into a new office space ’cause you’ve outgrown your office space. [00:13:26] Jon Yoo: Yeah, we’re, we’re really excited about the new office. We have hvac, which is a, a big, big, uh, it’s a big thing. [00:13:31] Jon Yoo: Improvements, high ceilings, you know, the whole works h help [00:13:36] Cyril Belikoff: sometimes. Yeah, [00:13:37] Jon Yoo: yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we have our, uh, office opening party if anyone’s an SF on Ally first. [00:13:41] Vince Menzione: Nice. Nice. Yeah. May, may, May 21st. May 21st. That’s right. Well, so, so you’ve been, you’ve had like a front row seat to all of this. I would love to get your perspective on what you’re seeing across partners and what’s changed over the last 12 months. [00:13:55] Jon Yoo: Yeah, so, uh, for those that don’t know, um, sugar is a, uh, a revenue platform for cloud marketplaces and co-selling. Um, so we partner very closely with Microsoft as well as either hyperscalers and other marketplaces like Snowflake, Alibaba, et cetera. And what we, what, what I’m seeing is a couple things. One marketplace is becoming a default to go to market engine. [00:14:17] Jon Yoo: So, you know, I think a lot of people see the stats about how the, the GMV, so, you know, the, the throughput through these marketplaces have been doubling. We’re seeing that in our data as well. So we’re seeing triple digit revenue growth from marketplaces. We’re seeing companies who, you know, maybe the earlier end of marketplaces were infra platform layer of software that used to really adopt it. [00:14:37] Jon Yoo: Now you’re seeing. You know, explosion in a business application layer of companies as well. And so that’s super exciting. I’d say the second piece is channel players are getting more and more involved. Um, I think, you know, I’m the Silicon Valley SaaS bubble, uh, or the AI bubble, so to speak. And I didn’t know as much about the channel world and even these big AI companies. [00:14:59] Jon Yoo: I mean, you’re seeing unprecedented, unprecedented demand, uh, for these, you know, LMS or these AI biz apps. And despite that, they are really working with a partner ecosystem because you’re realizing that most of the world do not really know how to adopt ai. Yeah. And they’re really leaning on expertise. [00:15:18] Jon Yoo: And these AI companies, AI native companies, are looking to channel partners who have these. You know, relationships with their end buyers on how to deliver change managements, how to deliver enablement, not just a system integration site. [00:15:32] Vince Menzione: And they’re also looking to the platform or platforms in the case, Microsoft here also. [00:15:36] Vince Menzione: Right. Which, because like what, where am I gonna do just go out and buy philanthropic or Claude or whatever? I need that to be integrated into my enterprise as well. Right, exactly. [00:15:46] Jon Yoo: So we’re definitely seeing like more adoption of Microsoft Foundry, for example, as people think about security and governance and whatnot. [00:15:52] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Very cool. Any comments on, on? [00:15:55] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, that makes absolute sense. It’s, uh, um, you know, lots of layers to AI from data. The a, the AI layer itself, the application layer, uh, and innovations happening at all of those pieces of the stack. Um, and so when a software company is trying to, you know, uh, modernize their thought process or build new. [00:16:19] Cyril Belikoff: They ha they have to think about all of those components. Foundry obviously is the AI layer and it provides them with capability to be agile and move quickly and do compliance and, and snap into an organization’s, um, architecture. But it’s the same applies to data, like how it’s fine to have AI but doesn’t, doesn’t do anything without data. [00:16:40] Vince Menzione: Right. [00:16:40] Cyril Belikoff: And so then how do they get data in the cloud? Um, uh, [00:16:44] Vince Menzione: and then how do you security [00:16:45] Cyril Belikoff: govern and govern, right? And how you secure govern, you know, all those sort of things. So obviously we have first party experiences, but they have partners with, um, their own solutions. They’re built on top of, [00:16:53] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:16:53] Cyril Belikoff: Those Microsoft layers. And, uh, you know, like John says, lots of momentum. [00:16:58] Vince Menzione: So let’s talk about the maturity curve. Like walk us through it. Where do you see partners in this room sitting today? And what does it take to move for them to move to the next stage? Like, what would be your guidance for, for this group? [00:17:11] Jon Yoo: So, you know, we, we work across the entire spectrum of companies. You know, we work with the, the largest enterprises who’ve done billions through these marketplaces like Snowflake, workday, to leading AI companies like Glean or OpenAI, uh, to earlier stage startups who are completely new to marketplaces and really look for, for guidance around what do I do in my first 90 days? [00:17:33] Jon Yoo: How do I get the attention of Microsoft sellers, or how do I. Optimize my marketplace operations so that we can be discovered, uh, really easily on Microsoft Marketplace and others. And the, the way that I think about it is companies first come on, because it is buyer driven oftentimes. So, I mean, that’s just the truth of the nature of you have these big enterprises that want to, you know, burn down their Mac agreements, for example, and that’s how they get started. [00:17:59] Jon Yoo: And or a, a as like this whole space maturing, you’re seeing. A new CRO come in and they’ve done this at X, Y, Z companies and they want to bring that playbook over. But then as they start to do a couple deals through these marketplaces, they think, and this is start of the the flywheel, right? Hey, what do I need for co-selling? [00:18:19] Jon Yoo: And there are systems, you know, integrations and playbooks that need to be done well. Once you do have co-selling figured out, how do I now know which opportunities to co-sell? So we have things like intense signals to be able to. Help them, you know, help overlay a cloud, go to market lens over your existing pipeline. [00:18:36] Jon Yoo: And then now it becomes less of a partnership initiative and actually elevates up to the CRO initiative. And across each of those, um, layers, uh, you have different automation needs because once you actually start to get the flywheel going, it becomes. Holy crap. Now I’m doing 10, 20, 30, 50% of my revenue through these market, you know, through, through marketplace. [00:18:58] Jon Yoo: And it’s creating different data pipelines of work to be done. And now I have to figure out my finance angle of how do I do revenue recognition through these indirect channels. And so that, that, that is kind of the maturity covers. I think about it when you try to retrofit like, uh, all the automation up front, it doesn’t go as well. [00:19:16] Jon Yoo: You have to do a crawl, walk, run approach so that you can also build and bring the rest of the organization with you. So if I look at ’em to the, you know, there’s some familiar faces, some folks that probably are wondering some new faces [00:19:28] Vince Menzione: as well. [00:19:29] Jon Yoo: Yeah. What, what Microsoft marketplace or what marketplace even is. [00:19:33] Jon Yoo: I’d probably say people are in that transformation bucket of, Hey, I’ve done a couple of deals, we’re in this early stages of co-selling. Now I, now I gotta figure out how to supercharge it because this is kind of the future, you know, we can talk more about agenta commerce and whatnot, but, um, I think a lot of people are figuring it out than looking for. [00:19:51] Jon Yoo: For guidance here, [00:19:53] Vince Menzione: zero. [00:19:55] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. You know, I would say, um, I’ll get what I call tactical yet strategic. [00:20:01] Vince Menzione: Okay. [00:20:01] Cyril Belikoff: Which just think about product-led growth. Yeah. Just think about, uh, similar to the consumer world, if you wanna sell something, you need search engine optimization. If you are thinking about these marketplaces and Microsoft marketplace being one, how are you optimizing your listing so that when a user goes into like the search bar, it’s optimized to bring back the results that make sense to you? [00:20:29] Cyril Belikoff: I think historically we’ve had scenarios where some partners have used the marketplace primarily as like a transaction thing. They’ve done the deal, but then they’re transacted on the marketplace ’cause they wanna retire the the Azure commitment. And that is changing to be sort of product led and marketplace led, uh, versus deal led. [00:20:49] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, but you cannot have a generic one line sentence in your listing. You will not be surfaced unless the customer literally knows your name and will search for you. You’ll not be surfaced if they search for a particular category healthcare app that does something right. And if that’s your thing, you should have the right keywords, you have the right images, have the right videos, and we believed in it so much. [00:21:14] Cyril Belikoff: We actually built a listing optimization AI tool that will auto look at your listing. And based on our best practices, and we know what our search engine is doing, we will make recommendations to you on how to improve. Listing. And so it’s not like a read a document as a best practice. It actually will be an ai, uh, customized tool for your particular listing. [00:21:37] Cyril Belikoff: So lean into those types of things, you know, to, as John says, says, think about the digital flow. This over time will become much more of your, of your business. So make sure you’re thinking about, you know, if someone’s on the marketplace and they decide to trial something for you, how, how are you following up? [00:21:56] Cyril Belikoff: Like, how do you take the next steps? Um, maybe you, maybe you working with a reseller and you don’t have your own sellers, but how do you wiring that into your resellers so your resellers are following up? Or if you have your own sellers, you know, your own sellers are doing it. So you have to sort of digitize your thinking on sales and marketing in this new market, commercial marketplace world, versus in the same way we would’ve done in like the consumer marketplace on Amazon or, you know, um, as you search something on Google. [00:22:26] Cyril Belikoff: Maybe bing. Um, so, um, yeah, yeah. This [00:22:29] Vince Menzione: size. B Come on, come on. [00:22:31] Cyril Belikoff: I [00:22:31] Vince Menzione: had bing. [00:22:32] Cyril Belikoff: Um, [00:22:33] Jon Yoo: I do wanna double click on that, which is when, when we, you know, I talk about like, hey, a lot of it’s buyer driven. A lot of people think about private offers, but then the marketplace offers. But the reality actually, when we look at the data is that there’s a lot more self-service [00:22:46] Vince Menzione: correct [00:22:47] Jon Yoo: offers than there are what they call private offers. [00:22:50] Jon Yoo: So where there’s deal led and that, that, that, that shift. It’s super exciting to see where now these marketplaces are becoming where buyers or users go to discover new products. Let alone, you know, in the future where let’s say there’s an AI agent that has some reward seeking function, and in order to do its job, it needs to go purchase a tool marketplace might be the channel where this happens, which is all the reason why that your listing does need to be optimized. [00:23:16] Jon Yoo: So that one, the agent knows exactly what your tool does and it can match against. Reward. And then second, you have to win the a EO race, right? Yeah. Of, of how you show up in these AI engines. So just wanted to double click on how important that is. Yeah. [00:23:31] Cyril Belikoff: Makes, makes total sense. And we’re, we’re seeing that shift from private office to having a public listed price and a, a public offer as well. [00:23:39] Cyril Belikoff: And so we’re, we’re ourselves investing in our own marketing demand generation. Just in the last three to four months because we’ve seen that taking off and as soon as we saw the signal, we’re like, oh, we should pour fuel on that fire. Because if, if we see organically customers don’t do it, we should, you know, we should go after that and help them understand that we’re here. [00:23:58] Cyril Belikoff: And, uh, if it’s working for some that are doing it by themselves, it’ll work for others and we’re seeing really, really good results. Um, so yeah, get your listing optimized. Think about your digital flows. As John says, the flows of the future are probably agentic wise, maybe not even a human coming to the Microsoft marketplace. [00:24:17] Cyril Belikoff: So you gotta be thinking, not now, it’s okay. You have time. Um, but in the future, you know, six months from now, that quite easily is a scenario. So you really have to start thinking about those, uh, those, uh, digital flows. [00:24:29] Vince Menzione: Yeah. It’s so insightful. Well, it’s what you call product led growth, basically. Yes. And agent led growth. [00:24:35] Vince Menzione: Yes. Right. In some respects. So this is where like we need to think about that. The future model where the agent comes in and actually does the purchasing. We’re not there yet, are we? [00:24:45] Jon Yoo: No. With some products, you know, um, especially, especially if it’s like developer tools. We’re starting to see some of that, but, uh, no one’s gonna buy a cybersecurity solution. [00:24:55] Jon Yoo: Um, that’s seven figures or an agent’s not gonna do that. Right. But the eng the, the search functions are a little bit changing. [00:25:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So a lot of ai, you know, we had Steven Boyle on earlier, we were talking about ai, AI natives, you know, that’s Jason Grey’s organization does a lot of work in that area. How do these organizations need to think and act and how do they leverage the cloud marketplaces? [00:25:17] Vince Menzione: Or how do le how do marketplaces fit into the equation? ’cause most of them are coming from a different like paradigm or mindset. [00:25:24] Jon Yoo: I mean, uh, it’s like the number one question, you know, I’ll give a little personal story of like, I get a lot of parking tickets, uh, and I don’t know how to pay off my late fees. [00:25:34] Jon Yoo: So we set up a little open claw that will actually go and ask me questions, and it actually pays off my parking tickets on my behalf. Um, so, so, so, you know, on the other hand, like there, there’s layers to it, right? It could be like layer one, I ask ai, Hey, how do I pay off my parking tickets? Layer two could be. [00:25:52] Jon Yoo: Hey, you know, what’s the best way for me to structure my cadence to pay off the parking tickets? And then layer three is like, Hey, AI, proactively check if I have parking tickets and go pay it on my behalf. Here’s my credit card information, you know, stored in a secure vault. So, uh, what, what I mean by a native as a company bring that analogy is, uh, bringing it at its core. [00:26:12] Jon Yoo: So like a little for, for sugar. We’ve spent the past six months optimizing around our entire, like company brain where we are storing all the context. To a singular, singular place that is queryable, that there’s no coordination tax between teams. Our entire product development process actually is automated where we have multiple agents debating one another, PRDs to code generation, code review, uh, you know, security, qa, et cetera, et cetera. [00:26:40] Jon Yoo: And then there’s humans in the loop across the process. So I would actually think about when we, when we fit that into, into marketplaces, it’s not just thinking about who’s going to send the offers or who’s gonna do the co-sell, or who’s gonna X, Y, Z, but how do you bring all that together so that your sales reps and your partnership person and Microsoft all has to share context in a given deal and it’s done automatically without, you know, back office folks having to update what partner led or partner influence means and reporting things in a, in an old way. [00:27:11] Jon Yoo: So it’s almost re-imagining. Entire workflow, given everyone should have open context of what’s going on in a given deal. So let’s say maybe a hand wavy way of answering that question. Yeah. But it does mean that we should be re-imagining, uh, what the job to be done is, uh, very fundamentally [00:27:28] Vince Menzione: cy, how are you thinking about it since you’re building the, the, the toolkit at Microsoft? [00:27:32] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, John says absolutely is right, particularly around marketplace and how that sort of flow and ecosystem will work. Um, in addition to that, it’s. Not only about how marketplace or about developers ’cause the developer, uh, scenario or persona was the first globally to see the value of AI and agents in the flow of their work. [00:27:55] Cyril Belikoff: It was the first to like, oh, one developer can now do much more. I can be empowered, I can build agents to work on my behalf. I can, uh, I can be an architect instead of a hands-on coder. Right. It’s changed the profile of what developers do exactly what. Uh, John mentioned what he’s doing himself. That’s just one profile of a user. [00:28:17] Cyril Belikoff: Th there are many other profiles. A sales person, a marketer, a uh, CFO team, hr. Each of these are literally going through the same transformation. They’re one beat behind developers because developers, you know, was really tech enabled and tech stack driven, and the, and the opportunity was, was obvious quite quickly. [00:28:39] Cyril Belikoff: These are coming really quickly. This is not like the internet adoption cycle that took many multiple years. This is like, we’re talking months. So, and even inside Microsoft, we have our own, what we call, uh, frontier Marketing Internal Initiative to re, um, rewire marketers and how they go about their daily job and stop doing it this way and do it this way. [00:29:04] Cyril Belikoff: Just pick up M 365 copilot with. Coworking Claude, uh, embedded and just go do the work. Why do you have to outsource this or create this? Just edit the video right there yourself. Like, why do you have to just go do the, as a marketer you want to create a beautiful piece of content, just go and create it. [00:29:21] Cyril Belikoff: ’cause it can create it for you now. [00:29:22] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:29:23] Cyril Belikoff: three months ago, literally three months ago, it couldn’t do that. And so what is it gonna be in two months for a marketer or a salesperson or finance person? I mean, just co-pilot in Excel. What that is doing to the financial business is in, like if you, any financial person will tell you they live and breathe through in Excel, like it’s just, it’s their equivalent of, it runs [00:29:44] Vince Menzione: most businesses [00:29:44] Cyril Belikoff: their dev tool, right? [00:29:45] Cyril Belikoff: It’s their thing. It’s really [00:29:46] Vince Menzione: is. [00:29:47] Cyril Belikoff: So this is happening over and over again. Again, if you can package those things up and package a package, that piece of IP on a marketplace is, is not only gonna be a big system, it could be a very, very small piece of. Functionality in a flow for a marketer or a salesperson that is so valuable that can be solved many times on a marketplace. [00:30:08] Cyril Belikoff: And in many cases, everyone’s a software company at this point. Everybody can go and package something up. And so I would be stunned if we don’t see cross pollination from system integrators to channel partners, all just publishing on marketplaces based on, oh, I’ve done this thing four times. I cannot do it 400 times. [00:30:26] Cyril Belikoff: Let me just package it up and put it on a marketplace. So. Yeah, I’m sure you know, John alluded to that. It’s, there’s a lot of exciting times. [00:30:33] Vince Menzione: No, the future [00:30:33] Jon Yoo: is [00:30:33] Vince Menzione: great. What do you [00:30:34] Jon Yoo: totally, I mean, it’s, it’s a case of like, how do, what does being marketplace native also mean? [00:30:38] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. [00:30:38] Jon Yoo: You know, and not, I feel like I’ve seen so many people just use it as a, Hey, we’re opportunistically there and if we get some leads out of it, great. [00:30:45] Jon Yoo: Or if there’s some deals, great, but they’re not really leaning in and being marketplace native the way, you know, and right now there’s, this might be uncomfortable, but there’s no excuses. You know, like creating a partner marketing content with your brand guidelines. It should not take so many time. Or it’s a 10 minute exercise. [00:31:02] Jon Yoo: Exactly. Exactly. Three [00:31:03] Cyril Belikoff: prompts. [00:31:05] Vince Menzione: It used to be that ops used to get involved because, oh, we, we know that they have a commitment. Let’s go run it through the marketplace. Right now, what you both have been suggesting here is it becomes a discoverable process. It becomes part of your normal go to market strategy, and you’re, you’re driving pr, product led growth and SEO and all the things you need to do running a a corporation and modern corporation today. [00:31:26] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, [00:31:26] Vince Menzione: exactly. So, what’s the future like? Where, where do we go in 12 months with this? What do you think? What do you predict? We, we get out a Ouija board or a crystal ball here. What, what, what do we think? [00:31:38] Cyril Belikoff: I think more broadly in the industry, you’re gonna, some of the scenarios that John alluded to, agent to agent interactions, uh, many agents acting on behalf of humans and on behalf of organizations, uh, and doing. [00:31:55] Cyril Belikoff: Simple things and quite complex things. Uh, and those need to be, uh, managed carefully, uh, with, uh, the right, uh, engagements and built carefully. And in, in many cases, customers will look to partners that are quote unquote certified on, uh, uh, HyperCloud platform. Uh, as a way to get going quickly, but also get the, the quality that they need. [00:32:21] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and I think instead of buying this monolithic, massive application, I think we will see lots more of smaller applications being built that have cleaner open, uh, you know, MC, you know, MCP type agent interfaces that can just work together, uh, without, you know. More complicated integration work, [00:32:42] Vince Menzione: cobbled together your own solutions as opposed to big [00:32:45] Cyril Belikoff: monolithic [00:32:45] Vince Menzione: applications. [00:32:46] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, there’ll be a much more agile, [00:32:48] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:32:48] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, personalization. I mean, a lot of people saying SaaS is dead. It’s not quite dead. But I think that SaaS will get significantly more agile, more custom and more personal, uh, for, uh, for customers. [00:33:03] Jon Yoo: I, I would agree with that. Um, I mean, I’m biased, but I think marketplace are gonna be even more relevant than ever. [00:33:08] Jon Yoo: I mean, it’s already highly relevant, but, uh, as you, you know, I think in the past the, the narrative was, well, there’s a new generation of buyers and they’re millennials. They, they wanted, you know, uh, I always talk about consumer experience to B2B sales, you know, and, and now it’s like agents that’s that on steroids. [00:33:24] Jon Yoo: Um, but what I, you know, beyond that, I think, uh, there, there’s a lot of talk of like SAS apocalypse or software companies getting. Destroyed by, you know, the, the, the AI labs or SaaS is dead or whatever. I think SaaS is gonna, I mean, there’s gonna be way more software companies because the cost to build is a lot easier. [00:33:46] Jon Yoo: That means that competition will be. Even more fierce than ever. And you have all these AI native companies that are coming out with a quicker time to market, quicker time to value, and they have some recursive loops that makes the product even that much better. Um, so what that means for everyone is like, one, you gotta go back to the, the core differentiations. [00:34:06] Jon Yoo: Or like in the past, maybe the, the time to build was the differentiation, but today it’s, or you know, there’s some other, obviously the core elements, but then there’s. Distribution. Yeah. So how do you partner with Microsoft, for example? How do you have your own self-improving like distribution model? That makes sense. [00:34:22] Jon Yoo: Marketplace being a huge component of that. Two is obviously there, there’s a piece of like network and data. That’s what we think about of hey, what makes our product better as more, more people use it. Um, because yeah, competition is crazy fierce and it finally goes into times deployment. That’s why you see these companies like. [00:34:41] Jon Yoo: Open AI anthropic that are competing for their enterprise, uh, pie. And instead of doing it themselves, they’re, I mean, I think OpenAI just did a joint venture of like $4.1 billion into the deployment company. Anthropics doing the same, they’re surrounding themselves with the ecosystem and channel is going to be more relevant than than ever, as long as you know how to enable AI services and know how to deliver on this technology to the, to the broader world. [00:35:07] Jon Yoo: And so. Channel awesome. Marketplace, awesome. You know, competition’s gonna be fierce. Success is not going anywhere. [00:35:16] Vince Menzione: Good conversation, gentlemen. [00:35:18] Jon Yoo: Awesome. [00:35:18] Vince Menzione: I’ve been told we’re over time. I wanted to open it up to questions. Um, but I do feel like we, yeah, I’ll get, I’ll get yelled at. But this was incredible. Um, some great, I mean, the, the pa it, it’s terrific to see. [00:35:36] Vince Menzione: How far we’ve come in, so shorter period of time, and it’s only gonna continue to get better. I think the one question I’ll have is like, what, what would hold any of these companies back at this point? It feels like it’s such a compelling reason we need to move forward. Is there, is there anything, like why would, why would we hold back? [00:35:54] Cyril Belikoff: Um, you know, some of the discussions we have, um, is about how to balance today’s world with tomorrow’s world a little bit. [00:36:01] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:36:02] Cyril Belikoff: Today’s business model with tomorrow’s business model, today’s financial results with tomorrow’s financial results. Um, and there are very different approaches to all of this. [00:36:13] Cyril Belikoff: Those AI natives, they’re like, there is no yesterday. There’s only tomorrow. Um, there those companies that realize they’re being threatened by AI natives and so they have to move quickly. Um, and, uh. Figure out a, a, a business model and then someone else who wants to do a bit of both and bridge into it. [00:36:32] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:36:32] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and just within that frame there are different ways to tackle it, whether it’s create two teams, one’s the future team, one’s the current team, and, you know, may the best team win, um, makes sense with the customer and that, uh, or, uh, give the, give the customer the choice and have the teams going together. [00:36:49] Cyril Belikoff: So there are lots of different approaches. [00:36:51] Vince Menzione: Right. So great to have you. Did you have some, did you have a comment to make on that? [00:36:55] Jon Yoo: Uh, no. Just, uh, unwillingness to lean in and learn something new. Yeah. [00:36:59] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:37:00] Jon Yoo: I’m, I’m, I’m much more in the burn all boats buckets. Yeah, [00:37:03] Vince Menzione: I know. Me too. [00:37:03] Jon Yoo: Of, uh, no, no old team and new team. [00:37:05] Jon Yoo: Just new team and you know, that’s just push forward. [00:37:07] Vince Menzione: Well, great to have two amazing leaders on stage with [00:37:10] Cyril Belikoff: us. Thanks [00:37:10] Vince Menzione: so [00:37:10] Cyril Belikoff: much. [00:37:10] Vince Menzione: So thank you [00:37:11] Jon Yoo: so much. Yeah, thank [00:37:11] Vince Menzione: you [00:37:15] Jon Yoo: so much. [00:37:16] Vince Menzione: Don’t forget. Ultimate Partner Live is coming soon, October 26th through October 28th in Reston, Virginia. I hope to see you there. [00:37:28] I.

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/-flNeKF6CxQ?si=xIIQ4LUl7oraQjkg Microsoft’s Cyril Belikoff joins Vince Menzione to reveal the seismic shift occurring within the newly reimagined Microsoft Marketplace. As the industry moves toward a predicted $300 billion partner opportunity by 2030, this discussion deconstructs the evolution of the “Frontier” vision, the launch of the AI apps and agents category, and the critical “Resale Enabled Offer” (REO) that is currently doubling deal sizes for early adopters. Whether you are a software company looking to scale globally or a reseller aiming to stitch together complex AI solutions, the message is clear: the flywheel is already spinning, and those who wait for a “perfect strategy” risk being permanently displaced by more agile competitors who are getting their feet wet today. Key Takeaways The Microsoft Marketplace has been reimagined into a single destination for discovering, buying, and deploying AI apps and agents. Analysts predict a staggering $300 billion opportunity for partners within the Microsoft Marketplace by 2030. The new Resale Enabled Offer (REO) allows software companies to authorize channel partners to resell on their behalf across specific geographies with minimal overhead. Cloud migration is far from over, as massive amounts of on-premise data and ISV apps still need to be modernized for the AI era. Marketplace deal sizes are doubling as customers use Azure commitments to retire their marketplace acquisition costs. Successful partners are moving away from “boiling the ocean” strategies and instead focusing on transacting one or two deals to learn the ecosystem’s mechanics. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Microsoft Marketplace, AI apps and agents, Resale Enabled Offer, REO, Cyril Belikoff, Azure Marketplace, AppSource, cloud solutions, software companies, digital transformation, AI strategy, channel led sales, ISV solutions, cloud migration, Azure commitments, Microsoft Cloud, Frontier vision, MSP opportunity, marketplace transacting, AI monetization, global scale, procurement, IT deployment, technical modernization, partner ecosystem, business applications. Opening Lines: [00:00:00] Cyril Belikoff: Marketplace is really the extension of our vision for Frontier, uh, and the Microsoft Cloud. You know, the, the Microsoft technology takes a customer a long way, but in many ways to complete the thought. If you’re in football terms, you want to cross over the line and score touchdown. You can’t just get, uh, to the red zone. [00:00:20] Cyril Belikoff: You actually need partner solutions. [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: So let’s, let’s kick off to Marketplace a little bit right, too, because, uh, it’s been a big year for Marketplace, or 20, the first half of 2026 fiscal year 2026 has been a big year. A lot of announcements, a lot of things going on in the world, in marketplace. Where do we wanna start there? Let’s recap some of it. [00:00:44] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um, so, um. It feels like a long time ago, but in, at the end of September, [00:00:51] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:00:52] Cyril Belikoff: Um, at the AR tour, uh, in Chicago, we announced a new Microsoft marketplace. We reimagined that experience. It’s a new customer experience, single destination for customers to. You know, discover, find, try, buy, and deploy cloud solutions, AI apps and agents all in one place. [00:01:11] Cyril Belikoff: And so historically, we’ve had a little bit, uh, of decentralization. We had this thing called the Azure Marketplace and AppSource for different experiences. AppSource was more for teams and, and copilot. Um, and, and office, Azure Marketplace. Of course, that was for Azure. We brought all of that into one place. [00:01:30] Cyril Belikoff: So customers, whether they are looking for a SaaS solution running on Azure, an agent that snaps into copilot, an experience that runs in our security store, now they can go to one place. Um. marketplace.microsoft.com. It’s one, it’s the new Microsoft marketplace. And we have an, of course, we have a, we had, we launched a brand new category, AI apps and agents, and we launched that category in September. [00:01:54] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, bringing together numerous, uh, uh, partner offerings. Yeah. And today we have the largest catalog, um, probably in the mid four thousands of AI and agents. Wow. Available to customer. So fantastic. There was, there was quite a big moment in September. Um, and then fast forward a little bit to November, we announced a resale enabled offer, um, at Ignite [00:02:15] Vince Menzione: eo. [00:02:16] Vince Menzione: Eo [00:02:16] Cyril Belikoff: eo. I, [00:02:17] Vince Menzione: I like EO reminds me of the band back in the day. [00:02:19] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. R Speedwagon. There you go. Uh, well, and it’s, it’s not that far from it because Oreo accelerates. Yeah. Um, what partners can do, uh, with the marketplace and really connects. Software companies and resellers, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a second. [00:02:34] Cyril Belikoff: But that’s really the recap, um, of, uh, you know, the new Microsoft marketplace, how we enabling it for, uh, for partners through the the resell enable offer. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: So, I know we talked on this a little bit, but I wanna maybe just expand on it. What does the frontier push and the marketplace evolution mean for partners? [00:02:53] Vince Menzione: Because I, I think it’s huge for both, for these partners to really monetize and accelerate their success working with you. [00:03:00] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. So, um. Marketplace is really the extension of our vision for Frontier, uh, and the Microsoft Cloud. You know, the, the Microsoft technology takes a customer a long way, but in many ways to complete the thought and to, you know, uh, uh. [00:03:20] Cyril Belikoff: If you’re in football terms, you wanna cross over the line and score a touchdown, you can’t just get, uh, to the red zone. You actually need partner solutions. [00:03:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:03:29] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, and so that’s where the partner solutions, combined with Microsoft’s first party offerings become a really, really. Great offering and powerful offering for our customers to, to become Frontier. [00:03:40] Cyril Belikoff: So we have obviously a ton of AI experiences, our own co-pilot experiences, uh, Microsoft Foundry, which is a platform for ai, but in, in many ways, we need those industry solutions. We need those AI apps and agents from partners to complete that offering. And that’s really. How it comes together and, uh, you know, uh, I heard you from o was just on before me. [00:04:01] Cyril Belikoff: They actually predict that the Microsoft marketplace, uh, is a 300 billion partner opportunity by 2030. Yeah, they’re talking about, I think, mid eighties growth. We have literally seen our business for the last three years, and we are in the middle of our, uh, you know, third year doubling. And so when you get three or four years of doubling every year, that’s compounded doubling. [00:04:24] Cyril Belikoff: Um, so, uh, we have seen lots of momentum from customers, lots of interest. We’ve made it, you know. Interesting for customers. Um, and incentivize our customers with their Azure commitments that can retire their marketplace, uh, acquisitions that way. We’ve made it, we’ve put incentives for partners and for our own sellers. [00:04:44] Cyril Belikoff: So we really creating the flywheel for everybody in the market to see value from, uh, the marketplace. So. Like, like, like you mentioned, like m the, uh, you know, suggested [00:04:55] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:04:55] Cyril Belikoff: It’s only exploding the opportunity on marketplace. [00:04:58] Vince Menzione: Well, and you both touched on the fact that the data is not in the cloud yet. [00:05:02] Vince Menzione: Not all the data that needs to be in the cloud in order to drive the future of where we wanna go from a society. Mm-hmm. And from a business application perspective needs to be in the cloud. So huge opportunities for partners around data states, around securing that data, governing that data, and so on, on top of all the business applications, [00:05:19] Cyril Belikoff: right? [00:05:19] Vince Menzione: As promise. So incredible. Yep. So let’s [00:05:22] Cyril Belikoff: talk about, yeah. The call migration. The call migration, people think that is over and it’s long from over because customers have plenty, uh, on premise, uh, not only Microsoft technology, but the, the, the, the software company or the ISV app that sits on top of it. Yeah. [00:05:36] Cyril Belikoff: And that needs to be migrated, managed, modernized, um, and marketplace is a big part of that too. Um, but there’s so many services and, um, opportunities around it. [00:05:45] Vince Menzione: Incredible opportunity. Let’s talk about the channel and the channel opportunity. You, you touched on this earlier, right? So this really lighting up the channel. [00:05:53] Vince Menzione: I saw this loud and clear when we were at Ignite. Like this is a huge opportunity for the Es, for the resellers, for all the partners. And as part of REO, you’ve got huge opportunities you’re laying out for them for the 500,000 part partners. You know, we talk about the Bill Gates moment down here in Boca. [00:06:09] Vince Menzione: This is where it all started. Uh, yep. How, how do you think about marketplace in the channel today? [00:06:16] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. You know, it’s, um, it’s vital. You know, we have a customer need, um, from. The smallest is small business all the way to enterprise. And the really, the only way we serve that, the only way we know how to serve that is with our partners from the largest of partners that serve our top enterprises down through, um, what we call small and medium and then down to our small business. [00:06:41] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:41] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and so, you know, we have seen our. You know, while our, we’ve seen a doubling of our business, we’ve seen three, three and a half to four x doubling of our channel led sales. [00:06:53] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:54] Cyril Belikoff: Um, over the last year. And so while our overall business is doubling, channel is accelerating even, you know, even more. [00:07:02] Cyril Belikoff: And so there, there’s a need from our customers because they buy from our channel and there’s obviously a need from the channel. And so we created this resale enabled offer. As you mentioned, we, um. We announced private preview in September and launched GA at Ignite. So, you know, uh, November, just before Thanksgiving holiday and retail Enable offer is all about scale and how we connect a, a, an independent software vendor or a software company. [00:07:27] Cyril Belikoff: To authorize a channel partner to resell on their behalf on a particular geography. And then that allows software companies to expand into new markets with very little overhead. And it allows the channel partners to create a set of offerings, not only from one partner, but you might have multiple software companies or applications that you stitch that are together to create an end-to-end customer offering or experience. [00:07:51] Cyril Belikoff: And so we are seeing, we are seeing many to many relationships. So software companies might authorize many resellers, many markets they’re in, for example. Yep. And then resellers, um, they’re, they’re becoming authorized resellers from many software companies so that they can really stitch together, end into end solution. [00:08:09] Cyril Belikoff: And it, we’re loving it and we are getting great feedback. It is early days for our global availability for, uh, re office, which. But we had partners that were literally waiting, um, uh, and waiting for deals. And within the first week there was, they were, uh, processing the, the Oreo deals at, at, at quite large scale already. [00:08:31] Cyril Belikoff: So. We are excited about the feedback that we’re getting. We, as you know, we, we stay close to that feedback and we listen well, um, and adjust from it. So we got more work to do, but, um, it’s a great opportunity for, to connect our, our multiple types of partners, software companies, and resellers. [00:08:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah, I agree. [00:08:49] Vince Menzione: And you know, I talk to a lot of these organizations myself, and there is palpable excitement. In the channel from Distees that were sort of disengaged a couple of years ago, maybe, trying to figure out where they were gonna monetize. And the other way area that’s aligned to this as well is the Ms. P community. [00:09:06] Vince Menzione: So these MSPs are getting bigger and bigger, and organizations like Accenture, Avanade, and ndl. Or becoming MSPs or creating Ms. P practices within their own firms. But there’s even these smaller MSPs, but many of ’em are getting to a billion dollars or more. These were little mom and pop companies years ago, but the customer so needs to have, you know, especially with ai, right? [00:09:27] Vince Menzione: Because we’re in a constant state of evolution right now. I need somebody that can help me on the tooling and then also help me on, you know, getting the tooling to work. And so, uh, we’re seeing a lot of excitement from that. Community, which wasn’t really as engaged with Microsoft the way they that they are now. [00:09:43] Vince Menzione: They’re really getting engaged in a big way. [00:09:46] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, it’s promising. Like you say, you know, the, the, we’re all learning this new AI world and obviously marketplace has taken off. We’ve had the classic SaaS solutions or cloud solutions on marketplace for a while, but really un having the local partner that’s close to the customer, what the customer’s trying to need to do and be able to connect the, the traditional. [00:10:07] Cyril Belikoff: Software as a service applications with these new AI experiences and really, uh, stitch them together and help them operationalize, you know, in their own, you know, cus in their own terms and what they’re trying to, uh, do is so important. You know, um, and to your point there, there are large, they’re the large ones that are seeing opportunity on the marketplace. [00:10:27] Cyril Belikoff: But the, you know, when you get down to, uh, medium and smaller businesses, they really need their local friendly resetter to help them. [00:10:35] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:10:35] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, so you’re right. We are seeing an, a new en energy engagement from not only our existing 500,000 partners, but a bunch of those new ones. [00:10:44] Vince Menzione: So, uh, again, second week of 2026, and people are really just starting to wake up from the holidays. [00:10:50] Vince Menzione: Now they’re getting ready for their s ks. All these partners are lining up and getting their teams aligned. Uh, you’re in front of them. Let’s have a conversation like what should they be doing better and differently? What do they need to go do now? It’s 2026. [00:11:06] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um, you know, first of all, if you’re a software company, you know, understand what the, the Microsoft marketplace can help you with, uh, can help you scale to global markets, remove burdens like tax, um, a processing, engaging with customers. [00:11:21] Cyril Belikoff: Um, we’re seeing an acceleration and doubling of, uh, not an acceleration deals, but doubling of deal sizes, as you know, through the marketplace. Uh, and there. It helps with engagement at different types of companies, whether it’s, or different types of, uh, roles in a company, whether it’s a, a procurement person or an IT person or a business person. [00:11:42] Cyril Belikoff: So, you know, get onto the marketplace, create offerings, um, and give us feedback. And then on the reseller side, um, also lots of opportunities, you know, register as, as a reseller, um, you know, understand the benefits and. The, the Azure sponsorships that we have available for you, that you can close deals with their, their, their credits and, and incentives that we provide to you. [00:12:06] Cyril Belikoff: And then figure out how you do your first deal with a software company. Um, yeah. You know, a lot of people will say like, should I have a big strategy? And Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you want to, that’s okay, but just getting into. Uh, the marketplace, figuring out one or two deals, transacting and seeing the opportunity is many ways the best way to do it and to learn it yourself. [00:12:28] Cyril Belikoff: And then you figure out, okay, where, where’s the opportunity for me in this deal? Am I in the transaction? Uh, am I in the services around the transaction or combination? Um, and just getting your feet wet will get you going and, and, uh, get you learning. [00:12:42] Vince Menzione: You know, I think about this in the, the time the partners are, they have this huge opportunity with Microsoft around marketplace and then thinking about how they build their own ecosystem. [00:12:52] Vince Menzione: And like you said, don’t, don’t try and boil the ocean, right. Don’t try and do it all at once. Mm-hmm. But start out small, but understand, you know, work with the Microsoft teams, understand how, how co-selling works, how to engage with the, with the Microsoft organization. How to, how to be up on marketplace, how to situationally. [00:13:09] Vince Menzione: You know, Jay and I were talking about this 28 moments and he talked about a deal that started out as an AWS deal, but it wound up a Microsoft deal because NTT and Software one were involved in the in the deal and influencing the customer’s decision process. Right working with Microsoft. And so we just need to be smarter, I think. [00:13:28] Vince Menzione: I think today it’s a very different model than it was 20 years ago when you and I got started in this business. Uh, yeah. And people just really need to go think about this more strategically in how they build this. [00:13:39] Cyril Belikoff: It’s great. I totally agree. Um, like I said, getting your feet wet, understanding the co-sell to your point and, and, and how Microsoft sells. [00:13:48] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and then understand what customers are trying to, you know, get, get, get out of it with their, their Azure commitments and how they can retire their Azure commitments through purchases on marketplace, which in sense them, um, to also work on the marketplace. So you, I think partners will find Microsoft sellers. [00:14:04] Cyril Belikoff: Own compensation, um, incentive to work. We’ll find that customers are incentive to transact on the marketplace. And so just enter that, you know, triangle and, and get engaged and, uh, and learn and then give us feedback. Like, like I’ve mentioned many times with you, we, uh, we take feedback every month from customers and partners in, in forums like this, um, in other forums, and then we evolve and, you know, build out, uh, stronger experiences. [00:14:31] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Cyril, I want to thank you again. So great to have you join us today and, uh, so excited to continue our, our mutual relationship and our beneficial relationship in 2026. So thank you again for everything you do and supporting us. [00:14:45] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Happy New Year to yourself and uh, and your community and, uh, thanks so much again. [00:14:50] Cyril Belikoff: Appreciate it. [00:14:50] Vince Menzione: Thank you, Cyril. The Ultimate Partner Winter Retreat is gonna be here in the Boca Studio. This is the third year that we’re gonna be here in Boca. This is always a favorite of our community members, our executive members, our sponsors and speakers. We’ll all be here in the studio, which is a really intimate setting. [00:15:12] Vince Menzione: We can see upwards of 40, 50 people. Uh, we’ll be hosting an incredible dinner at the Boca Resort overlooking the golf course. That’s an incredible property and, uh, we’d love to have you join us. Thank you for being part of the ultimate Partner community, and I hope to see you this year at one of our events. [00:15:30] Vince Menzione: Thank you.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at what the launch of Microsoft Marketplace means for frontier firms and innovation at scale.Highlights00:09 — Microsoft has announced that it's combining the separate marketplaces for AI business tools into a single offering called Microsoft Marketplace. The aim is to deliver these solutions as an extension of Microsoft Cloud to support what Microsoft describes as "frontier firms" — firms that blend human ambition with AI-powered technology.00:37 — Microsoft Marketplace combines Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource, enabling users to quickly and easily test, purchase, and deploy cloud solutions, AI applications, and crucially, agents. Now currently available in the U.S., the new marketplace is expected to launch for global audiences soon.01:01 — By combining the offerings from Azure Marketplace — which focuses on cloud-related infrastructure platforms and SaaS — with Microsoft AppSource — its marketplace for business applications, productivity tools, and applications built on the Microsoft technology stack — enterprises now have access to a comprehensive range of tools.01:24 — This is just the latest in a series of moves by Microsoft to simplify AI adoption and implementation for its enterprise users. Similar to its decision to make Copilot Studio a two-tier service, Microsoft isn't reinventing the wheel. Instead, it continues to provide services tailored to AI innovation while using familiar tools for users. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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On this digital event Ida from Microsoft and Martin Fischer from Arrow will give you a fundamental introduction to the different marketplaces (Azure Marketplace and AppSource) to ensure your company chooses the right storefront. Massimo from Microsoft will hereby give a technical introduction and the listing types, walk you through the difference between public and private offers as well as the technical requirements.

On this digital event Ida from Microsoft and Martin Fischer from Arrow will give you a fundamental introduction to the different marketplaces (Azure Marketplace and AppSource) to ensure your company chooses the right storefront. Massimo from Microsoft will hereby give a technical introduction and the listing types, walk you through the difference between public and private offers as well as the technical requirements.

Dynamics ERP veterans Tanya Henderson and Steve Endow join the podcast to discuss their new ISV venture focused on the Dynamics 365 Business Central market, Blue Dragonfly. They also talk about their overall career journeys from a focus mostly on Dynamics GP a few years ago to now working primarily with Business Central. They bring some unique observations to what's happening in the BC space, including their outlook on how AppSource is changing, the differences in how Microsoft seems to run its BC R&D organization compared to the old GP team, and how the global community interacts more or less 24x7 around the world. They also offer some interesting ideas for what it takes for other GP professionals to get up to speed on BC. Links: Steve Endow: https://links.steveendow.com  Tanya Henderson: https://tessteam.com/ Show Notes 1:45 - How Tanya and Steve each got their start with Business Central 5:45 - The origins of their new ISV business based on Business Central: Blue Dragonfly 9:30 - The decision to develop new ISV products for the BC space 13:00 - Blue Dragonfly's first product, recurring billing 16:00 - Developing product ideas and plans 17:30 - The per-tenant extension opportunity in BC 22:00 - The decision to commit to BC: architecture, licensing, marketplace, administration, and more 25:15 - AppSource experiences as a BC ISV - why current standards can cause concerns for some apps 29:15 - Best practices for an ISV in an app-centric Business Centric world 33:00 - Using Azure services for optimal cloud-based solutions 36:00 - What to look ahead to in 2023 and the community's influence 42:00 - Microsoft's adoption of GitHub and the broader agile transformation of BC 44:45 -  Preparing to work with partners and customers in 2023 on products and services 50:45 - Steve's multi-year effort to gain expertise in BC 52:15 - 2023 conferences where you can hear from Tanya and Steve

In today's #TBT segment we try a Business Central Address Verification app from Microsoft AppSource and discuss the other Address Verification apps found on AppSource. Podcast Show Notes ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/post/a-shot-of-business-central-and-a-beer-episode-27

Jeremy Thake and Ayca Bas interview John Peluso, the Chief Product Officer at AvePoint to discuss their journey building MyHub on top of Microsoft 365.   Check out MyHub on Appsource.

On this month's episode of A Shot of Business Central and A Beer Ken and Michael have the latest Business Central news, then chat with Ryan Meade from DynamicWeb about eCommerce and PIM, and finally Ken and Michael wrap things up by taking a look at a couple highly rated free Inventory Apps from AppSource. As always though, before we dive into all things Business Central we start the podcast off with ice cold beer. Subscribe to the Podcast on all Platforms! ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/podast-locations Podcast Show Notes ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/post/a-shot-of-business-central-and-a-beer-episode-43 Microsoft Software Information: ➢ Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-business-centralMake ordering, selling, invoicing, reporting, and manufacturing easier and faster. ➢ Dynamics 365 for Sales: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-for-salesDifferentiate your business, build loyalty, and maintain your reputation with Microsoft CRM. ➢ Microsoft 365: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-365-businessFamiliar, secure, top-of-the-line productivity and collaboration tools that are always the latest version. ➢ Power BI: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-power-biTransform your company's data into rich visuals and spot trends as they happen and push your business further. Follow Solution Systems ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solution_systems/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Solution-Systems-Inc-354733749699/ ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Solution_System ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solution-systems-inc- ➢ Blog: https://www.solsyst.com/blog Podcast Hosts ➢ Ken Sebahar | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ ➢ Michael Intravartolo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/ Podcast Directed by Ken Sebahar ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ Podcast Produced by Michael Intravartolo ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/

Since a bit of time has passed since the last episode, let me briefly bring you up-to-date: In June, we at NETRONIC organized an event series that we run under our "next by NETRONIC" event brand. The idea of next by NETRONIC events was to host online events in which we just play a facilitating role for having panel discussions, dive into Business Central-related topics, and avoid NETRONIC scheduling demos. Hence, the "next by NETRONIC" event brand is ideal for running an event series in which actually other ISV solutions play a key role.To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". We want to provide manufacturing ISVs the opportunity to showcase their AppSource apps to a broader audience. We - by the way - will only allow presenters that have their apps in Microsoft AppSource. With the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange, we want to make it easier for our customers and partners to find manufacturing apps that close requirement gaps ... just like our visual scheduling apps do.So, the industry vertical solutions webinar was the last of the events and two industry vertical ISVs presented their solutions:Michael Bradley works in pre-sales and marketing at PrintVis, USA, the Microsoft-certified Print MIS, a software solution specifically developed for the print industry which is built directly on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Hence, Michael contributed a lot of print industry-specific knowledge to the discussion.Adri Cardol is the Product Manager at TO-INCREASE from the Netherlands. TO-INCREASE specializes in the development, delivery, and support of industry solutions, and connectivity tools for Microsoft Dynamics NAV/BC to Microsoft Dynamics partners. We had Adri in the panel discussion to share with us details about the industrial equipment manufacturing industry.

Steve shares a long list of back end work required to support a BC appAzure Functions Security:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azur...Azure SQL Security:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azur...Business Central Security and IP Protection:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dyna...Business Central AL Access Property:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dyna...Music by Philip E Morris - Good Morning - https://soundcloud.com/philipemorris

 Following last week's shopfloor discussion episode, here is the 28th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. Again, this episode originates from our Business Central Manufacturing Exchange webinar series. It is a recorded panel discussion on warehouse challenges and solutions. I hosted this panel discussion and was excited to have Žilvinas Lapačinskas (Software Baltic), Mark Hamblin (Insight Works), and James Crowter (Clever Dynamics) as my guests. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". With the event series, we want to provide manufacturing ISVs the opportunity to showcase their AppSource apps to a broader audience. So, last week, we ran a warehouse solutions webinar in which three warehouse ISVs presented their solutions. At the end of the webinar, I hosted a panel discussion with all three warehouse experts. Namely, these are Žilvinas Lapačinskas is a supply chain management consultant at Softera Baltic from Lithuania. Softera is a well-known Business Central partner in the Baltics. They understand how manufacturing, commerce, and service companies work so that they can offer fitting industrial and process automation solutions.Mark Hamblin is President of Insight Works, a Canadian-based ISV specializing in manufacturing and distribution apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.James Crowter is a Microsoft MVP and the Managing Director at Clever Dynamics from the UK. Clever Dynamics provides a range of clever apps for smarter manufacturing and distribution that are seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.I highly recommend that you not only tune into this podcast which is the recording of this panel discussion. Instead, I also recommend that you watch the recording of the entire webinar to see how Softera, Insight Works, and Clever Dynamics can help you with your warehouse challenges.

The 27th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show is somewhat different than all the others that you have been listening to so far. This episode is not a conversation with one guest. Instead, it is a recorded panel discussion on shopfloor challenges and solutions. I hosted this panel discussion and was excited to have Bent Korsgaard (Naveksa), Mark Hamblin (Insight Works), and Matthew Woodhouse (Clever Dynamics) as my guests.A bit of background: Recently, we at NETRONIC ran a webinar series that we called the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange. Oftentimes, when we speak to customers (and also to partners), we are confronted with requirements that are outside our scheduling core competency. Sometimes, we are asked for shopfloor solutions and time tracking. Another time, it is product configuration. And yet another time, it is that people request some warehouse functionality from us. Not seldomly, we are also asked for manufacturing solutions that are specific to one particular industry.  Hence, we grasped a general need for more transparency on the Business Central manufacturing apps and solutions landscape. We took that need seriously and launched the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange to address this need. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". So, last week, we ran a shopfloor solutions webinar in which three shopfloor ISVs presented their solutions. At the end of the webinar, I hosted a panel discussion with all three shopfloor expertsI highly recommend that you not only tune into this podcast which is the recording of this panel discussion. Instead, I also recommend that you watch the recording of the entire webinar to see how Naveksa, Insight Works, and Clever Dynamics can help you with your shopfloor challenges.

This episode is sponsored by KwikTag by enChoice. To learn more about KwikTag and the benefits of SimplyAP, the cloud AP automation solution, visit kwiktag.com. The Dynamics 365 Business Central ecosystem has seen drastic changes in the last few years, thanks in large part to the product's rapid evolution. That greater maturity means the product can now address the needs of more organizations, and that has also drawn in more ISVs willing to invest in integrating their solutions. Our guests from KwikTag by enChoice, director of marketing and channel Mary Miller and VP of product Mike Fernandes, share their observations on the changes in the Business Central ecosystem, from buyer attitudes to ISV priorities. Solutions of the future will be easier to deploy (like through AppSource), provide more pre-built AI capabilities, and generally do more for less. Mary and Mike discuss the importance of enChoice's acquisition of AI-driven OCR platform provider Sypht and the launch SimplyAP for Business Central, KwikTag's new solution for BC that is designed for rapid deployment and uptake. Show Notes: 1:30 - Where do Mike and Mary see the Business Central market today? 5:00 - Important advances in Business Central that help ISVs publishing integrated products 7:00 - Improvements in Business Central APIs and solution publishing 9:00 - Why younger workers are changing expectations around making business solutions easier to find, deploy, and use 10:30 - How Kwiktag have adapted their product strategy to meet market demands 13:45 - Adjusting pricing and technology to meet the needs of growing organizations that need AP automation 15:00 - Opportunities to add intelligence to the AP process  in KwikTag's product roadmap via the Sypht acquisition 17:00 - The launch of SimplyAP for Business Central 18:30 - Planning for the second half of 2022

The guest in episode 26 of Martin's Business Central Manufacturing Show was Andrei Panko. Andrei is a program manager in the Business Central engineering team at the Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having a Microsoft employee as a guest on the podcast was really a novelty. In the other episodes so far, all speakers were Business Central manufacturing experts working for a Microsoft partner. So this podcast provides most interesting insider insights into how things work in the Microsoft Business Central development team.Andrei started working as a consultant, developer, and project manager in 2004 - back then it was Dynamics NAV, of course - and was an MVP for six years running. He has extensive field experience in the supply chain and has engaged in many other aspects of the Business Central application and platform as well. Besides, he is the author of the book "Supply Chain Management in Microsoft Dynamics NAV", which was published in 2008, and he holds a patent for metadata-driven machine learning for systems.Before diving into how things happen at Microsoft, Martin first wanted to know how Andrei got into manufacturing and how it does matter to him. Andrei related that one of his first customers was a small manufacturing company that needed to improve its processes and for whom he purchased and implemented Business Central.According to Andrei, the great strength of Business Central, even back then, was that it could be easily and flexibly modified to fit specific unique company processes. While Andrei and Martin agreed that this strength still exists, they both think that the way of creating these enhancements has changed quite a lot. In their opinion what had been real customizations in the past, now increasingly get turned into apps.This led to a discussion about whether Business Central has become a much more core part of Microsoft's overall strategy, by e.g., providing the AppSource infrastructure or integrating it with Power Platform.Andrei gave a short "historical" discourse from how the ERP was deployed 20 to 30 years ago to how it is done today by way of SaaS. The red thread running through this development over time is one of the core initiatives at Microsoft Business Central. The team has been helping partners reduce the number of ad-hoc developments. This not only changed the selling and deployment model of many partners but also changed the requirements for Business Central.In order to help partners and customers reduce the number of ad-hoc developments, Business Central has become tighter integrated with the Office products, tools are now much better integrated with the overall ERP and there is much more tooling support also from the power platform.In this context they talked about another way of reducing ad-hoc developments, namely listening to, and using the feedback they get from customers and partners. Andrei related two interesting facts:The development teams do not receive much direct feedback from end-users and customers.Mostly, the partners only give feedback about their own needs instead of those of the end-users, and they prefer to get tools to solve their customers' problems instead of getting solutions for these problems directly.

Today's episode focuses on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) with our guest, Global Engineering Lead for the CAF, Brian Blanchard. The CAF framework provides guidance for creating and implementing business and technology strategies for the cloud.We discuss moving your technology and business to Microsoft Azure and talk about some best practices for business decision-makers, cloud architects, and other technology leaders. We also talk about mistakes people can make along the way.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptThe Cloud Adoption FrameworkCloud Adoption Strategy EvaluatorCloud Adoption Framework Discover WorkshopsMicrosoft Learn ModulesAzure Migration and Modernization ProgramGuest:Brian Blanchard is the Global Engineering Lead for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF).Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We have a wonderful discussion with David Starr, a Principal Software Engineer from the Commercial Marketplace Services team (and fellow hoster of his own Podcast) to talk about the services available to ISVs and customers to get their cloud applications and solutions visibility via the Azure Marketplace so then can monetize them. We discuss Azure Managed Apps, App Source and various technical and business details around these services. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode418.mp3 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Gu8N0sjnkLA Resources: Azure Marketplace - https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/ AppSource - https://appsource.microsoft.com/ Mastering the Marketplace technical learning library - https://aka.ms/MasteringTheMarketplace Azure for Executives podcast - https://aka.ms/AzureForExec Get started here - https://partner.microsoft.com   Other updates: App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will be retired on 31 August 2024 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/app-service-environment-v1-and-v2-retirement-announcement/   http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-ondemand-capacity-reservations/   Diversifying the telecommunications supply chain with Open RAN https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/diversifying-the-telecommunications-supply-chain-with-open-ran/   Accelerate silicon design innovation on Azure with Synopsys Cloud https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/accelerate-silicon-design-innovation-on-azure-with-synopsys-cloud/   Introducing the new Azure Front Door: Reimagined for modern apps and content https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-new-azure-front-door-reimagined-for-modern-apps-and-content/   Public preview: Azure dedicated host support in AKS   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-dedicated-host-support-in-aks/

In this episode, we're talking about how Microsoft engages with the developer community. Growing and maintaining a strong community of developers has always been important to Microsoft. Our developer relations team, led by Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft Jeff Sandquist, makes the world better for developers and enables them to apply the latest technologies to create software that changes the world.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptAzure Developer Community BlogDeveloper CommunitiesMicrosoft ReactorGuest:Jeff Sandquist is the Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Hur tjänar du pengar med Microsoft . Korta ner säljcykeln, nå nya marknader och öka dina intäkter. Vem vill inte det? Hey du kan till och med få till en deal I Japan utan att ha ett kontor där. Läs mer om Azure Marketplace. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've heard this term bandied about for many years now, "Single Version of the Truth". As Jack Nicholson once said, "You can't handle the Truth!" I would paraphrase that as, "You can't afford a Single version of the Truth, and you wouldn't want it anyway!". So, let's see how many of you I can get to agree on this one :). What is Implied? From a business standpoint, "Single Version of the Truth" or SVT, is often pimped as this utopian idea that all of your data, about everything to do with your customers and your business is in one place. providing the coveted 360-degree customer view. First, no such Utopian application can be subscribed to from anyone on this planet today. However, you can subscribe to several applications and potentially spend an enormous sum of money and time to wire them all together, giving the illusion of a SVT. While some of you might be sad to hear that SVT is not "push-button", I will try to cheer you up by saying you would not want it anyway. Silos are Bad! Yes, if you read back on my blog, you will see me also preaching that data silos are bad. In fact, I used the same post image for this post. But that was then, and this is now. Back in the days before the Power Platform, when all we had was Dynamics 365, we also sang Microsoft's tune of the time that "You want all of your data in one place", meaning in a Dynamics 365 database. This was a strong argument for a customer who was considering multiple point solutions made by vendors other than Microsoft. And we had a great deal of success consolidating those multiple point solutions under a single Dynamics 365 umbrella. But to call that a SVT was a stretch. Maybe "Fewer Versions of the Truth" with a 245-degree view of the customer was a more realistic goal, as that was typically the outcome. Dynamics Silos Even under the Dynamics 365 brand there were, and still are, silos. Dynamics 365 Sales runs on top of Dataverse, while Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics 365 Finance run on their own databases. Dual-write is an ongoing effort to create the SVT illusion. Power Platform The Power Platform arrived and blew up the whole concept of SVT. Even Microsoft started singing a different tune, promoting their Center of Excellence "COE", so you could more easily manage the possibly thousands of environments (aka Data Silos) that users could now create in your enterprise tenant. So, is SVT dead? The problem was never with "Point Solutions" and their siloed data, it was with "Point Solutions" and silos from other vendors. With the Power Platform, Microsoft created a rocket engine to crank out "Point Solutions"... but these would be "inside the wall". Silos are Good! So now let me be my own devil's advocate. I will take our own organization, Forceworks for example. The Sales side of our business watches over AppSource prospects and website prospects etc. You can probably imagine that with over 50K users of our RapidStartCRM app, that means there were way more prospects than that, who did not move forward. So, we have thousands of prospects and most of these will never amount to anything, of course. Not unlike any other business where the number of prospects is typically exponentially higher than the number of actual customers. The Services side of our business works with our actual customers, not every RapidStartCRM user becomes a customer. Our customers are organizations who have engaged us to support or customize not only RapidStartCRM, but also Dynamics 365 or anything Power Platform related. So, our Service database is a fraction of the size of our Sales database. In our case, Sales runs on a customized version of RapidStartCRM in one environment, and Service runs on another customized version of RapidStartCRM in another environment. The rationale? Why should the service team have to navigate around thousands of irrelevant records?  If they are not customers, they don't need to be in the Service silo. But what about Synchronization! Much of "Synchronization" is unnecessary hype. Yet many organizations pay us tons of money to try to achieve it. Flow can handle 90% of what is actually useful. For example, when a prospect in our Sales solution becomes a customer, a simple flow creates the record in the Service solution. If a service customer asks about a new app or service, a simple flow in the service app updates the record in the Sales solution. Unintended Consequences If you have not yet built a flow that acted beyond the scope of what you intended... you have not bult enough flows. Both of our environments have multiple flows, many quite complex, automating a bunch of things. Were all of these in a single environment, the chances of a Service flow accidently scooping in some Sales records for example is much higher. So, flow development becomes much more complex. But what about my 360-degree view of the Customer? Let's face it, you are not going to get around the fact that you will have multiple sources of data. At least with Microsoft, it is possible to have all of those data sources under one roof, which I do not believe can be provided by any other company today. If you really want that 360-degree view, yet another application can give you that, Power BI (Microsoft's Business Intelligence app). Power BI can not only connect, munge together and regurgitate beautiful charts and graphs using data from all of your Microsoft sources, it can bring in most of your external data sources as well. I would still argue that the "360-Degree view" is over-rated, the only positions that might actually need that are very high senior management, and we all know they don't look at data anyway... unless it supports a personal agenda. So that's my take on this. If you are looking to shovel money to someone in pursuit of this dream, hit me up. Or if you just want business applications that "work" for your business, you can also hit me up. Feel free to leave any comment you like, as long as it supports my personal agenda, I am a CEO after all :)  

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/345 Learn more about Poland – a good place to visit and famous food  Krzysztof Bialowas' career and educational background The difference between NAV and Business Central Find out which one is good for your Business - NAV or Business Central Krzysztof's responsibilities and the things he is developing What is Microsoft AppSource – how to use it and why is it important? How does AppSource help you run your business Krzysztof's journey into becoming a Microsoft MVP Talks about Krzysztof's involvement in the MVP community  MUSIC CREDITSThe Happiness of Larry by radiotimes (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nz365guy)

In this episode James & Liam discuss the challenges faced in 2021 plus their predictions for 2022. They delve into the explosion of SaaS and how it increases your ability to manage the performance of your system as well as better protect it from security breaches like Ransomware attacks. They also cover the AppSource boom and what to look out for when downloading apps from there, as well as a new eCommerce integration coming in the new year… it's a jam packed episode! Listen today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Microsoft believes security and information privacy are fundamental rights. And Microsoft has taken this to heart with a Confidential Computing initiative as part of the overall Azure promise on trust and security.In this episode, Graham Bury, Eden Cohen, and Anna Montalat Campamar talk about what Confidential Computing is, what is Microsoft's vision for Confidential Computing in the Azure space is, pros and cons to computing confidentially on the cloud rather than a private data center, and a few stories about how partners and customers are working with Microsoft to move forward their own Confidential Computing initiatives.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptAzure Confidential ComputingKey foundations for protecting your data with Azure confidential computingCustomer stories:Accelerating healthcare AI innovation with Zero Trust technologyScaling secure enclave environments with Signal and Azure confidential computingRBC creates relevant personalized offers while protecting data privacy with Azure confidential computingMobileCoin creates fast, trusted cryptocurrency transfers with Azure confidential computingGuests:Graham Bury joined Azure's Compute organization two years ago to lead the commercialization and developer platform for confidential computing.  He brings over 15 years of experience at Microsoft across client and service products from Windows to Surface Hub and HoloLens.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Eden Cohen joined Azure's Compute organization earlier this year and leads the infrastructure product team within Confidential Computing. He is responsible for virtual machine and hardware-based products. Follow him on LinkedIn.Anna Montalat Campamar leads the product marketing efforts for Azure Security platform and Confidential Computing. She has experience in a wide array of technologies – from infancy such as quantum to growing ones, including confidential computing.Follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter. Host:David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We are discussing what it means for technology executives to lead their companies through true digital transformations, both from technology and cultural change perspectives. We've mentioned digital transformation several times over various episodes. Today, we'll be making digital transformation very tangible and providing guidance for leaders looking to revamp their organizations with technically driven initiatives with our guest Merrie Williamson, the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptDigital Transformation with MicrosoftMicrosoft Learn course - Enabling Digital Transformation Microsoft Industry digital transformation blogSatya Nadella on Digital Transformation for Microsoft (Video)Guest:Merrie Williamson is the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.She is responsible for global commercial sales, strategy, and execution for the core multi-billion-dollar Azure business. She has a strong background in leading engineering and product teams and in marrying sales to engineering.Follow her on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Today we're talking about opportunities partners have in marketing and selling their solutions through Microsoft's commercial marketplace. Through our commercial marketplace, partners have an opportunity to unlock access to millions of customers at a worldwide scale. Here, you'll learn how the commercial marketplace works and steps you can take to take advantage of this in your business strategy.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptISVs and Partners: Publish Your AppCustomers: Buy an appMarketplace Business Office Hours  Marketplace Developer Office HoursJoin the Microsoft Partner NetworkEventsGuest:Tanuj Bansal is the General Manager of Azure Product Marketing. He has been in various leadership roles in product marketing for the Azure business from its very early days, always championing customer and partner success. Follow him on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Heute nehmen wir wieder eine App für Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central unter die Lupe. Belege und Berichte in Business Central sind bei jedem ein Thema. Sie sollen dem CI des Unternehmens und den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen entsprechen, einfach anzupassen sein und das bitte nicht immer für viele tausende Taler in tausend Tagen. Mit der Erweiterung ForNAV soll das ganz easy sein. Jennifer Singleton, Geschäftsführerin bei ForNAV ist unser Gast in dieser Folge und gibt uns allen tolle Einblicke in die Welt von ForNAV. …und das Thema „RDLC und Word-Reports lokal drucken“ hat ForNAV auch gelöst. Da sich unsere Moderatorin Birgit und Jennifer schon seit über 10 Jahren kennen und "alte NAV / Business Central Hasen" sind, gibt's natürlich auch ne Menge Real-Talk über die gesamte Microsoft Dynamics 365 Plattform. ForNAV in bewegten Bildern findet Ihr hier: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpjnuA-F0c9PllSe-RjsBWIytWegCfvc

Welcome back to a special episode of A Shot of Business Central and A Beer, presented by Solution Systems, a Gold Microsoft Partner. In today's episode Ken and Michael will be chatting with Mike Morton. Mike is the General Manager of Business Central at Microsoft and has been in this role for almost 2 years. During this podcast Mike offers insights into what the future holds for Business Central, upcoming features, reporting, AppSource, and much more. Subscribe to the Podcast on all Platforms! ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/podast-locations Podcast Show Notes ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/post/a-shot-of-business-central-and-a-beer-interview-with-mike-morton Microsoft Software Information: ➢ Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-business-centralMake ordering, selling, invoicing, reporting, and manufacturing easier and faster. ➢ Dynamics 365 for Sales: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-for-salesDifferentiate your business, build loyalty, and maintain your reputation with Microsoft CRM. ➢ Microsoft 365: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-365-businessFamiliar, secure, top-of-the-line productivity and collaboration tools that are always the latest version. ➢ Power BI: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-power-biTransform your company's data into rich visuals and spot trends as they happen and push your business further. Follow Solution Systems ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solution_systems/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Solution-Systems-Inc-354733749699/ ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Solution_System ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solution-systems-inc- ➢ Blog: https://www.solsyst.com/blog Podcast Hosts ➢ Ken Sebahar | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ ➢ Michael Intravartolo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/ Podcast Directed by Ken Sebahar ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ Podcast Produced by Michael Intravartolo ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/ #Podcast #MSDyn365bc #ERP #Microsoft #Software

Today's episode is an insightful throwback from episode 5. It's all about the apps that can be found in AppSource to help you with reporting expenses in Business Central. Listen in as Ken and Michael install some of these apps, use them, and offer their opinions. Subscribe to the Podcast on all Platforms! ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/podast-locations Microsoft Software Information: ➢ Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-business-centralMake ordering, selling, invoicing, reporting, and manufacturing easier and faster. ➢ Dynamics 365 for Sales: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-for-salesDifferentiate your business, build loyalty, and maintain your reputation with Microsoft CRM. ➢ Microsoft 365: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-365-businessFamiliar, secure, top-of-the-line productivity and collaboration tools that are always the latest version. ➢ Power BI: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-power-biTransform your company's data into rich visuals and spot trends as they happen and push your business further. Follow Solution Systems ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solution_systems/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Solution-Systems-Inc-354733749699/ ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Solution_System ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solution-systems-inc- ➢ Blog: https://www.solsyst.com/blog Podcast Hosts ➢ Ken Sebahar | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ ➢ Michael Intravartolo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/

Ja was ist das denn? DYNAMO APPs für Zahlungsverkehr, Finanzwesen und Kartenterminal-Anbindung in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - die machen Anwender einfach glücklich. Angelika Lanbin, erzähl doch mal was die DYNAMO APPs so alles können. Wer mich kennt weiß, dass ich seit 2004 ein Microsoft-Mädchen bin, vom Kopf bis unter die Füße. Damals hieß Business Central noch NAV (und kurz vorher noch NAVISION) und die heutige APP DYNAMO PAY hieß "Diskettenclearing / elektronischer Zahlungsverkehr". Leute, wo ist die Zeit geblieben?

Shortly after we launched RapidStartCRM back in 2015, a couple of competitors followed us into the emerging space we identified. They are gone now, but new ones occasionally pop up. I hear "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". First Mover Advantage As the very first simple-to-use CRM solution built on Microsoft's Business Applications platform, we did have an early advantage. We brought a lot of SMB knowledge to the offering, and SMBs were eating it up. My assumption that there was a market hungry for CRM, but turned off by the complexity of Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com, proved correct. Even Microsoft was a promotor of RapidStartCRM, seeing it as a path to capture a segment of the market they were never very good at. But the first mover advantage won't carry you forever. While we may be able to forever claim we were the first, it requires ongoing work to continue to claim we are the best. First Users Advantage Being the first to market is important, but having the first users of a new product, is much more valuable. As an SMB ourselves, we could anticipate many needs for a simple CRM, and we incorporated them into the very first version. But our ability to anticipate needs pales in comparison to actual user feedback. While largely the same application (in appearance) that we launched in 2015, there have been over 25 version updates over those years. Every one of those updates was a direct result of feedback from our growing user base. I see what you did there When we launched, there was no "AppSource", the best our potential competitors could do was watch one of our videos to try and reverse-engineer what we were doing. A few tried, some even copying and pasting our web copy. I was mostly annoyed at the sheer laziness of their efforts. It's a little different today, our app is now available to anyone via AppSource, and not surprisingly of the competitors I am aware of today, each of them had installed RapidStartCRM in advance of launching their copies. Some have at least attempted to take a slightly different approach, yet others simply came up with a catchy name and are basically trying to replicate what they think we are doing. One even pretended to be a customer and reached out with questions! Even Microsoft closely dissected and reviewed RapidStartCRM as they were developing the "Business Edition", the "never launched" predecessor to the Dynamics 365 Professional offers. The Missing Link The primary reason we have had so many updates, while our competition seldom gets past their first one, is the over 50,000 users we have on our app. You don't get that many users launching a knockoff with your fingers crossed. Sure our brand recognition for RapidStartCRM is high, but that would not mean anything if the app was not excellent, and continuously updated as new capabilities come out and features are requested, as long as both of those items fit within our mantra of "Simple-to-Use". We closely evaluate any changes, to ensure we don't trip the touchy complexity wire. This is a lesson some of our aspiring competitors should learn as they replicate our concept, but then proceed to add a bunch of crap to it. Simple isn't Easy You would think that building something simple should be easier than building something advanced... it's not. Even with Microsoft's vast resources, the Dynamics 365 Professional apps that they positioned for SMB, missed the simplicity mark by a mile. The fact that so many SMBs are using the professional apps is a testament more to Microsoft's marketing might, than the apps being appropriate for most of their SMB customers. It's funny how our roles have reversed. When they were first promoting RapidStartCRM it was with an eye towards eventually moving those new customers to Dynamics 365. Instead, many Dynamics 365 customers are moving to RapidStartCRM. Of course I knew this would happen, but I continued to smile as they told me about "their" plans for RapidStartCRM. It's about the Churn In the SaaS software business "Churn" is a critical number. Basically it means that while you successfully sold a customer on your product (Yay!)... they cancelled shortly thereafter (Boo!). While Microsoft does not publish their churn rates, I am aware that for SMB customers, over the years, the churn rate for Business Applications has been very high. Not surprising since Microsoft cannot not grasp the concept of "Simple", a natural by-product of an organization comprised of thousands of engineers. RapidStartCRM's churn rate on the other hand is near zero, the one exception being future competitors of course. Healthy Competition While anyone would want to have a monopoly in their space, it is not realistic in a free enterprise economy. I look forward to "healthy" competition, something that moves the needle forward. But for now, I guess we will have to continue being the ones who move the needle, because knockoffs don't move anything. If you are thinking about a Simple CRM, think RapidStartCRM, the first, with the most users, and still the best, Simple-to-Use CRM built on the Microsoft Power Platform.

On this episode, we are talk about the Azure Marketplace in the retail space: how the Azure Marketplace can help retailers, and how the it may be important for your business, both as a customer or as a solution publisher with our guest, Orlando Fernandes of XNFY Labs.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptXNFYMicrosoft Cloud For RetailAzure For RetailGuests:Orlando Fernandes works in Innovation & AI for the retail segment. He has the goal to create solutions that could change paradigms and create unique value.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn. Or visit his blog: https://medium.com/@orlando.ribas.Sahir Anand is the Principal Category Lead for the Microsoft Azure Cloud for Retail and Data & AI.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

I have had my head down for a while working on the next version of RapidStartCRM. We also recently deployed RapidStartCRM for our own support operations. In the process, I came across a few items that I thought would be of interest to the users of our free app, and since they would also work for any Power App, including Dynamics 365, I thought I might discuss them. Next Version Before I get into this, I want to clarify what I mean by "Next Version" of RapidStartCRM. We have been developing this product since 2015 when we launched it a the Worldwide Partner Conference (Now called Inspire). Over the years we had made hundreds of updates and tweaks in direct response to users. We also refactored the solution a couple of years ago to run on the low cost Power Apps licenses in addition to Dynamics 365. Each update, with the exception of the refactoring, had progressively fewer changes as we honed in on our target customers' requirements. I am pleased to inform you that the next version will have the fewest tweaks yet... I mean it is damn near perfect already. So let's get back to our internal project. Forceworks Support We had been running our support operation on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for over 10 years. Several times I had contemplated moving it to RapidStartCRM, but as a certified partner my licenses were free, so I kept putting it on the back burner. Our support operation is not very complicated. Customers buy blocks of hours which we add to their bank, and we track our activities against those blocks. We also maintain a portal where customers can login and see their bank balance as well as review all activities. We had been using a third-party portal since before Microsoft even contemplated a portal product. The portal company had been purchased by another company for other assets of value to them and the portal product came with the package.  But portals was not a priority for them. I figured it was a matter of time before they shut it down. So the time had come to move. Dynamics 365 So, as I said I get Dynamics 365 licenses at no cost. So it might seem an obvious choice just to fire up a Power Apps Portal and connect it to our existing instance. and be done. However, as years have gone by now with us supporting customers on RapidStartCRM, many of whom had moved to it from Dynamics 365, I have come to not really like Microsoft's first-party apps very much. I truly feel they are unnecessarily complicated and bloated. And while my licenses may be free, any additional database capacity is not. Our instance, even though it was not doing all that much, was consuming the lion's share of our capacity. So I made the decision to "upgrade" our support operation off of Dynamics 365 and on to our own RapidStartCRM. Also, Power Apps Portals works the same on RapidStartCRM, so there was no reason to continue with the bloated beast. And, if for some reason I was no longer getting free licenses, my cost would be about $10 vs. $95 per user... a factor in many other customers' "upgrading". Migration We could have done this upgrade/migration in a day, but I took this opportunity to make some improvements to our process. Mainly around automation, nothing we could not have done before, but this was a good time, since we were opening things up. We started with the same RapidStartCRM solution as our customers get, and installed it from AppSource on a new environment the same way any customer would. We made use of the RapidStartCRM Accounts, Contacts and Cases. We created two custom Tables, one for Case Notes, to track time and activities, and one for Support Hours, to track the customers' purchases and banks. We also created several Cloud Flows with Power Automate... things like calculating hours and various customer notifications. In addition, we added some specific charts to the RapidStartCRM dashboards for quickly getting a view of things. We also tweaked the RapidStartCRM App to hide Opportunities and a couple of other items we were not using for this need. Lastly, we mapped and migrated all of our historical data to the new environment. I didn't even pause before I hit the "delete" button on our old bloated environment we had depended on for 10 years. Portals So I mentioned that Microsoft offers a Power Apps Portal. Again, for me it would cost nothing. Depending our your requirements, it might be a good solution for you. Unfortunately, like everything the Microsoft Business Applications group produces... it is more complicated than necessary. This is even more noticeable when your requirements are simple. Our requirement was to have a place customers could log into and see their account information, purchase history, case information and case notes. I wanted it to be clean, simple and easy to maintain. Not too complicated. Our Forceworks main website runs on WordPress, like so many other small to mid-sized businesses. So my preference was a WordPress based portal. My friend, and fellow MVP, George Doubinski had the answer. The AlexaCRM WordPress integration solution. Using Alexa, we are able to display any information we want from our RapidStartCRM environment on any WordPress posts or pages. For us, it was a better solution. AlexaCRM can do much more, I am aware of customers running full eCommerce portals with it! If you let George know that you heard about his solution from this post, he promised me he would sing you a short song of your choice. Power Automate Our previous environment had used classic workflows for everything, so this was a good time to move those to Power Automate Cloud Flows. However, I am not 100% sold on Power Automate... yet. Classic workflows still exist because Microsoft has not yet reached parity with Power Automate to be able to turn them off. The "Fullness of Time" does seem to be quite full indeed. But I decided to use Cloud Flows wherever possible. It seems that every time I look for a connector in their expansive list of hundreds, it either does not exist, or does not do what I need it to. This was the case for WordPress also. The connector exists... but is essentially useless. Once again, a fellow MVP to the rescue. Heidi Nuehauser is working with Nick Hance at Reenhanced, and they have a rock-solid Power Automate connector for WordPress that can be used with either Gravity Forms or Contact 7 forms on your WordPress site. If you use the code FORCEWORKS, you can try it out for a month for free. BTW, I did not actually need the Reenhanced connector for our Support site, but while I was under the hood, I decided to update all of the forms on our main Forceworks and RapidStartCRM websites. So now all forms submitted create a record in Dataverse automagically. Results Since our Support Portal is not public (unless you want to buy some hours), I added some screenshots below for your reference. If you would be interested in a similar solution, please contact Forceworks. Account Summary Page   Cases Page Case Details Page

I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our program and we got feedback and we think there's value in that. Toby: I did mention that going forward we'll have a more consistent approach across Microsoft Cloud. There's lots of different benefits out there. Azure Credits, we announced some new things around Teams. And so we just need to, as one Microsoft, provide that to our partners in a consistent delivery through these benefits so that we can support that kind of value proposition we talked about earlier. So look for more from us in that area. You're spot on, on the competency side. And I wouldn't even say resellers, I'd say more SI, system integrators services partners. Steve: Yeah. Toby: The key difference there is, we want those guys to be able to differentiate their organization. As a company, you can say, "I've got 15 certified individuals in this role-based certification. And I've got this many credits to my business that make me a gold partner at an organization level"- Steve: Which is something a customer looking at SI would be looking for. Toby: Right. Steve: But when you're looking at an ISV solution, they're really just looking at the functionality. Toby: It's the app, right? You would want to badge in app versus badge and organization. And so that's the key difference there. And I think we've kind of figured that out and again, you'll see us do more in that space going forward. Steve: Yeah. I just want to mention, just go back for a second to make sure everybody is aware that the transactability and the licensing are optional. These are things that you can take advantage of if you spend a ton of money on your own systems, nobody's going to expect you to rip and replace. These are really designed for... I mean when I think of a partner like myself, if I can get out of the license management and have transactability just be automatic, where all I really have to do is focus on building my IP, getting it in AppSource, hopefully promoting it properly, but then the licensing becomes automatic and the transactability becomes automatic, and I'm just getting money coming into my account. Of course, you guys are scraping your 3%, which I don't begrudge because your given me those tools. That just makes things a lot easier. Toby: That's right. And you're right, it's not mandatory. It's again what makes sense for the partner. And so, you can do business with us and ISV Connect outside of the marketplace and work with us on the new 3%, get those benefits, or you can transact in the marketplace, it's that same 3%. And it's a different benefit. You get that whole commerce system, you get that whole billing engine. You don't have to worry about that. And there's a lot of ISV's out there that see value in that. So yeah, you're spot on. Steve: Yeah. I remember Goose had kind of recharacterized the revenue share after the kind of flap up from some of the ISV's about the benefits and stuff and he recharacterized it as a cost for the use of the platform that you're building on top of a platform that Microsoft has built, Microsoft maintains, Microsoft advances. So look at that as a cost for that. And I think you still kind of need to look at that as a cost for that. It's not 3% for licensing and transactability, it's a cost for maintaining the platform, there's these pieces you can take advantage of or not. But if you're not taking advantage of license management, transactability, it doesn't mean you don't have to pay the fee. You're paying the fee for something else. Toby: Yeah. Steve: I'm trying to head off some things I know I may hear from some folks [inaudible 00:23:24] licensing. No, no, no. Toby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right, Steve, and again, to zoom back out again, I mean, it's not about the 3%, it's about attracting partners to build on the broader Microsoft Cloud and supporting their business in a way that works for them. And you're right, there is a cost of doing that, but we want to invest, and I think we just sent a message hopefully to the market that we want to be aggressive in this space, we think we're well positioned, we've got a great value proposition with this broader Microsoft Cloud thing that we're just seeing incredible growth across the business. Toby: And I guess most importantly, we're listening back to that, after a full year, really sort of staying in tune to feedback from partners like yourself, that [inaudible 00:24:07] at large to make sure that we're doing the right thing and delivering, that's kind of what was most important to me. Steve: So those discounted skews for ISV's, in order to qualify for that, what do they need to do? They need to join ISV Connect? Toby: Yeah. So the discounted licenses, which are again, just basically at cost for us, are available to anyone who's enrolled in ISV Connect. All you need to do is enroll in the program, but then if you hit the new reduced rev share threshold that sort of unlocks additional benefits, then we'll give those licenses to you for free. And I can't here in the car, remember all the details of the numbers and stuff like that, I think, and you probably have it. I think aka.ms.bizapp.ISV connect, I think that's a link to our website that has all the benefit details and stuff, but that's basically the way it works. Steve: Are those available today? Toby: They are. There's a whole bunch of them available today and there's more coming. I know that the sales service, field service, marketing, I think the customer insights products, maybe commerce, I might be forgetting a few others and then there's more coming down the pike shortly. Steve: All right. So a good reason for people to go back to revisit ISV Connect site if they haven't in a while. Toby: I would love that. Yeah, I think so. If we can get people to go back and like you said, revisit, just get educated, hopefully get re-engaged and then keep the feedback coming. That's a great outcome. Steve: So I've had a few ISV's asking me about what's the future of ISV Embed, and maybe you can speak to that because that one's kind of a little vague, I think, for a lot of folks right now. Toby: Yeah. It's a great question Steve, that's kind of next, next on our list. And again, today I can't share a lot of specifics, but this is a good topic for us to come back to probably in our regular chats. Toby: As you know, Cloud Embed is a model that supports kind of like an OEM like model where a partner's just packaging their IP directly on the underlying license and selling it together through our ISV Cloud Embed program, which leverages our CSP vehicle as a way to transact. And so we've had it out there for a couple of years. And I may have mentioned before that we're sort of modernizing a whole bunch of our commerce capabilities and new business models and so we're working on a few different options still to support that embed scenario where things like co-selling with our field or certain other marketing benefits aren't the most important thing for a particular ISV in a particular scenario, they don't want to have to mess with reselling the underlying dynamics license. They're not resellers. They just want to sell their IP. Steve: Yeah. Toby: So we're working on some stuff there, especially, on both the core dynamics business and the power platform business. So we can stay in touch and I can come back to you for some feedback once we have more to share. Steve: Yeah. That, I mean, that program worked for a particular kind of an ISV. Toby: Yeah. Steve: A lot of the ISV's that have add on solutions that are not SI's, there's a partner already involved with a customer and they just want to sell their add on solution. Steve: Yeah. Licenses have probably already been sold by that partner. They don't want or need to get involved in that management of that sort of stuff. They just want to sell their IP. And then there's some ISV's that the customer is actually buying, which I think we're starting to see now. And I think I told you this before, one of the things that Salesforce had going for them with their ISV's was there were a lot of very robust ISV's that did a lot of direct marketing to customers about their solution and less so about the fact that it ran on Salesforce. Steve: Salesforce is this platform in the background, but this is what we're selling is this ISV solution, and in that scenario they own the customer because the customer wasn't buying Salesforce, they really were buying the solution to their problem for this ISV, and we hadn't seen as much of that on the dynamic side for a long time. It was definitely, you start with dynamics and then you add on ISV features and capabilities. But I think we're starting to see more of that, that holistic ISV solution that a customer is buying the solution that happens to run on the power platform or on dynamics. Toby: Totally. That's the scenario we see mutual opportunity in. That example, you said where the ISV owns the partner or the customer, the relationship with the customer, frankly that helps us reach more customers as Microsoft. And then if we provide that ISV still the underlying technology and the right business model to support their business, then that's goodness on both sides. So, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:29:10]. Steve: So that's the one where ISV Embed probably makes the most sense, , that type of partner. So we're starting to see more of them. Toby: That's great. That's great. Well, I always appreciate the feedback if you have any. So I'd love you to go through these new things in a bit more detail, and then send me your feedback and we can continue to keep the lines of communication open as always. Steve: I'm not letting you off just yet. I'm keeping you for a couple more. Toby: Oh man, I've got my team waiting, I'm hungry Steve. Steve: I just want to ask, "What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space coming soon that people should really be paying attention to?" I know we've got some things happening that aren't so much related to ISV, like the power platform pricing coming down, but what are some of the things that you're seeing in your group, or maybe some things that are already out there that you're feeling like ISV's are not understanding what this is obviously or they'd be all over it? Toby: Hmm. That's a great question. I'd say probably two things. One is, again, one of the big announcements we made at Inspire that wasn't necessarily related to ISV's or ISV Connect specifically, but what we announced with Teams where Teams users will now be able to sort of view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records from directly within Teams. Toby: So this concept of collaborative apps you'll see, and that's at no additional cost. Obviously that concept you'll see us continue to do more around to bring that again, pretty large install base of Teams users that are out there, 250-million now, together with Dynamics, we think is sort of unique to our value proposition. So there was [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Steve: So this is somebody you think ISV's out there should definitely go do a little bit of investigating into the Team story? Toby: Yes, yes. Teams on the front end, it's such a large install base that we can take advantage of as partners. And then on the backend, I mentioned that again, power platform, Dataverse, leveraging our data services like Azure Synapse Analytics, again, stitching that all the way from the front end of the backend. We as Microsoft, we're really focused on that combined Microsoft Cloud story. And I think the partners that are recognizing that and investing in that with their own IP are the ones we're going to engage with and hopefully generate some good opportunity around. Toby: The second one, in that vein Steve, the second one I was going to say is just what we continue to do with our industry clouds. So we have cloud for healthcare out there at the moment, we've got financial services, manufacturing, retail, we announced the cloud for sustainability, we've got not-for-profit. So, these things continue to roll off the conveyor belt, but it's such a great opportunity. I was sort of surprised with how much interest we had from the ISV ecosystem around these industry clouds. Obviously as we build more industry IP, we need to sort of adjust our relationship with our partners who serve those industries, but there's still so much space to add, specific IP to that industry and work with some of those very credible industry partners that we were sort of talking about just a moment ago is a big place that we're going to invest going forward. So, that's an area I'd encourage people to keep a close eye on. Steve: Are you satisfied with the level of ISV engagement with the accelerators? Are they still kind of too many of them on the sidelines kicking or poking it with a stick or have we got enough of them actually coming in now that you're happy with that velocity? Or are you feeling like there's a bunch more that need to get in there? Toby: I think, first of all, we've evolved a bit from that original industry accelerator approach to now just real industry IP that we're building first party in these verticals that I mentioned. Obviously there's great partners out there that can work with us with those solutions to, like I said, have their IP built on that broader Microsoft Cloud. Industry clouds are just a great example of a Microsoft Cloud solution, frankly. And so to your question of, do we have enough partners there? You want to obviously get it right when you launch an offering like that with the right, frankly, small number of partners to complete the solution and have it be good and relevant and useful for customers, but the more the merrier around that investment. Toby: And so it's early days, Steve, we only have one industry cloud in market GA'd at the moment, but as I said, there's a lot more coming. So we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem around it pretty aggressively. Steve: Yeah. I mean, we've got partners of all sizes, so we got some big healthcare ISV's I'm sure engaged in some of the heavy lifting, but healthcare is an awfully big market, awfully big field, and there is spot, point solutions kind of across the healthcare organization that need to be filled by probably a smaller ISV's. So it seems like there's stuff across that whole thing. Toby: Yeah. Totally. There's plenty of opportunity and plenty of space around that. And even from a geographic perspective, I mean, different parts of the world have different regulatory requirements and are different, and so there's yeah, to your point, and that's what I was trying to articulate earlier. I think there's still just a massive opportunity for partners to work with us around those new offerings. Steve: Well, I know you've got to get to your thing. You've told me twice in the call, I appreciate you pulling the car over to chat with me to catch up. I just wanted to get some of this stuff out to the listeners about some of these changes that just occurred. Steve: And I'm definitely going to go through, like you said, and study it a little more closely and I'll reach out to you directly with some feedback and some thoughts and see if we keep this thing moving. Toby: Awesome. Well, Hey, I'm so glad you caught me, Steve. It's always a pleasure to catch up and have a chat, and yeah, please do go through it in some detail. Again, your feedback is important. Whole ecosystems feedback is super important to me, so I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great to catch up. Steve: All right man, talk to you soon. Toby: All right. Take care, Steve.

Low Code solution creation is all the rage. A Gartner report even forecasts, “By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using low-code development tools.” In this episode we're discussing Microsoft's Low Code platform. We'll hear why it can matter for you at a strategic level in your organization and we'll also be digging down into the capabilities of the platform.Our guests today, Charles Lamanna and Ryan Cunningham, talk about what types of solutions people are building using the platform, who uses the platform and who the most common type of “Low Code” users are, Microsoft's Dataverse as a key part of the Power Platform and what it is, and how someone new to these technologies gets up and running to try it out and get started.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptLow Code Application Development on AzureMicrosoft Power Apps on AzurePower AutomatePower Automate Robotic Process AutomationGuests:Charles Lamanna is the Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications & Platform (BAP) at Microsoft. He leads the engineering teams in the business applications & platform across both Product Management and Development. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Ryan Cunningham is the GM for Power Apps at Microsoft. Power Apps is the Low Code platform used by millions of people around the world to build apps that make their working lives better.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Did you know there's now over 1400 apps that plug into your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? With a lot of them being free to download and explore, with no need to build a dedicated server for or make customisations to? No? Well you do now, and in this week's episode of Tecman Talks Dynamics, we discuss why we love the AppSource so much and our top picks to compliment Business Central and your everyday operations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

COVID-19 has presented major challenges to healthcare, and lately that's included accelerating the development and delivery of vaccines and therapeutics at scale. Luckily, in recent months we've seen an acceleration in the supply lines of delivering vaccines from manufacturers to recipients.Today we are talking with Microsoft partner Schrocken's Sunil Ghogre and Yogendra Chordia, and Microsoft's David Houlding about empowering life sciences organizations to meet supply chain challenges.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptSchrockenShrocken on LinkedInAzure Marketplace OfferMicrosoft HealthAzure MarketplaceAppSourceHow to get started partnering with MicrosoftMicrosoft for StartupsIgnite Sessions:What's new in Microsoft Cloud for HealthcareLearn how Microsoft & Intel unlock the potential of edge & AI in healthcare to collect data & turn it into actionable insightsIntro to Mixed Reality Business Apps + Real-Life Use Cases in HealthcareGet started on your HealthTech JourneyGuests:Sunil Ghogre has over 30 years of diverse, global experience delivering exceptional manufacturing operations management and supply/sourcing expertise in the Pharmaceutical and Consumer industries.Follow him on LinkedIn.Yogendra Chordia is a technologist with 25+ years of enterprise software experience. At Schrocken he is focusing on applying his hi-tech supply chain experience in digitizing biopharma contract manufacturing supply chain.Follow him on LinkedIn.David Houlding is the Director of Strategic & Healthcare Engagements for Microsoft Azure. He served as Chair of the HIMSS Blockchain task force for over 2 years, and currently serves as an Advisor to the British Blockchain Association. He has technology interests and specialties in cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain and AI.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we’re talking about the IoT (Internet of Things) space and the related data that drives the industry with two industry leaders from Crate.io who specialize in IoT data management: Christian Lutz, founder, and president, and Eva Schönleitner, CEO. Data in the IoT space is unique in many ways, most notably in shape and scale.Also discussed are some of the many announcements made by Microsoft at the annual Ignite conference, which was held recently. As always, there was a lot of big news that came out of Ignite. Microsoft’s Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead for Cloud for Manufacturing gives the scoop.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptCrate.io.NET Core on GitHubPerceptAzure Percept: Edge intelligence from silicon to serviceGuests:Christian Lutz is the founder and president of Crate.io. He has over 20 years of experience as a startup entrepreneur with strong experience in enterprise software. Follow him on LinkedIn.Eva Schönleitner is CEO of Crate.io. She has extensive worldwide experience in the technology and industrial segments and has a track record of developing high-performing organizations. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.Diego Tamburini is Principal Industry Lead for Cloud for Manufacturing at Microsoft. He helps build the best ecosystem for software partners developing manufacturing solutions on Azure and helps them be successful. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Businesses set different thresholds for successful ERP projects, and the reasons can be complicated. With budgets that range from thousands to millions of dollars and often little room for delay or rework, it should be no surprise that some organizations end up going live with critical financial and operational business systems that an outside observer might consider sub-par. Microsoft has taken an interesting strategy with Dynamics 365 Business Central, the company's SMB ERP cloud offering, urging partners to pursue highly repeatable, fixed price deployments wherever possible. That model serves some interests, like accelerating the growth of the customer base, but it has also created tension with ERP professionals who say their years of experience and dedication to customer success have taught them to pursue other approaches to achieve the best outcomes. Alex Chow, founder of AP Commerce, is one of those ERP veterans who has charted his own path in the Microsoft channel. He says he started his own firm in 2005 to allow him to work with clients in the way he preferred. And while the firm is not the biggest or fastest growing, he says the company's philosophy has held the team on a steady path even as the product and channel trends have shifted around them. Alex recently wrote about his experiences meeting Business Central customers post-go-live that were living with problematic deployments and the concerns these cases have raised. We discuss some of those observations and more about his broader experiences with Business Central and NAV. Show Notes 2:00 - Alex's early experiences in the ERP consulting profession and how that led to him starting his own firm 6:00 - Finding other consulting models beyond billable hours, and how to make it a reality for NAV professionals 13:00 - Does traditional billable consulting still make sense for Business Central today as a SaaS offering? And how Microsoft is managing partners today. 17:00  - What makes an organization unique - or just like everyone else 19:30 - What can go wrong on a BC deployment, and what led Alex to write about it. 23:30 - The nature of fixed-price BC implementations and why it can lead to less-than-ideal outcomes 25:30 - What's unique about these companies' issues compared to ERP failures of the past 27:00 - How to improve sub-par implementations and why BC customers might be wary after go-live 31:30 - What differentiates a worker doing repeatable deployments vs specialized service 39:45 - Where to find professional help for BC 41:30 - Response to Alex's article 43:00 - If and how selling and servicing BC has changed AP Commerce 45:30 - Can customers install solutions from AppSource themselves?

Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/304

Insurance has some problems. It’s too complex, too expensive, and it doesn’t cover everyone. Our guest today, Rob Galbraith, the most interesting man in insurance and author of the book The End of Insurance as We Know It, says that tech can help though, but it must be relevant to the consumer’s needs. To support this hypothesis, he has coined the acronym S.C.A.L.E.D. to focus on the technologies he believes are transforming the insurance industry. He tells us what it means and explains each part in detail.Additionally, usual host Paul Maher takes on a guest role this week as a former CTO at Milliman and talks about what some of Microsoft’s big investments in insurance are and how Microsoft AI technologies are impacting insurers and financial services as a whole.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptThe End Of Insurance As We Know It (Rob’s book)Azure for Financial ServicesAzure for InsuranceGuest:Rob Galbraith is the most interesting man in insurance. He is a keynote speaker, media contributor, and bestselling author of The End of Insurance as We Know It. He is the Insuretech Business Series man of the year for 2020.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.Special Guest:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about looking at various technologies and their impact on business and society. Our guest and digital speaker, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam, talks about cutting-edge tech like augmented reality and describes how wearables can be used by insurers to promote good health, which benefits both insurers and their clients.Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere – on any device – through mixed reality applications. Additionally, he talks about the democratization of AI and what is happening there, both good and bad.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptDatafloqDatafloq on TwitterQuantum computing at MicrosoftAzure QuatumQ# and the Quantum Development KitGuests:Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is the Digital Speaker. He focuses on the Future of Work and how to build the organization of tomorrow using emerging technologies that include big data analytics, blockchain, the Internet of Things, tokenomics, and Artificial Intelligence.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit his website at thedigitalspeaker.com.Dr. van Rijmenam has also authored and co-authored several books. Check them out!Think Bigger - Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your BusinessCo-author of the book Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our WorldThe Organisation of Tomorrow (discusses how AI, blockchain, and big data turn every business into a data organization.)Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about high-performance computing (HPC). HPC is important in many industries and lets us work with data at scale, operate on large media files, work with large AI and ML workloads, and run big batches of worker jobs.Tim Carroll, Director for HPC & AI for Research at Microsoft, and Evan Burness, Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute in Microsoft Azure tell us what high-performance computing is and why it’s unique, how it is being used in the industry today, benefits of the new HPC VM over what people have used in the past on Azure, and for people who are not using HPC today, how they can get it up and running!Episode Links:Episode TranscriptMicrosoft Azure HPCAzure HPC by industryMore performance and choice with new Azure HBv3 virtual machines for HPCGuests:Evan Burness is the Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute in Microsoft Azure.Follow him on LinkedIn.Tim Carroll is the Director for HPC & AI for Research. He is also a HPC Global Black Belt at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Most organizations producing software are moving their workloads to the cloud. In doing so they are typically choosing between 3 modes of cloud service, especially regarding their product architecture. The 3 main models for cloud offerings are IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.Moving solutions to the cloud, or building a cloud-native solution, requires rethinking how we sell and distribute our software. Cloud-first sales models can be very different than traditional sales pipelines. Today we are focusing on Software-as-a-Service applications as a vehicle for selling cloud-based solutions. Our guest, Ercenk Keresteci explains that SaaS applications are the de-facto model for companies licensing their software.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptWhat is SaaS?Publish solutions on the Azure MarketplaceClients for different programming languages and samplesGuest:Ercenk Keresteci is a Microsoft Principal Architect with a focus on manufacturing and the Internet of Things. He has a specific focus on these industries while helping partners onboard their solutions onto the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this second episode of Tecman Talks Dynamics, Directors James and Matt discuss how projects have significantly evolved due to the current times, which has made a considerable impact on how they are delivered to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central/Microsoft Dynamics NAV customers. In this 20-minute conversation, the duo explains how the last 12 months have seen the biggest shift. They explain how the pandemic, as it has in many other areas, accelerated the change to remote project delivery - a move many Tecman customers had already started on in recognition of the sometimes-prohibitive time and costs associated with always having consultants on-site. As you delve into the podcast with James and Matt, you will hear their views on why remote working can be more valuable for your business. As Matt says, it's all about giving clients “the right person, for the right project, for the right amount of time, rather than sending a busload of experts to one location for a whole day” James and Matt also discuss: How the 1000+ Dynamics apps from AppSource have changed the way projects are delivered - and paid for! As Matt puts it: “There's an app for everything nowadays and if you decide you don't need it anymore, you just cancel the subscription”. The age-old question of whether to upgrade or re-implement when moving from an older version of Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central and how the right licensing can help How can we use Teams to improve project delivery and training (spoiler alert: lots of tips to help you maximise Teams for your business and improve communications around projects!). So, tune in to this second episode of Tecman Talks Dynamics, on your podcast player of choice, to understand how the world of Dynamics projects is transforming: https://www.tecman.co.uk/podcasts Disclaimer – all information shared in this podcast is accurate for that time. However, due to the frequent changes within Microsoft, some facts may become outdated. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn how you can publish your SaaS solution and start generating revenue by making it available to potential buyers on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. Ercenk Keresteci joins Scott Hanselman to cover the technical details of integrating a solution with Microsoft's commercial marketplace, including how to use scripts for provisioning and de-provisioning a customer.[0:05:00] - DemoAzure Marketplace and AppSource publishing guideCreate a new SaaS offerSaaS fulfillment APIs, version 2A sample for Azure Marketplace SaaS integration (GitHub)Create a free account (Azure)

Learn how you can publish your SaaS solution and start generating revenue by making it available to potential buyers on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. Ercenk Keresteci joins Scott Hanselman to cover the technical details of integrating a solution with Microsoft's commercial marketplace, including how to use scripts for provisioning and de-provisioning a customer.[0:05:00] - DemoAzure Marketplace and AppSource publishing guideCreate a new SaaS offerSaaS fulfillment APIs, version 2A sample for Azure Marketplace SaaS integration (GitHub)Create a free account (Azure)

Learn how you can publish your SaaS solution and start generating revenue by making it available to potential buyers on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. Ercenk Keresteci joins Scott Hanselman to cover the technical details of integrating a solution with Microsoft's commercial marketplace, including how to use scripts for provisioning and de-provisioning a customer.[0:05:00] - DemoAzure Marketplace and AppSource publishing guideCreate a new SaaS offerSaaS fulfillment APIs, version 2A sample for Azure Marketplace SaaS integration (GitHub)Create a free account (Azure)

Learn how you can publish your SaaS solution and start generating revenue by making it available to potential buyers on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. Ercenk Keresteci joins Scott Hanselman to cover the technical details of integrating a solution with Microsoft's commercial marketplace, including how to use scripts for provisioning and de-provisioning a customer.[0:05:00] - DemoAzure Marketplace and AppSource publishing guideCreate a new SaaS offerSaaS fulfillment APIs, version 2A sample for Azure Marketplace SaaS integration (GitHub)Create a free account (Azure)