Microsoft's Phil Goldie, director, partner business and development.
1. Key channel plays for 2015? Get on board with building recurring revenue streams. The IP and the knowledge you have as an organisation, you need to figure out how you can capture that in a recurring revenue model. That’s probably one of the biggest things we want the channel to do.
2. Key technology for 2015? Big Data and Business Intelligence are the big ones for me. This will be the year when they become much more real. You need to see those beacon products and projects starting to happen, and for customers to start to show you what’s possible. And I think this year we will see this happen.
3. Key message to the channel for 2015? Work with us. We’d like to work with every partner we can on their business model transformation. We’re always thinking about how to make it more profitable, it's one of our big focus areas. We’re investing heavily in that this year, and the doors are open to any partner who wants to come and work with us.
4. Key warning to the channel for 2015? The kind of Cloud adoption we’re seeing right now, with Azure being onshore, Dynamics CRM and Office365 coming in the next few weeks, will continue to accelerate customer adoption. The customer is defining that that’s where they want to go, in huge volumes. So if you’re not already there, then don’t wait because this is happening very fast now. That’s the key warning for this year.
5. Key to their company for 2015? We’re continuing the openness you’ve seen from us in the last 12 months – it's more broad than just our own products. We’ve seen that with some of our different acquisitions, such as on Android and iOS platforms. We want to be the productivity company. I think that’s playing out pretty well now, and its another big focus this year. How can we serve all productivity users, across all different types of platforms. Yes, we want to make Windows the best experience possible, but how do we make that first class in terms of other platforms as well? So openness is one of the key things this year.
